Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University) by Lanza, Fabio (August 13, 2010) Hardcover

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

by Fabio Lanza

On May 4, 1919, thousands of students protested the Versailles treaty in Beijing. Seventy years later, another generation demonstrated in Tiananmen Square. Climbing the Monument of the People's Heroes, these protestors stood against a relief of their predecessors, merging with their own mythology while consciously deploying their activism. Through an investigation of twentieth-century Chinese student protest, Fabio Lanza considers the marriage of the cultural and the political, the intellectual and the quotidian, that occurred during the May Fourth movement, along with its rearticulation in subsequent protest. He ultimately explores the political category of the "student" and its making in the twentieth century.Lanza returns to the May Fourth period (1917-1923) and the rise of student activism in and around Beijing University. He revisits reform in pedagogical and learning routines, changes in daily campus life, the fluid relationship between the city and its residents, and the actions of allegedly cultural student organizations. Through a careful analysis of everyday life and urban space, Lanza radically reconceptualizes the emergence of political subjectivities (categories such as "worker," "activist," and "student") and how they anchor and inform political action. He accounts for the elements that drew students to Tiananmen and the formation of the student as an enduring political category. His research underscores how, during a time of crisis, the lived realities of university and student became unsettled in Beijing, and how political militancy in China arose only when the boundaries of identification were challenged.

Genres: China

Unknown Binding

First published July 21, 2010

Reviews

[Jessica Zu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wonder whether the constant name dropping is due to concerns of "academic integrity", but his own voice is really drawn with the caucus of all these other theorists ...
I still love this book because it frames the question in a different way, taking us out of the metaphysical quagmire of "what is modernity"

Just a little clarification about its opening quote "Beida bubai"--this used to be a joke (at least during my study 1992-1997), and it puns with "Dongfang Bubai" if you read Jinyong's Xiao'ao Jianghu, you know what it means.
Just please don't take it as representative of how Beida students thing of themselves, those centennial whatever are produced (at least in part) to appease CCP and to get donations (lots of them)--in other words, official narrative ONLY; nothing more, nothing less. it does not represent Beida students, per se.

[哲伦 周 · Rating 3 out of 5]

7/10？it is decent…