Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai

by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom

This is a history of student protests in Shanghai from the turn of the century to 1949, showing how these students experienced and help shape the course of the Chinese Revolution.

Genres: China

460 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1991

About the author

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, a Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, is a modern Chinese social and cultural historian, with a strong interest in connecting China's past to its present and placing both into comparative and global perspective. He has taught and written about subjects ranging from gender to revolution, human rights to urban change.

His work has received funding from the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation.

Reviews

[Chelsea Szendi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Taking the elegant theatrical metaphor so key these days to describing social movements, Wasserstrom offers rich descriptions of the practices of protest students in Shanghai employed from the 1930s to the 1980s. There's a little bit of structural analysis just to pepper the stew. I left craving a little more questioning of the category of "student" as social force, ala Fabio Lanza.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

student as political actors: how they organize (not just ideology and party membership) themselves, how they convey their message to a larger audience, how they draw people in ... the symbolic ordering of things ...
fascinating!