Reform and discontent : the causes of the 1989 Chinese student movement

The central argument of this thesis is that a series of China's state policies, before and during the reform era, were conducive to the rise of the 1989 Chinese Student Movement (CSM). The most important of these were (1) leftist policies during Mao's era which fostered the formation of pro-democratic yet impractical intellectuals and created a university ecology that was remarkably conducive to student movements, and (2) the state-led reform which over produced students on the one hand, and blocked upward mobility channels for intellectuals and students on the other hand. These and other conducive factors to the rise of the 1989 CSM were not simply state mistakes. To a large extent, they were characteristic of the regime.The thesis does not reject non-state centered factors such as anomic feelings toward uncertainties brought by the reform, the conflict between reformers and hardliners within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the rise of civil society during the eighties, the impact of Western ideologies following the open door policy or the intrinsic character of Chinese culture, that have all been hitherto proposed to explain the rise of the CSM. Rather, it incorporates these explanations under a state-centered paradigm in light of a general model (the DSSI model) that I am proposing to explain the general causes, and to a lesser extent, the dynamics of large scale social movements