Edward Ding

D Block
May 20, 2014
Mr. Fitzgerald
Into the Reflecting Pool: The Chinese Student Mirror

A typical narrative of the birth of the Communist Chinese state will detail the rise to
power of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over the national Guomingdan government
(GMD). It will most likely tell of the "Century of Humiliation," the shortcomings of the previous
Chinese governments, and the road that led to the eventual communist takeover and victory.
Certainly this traditional story does not err too far from the truth, yet at the same time, it comes
short of describing the complexities of Chinese Civil War and the birth of Communist China. In
particular, while most analyses and histories of the Chinese Civil War to some degree or another
discuss the home front, few go into depth on the specific happenings. In what Mao himself
described himself as a "second front" (Pepper 698), the student protests that emerged during the
latter years of the Chinese Civil War became a defining political obstacle for the GMD. Indeed,
the victory that the CCP enjoyed was not one simply won through armed combat but also
through the steady tides of student unrest (Pepper 698). Furthermore these protests served a two-
fold role: first, as an "indicator of the political values and behaviors of the young intellectual
community which the new Communist Government would inherit" (Pepper 698), but more
importantly, albeit less obviously, were also indicative of the general population's sentiment.
While broadly seen as activities driven exclusively by student motivations, the Chinese Student
Movements of 1945 through 1949 were, in fact, largely reflective of the general population's
opinions and desires during the Chinese Civil War era.
The Chinese Student Movements of the epoch found their genesis in Kunming, a bustling
urban center of southwest China. It was in December of 1945, when the tensions between the
CCP and GMD had once again began to mount following the Japanese capitulation that the first
wave of student unrest began to form. Over the course of four years, there would be four distinct
student waves, each having their distinct flavor and drawing government responses. It is
important, however, to note that for the most part, students were not seeking communist victory.
Rather, the students were simply odious of the insensitive and corrupt natures that had become
defining of the GMD. The students, familiar with the concepts of democracy and representative
government did not desire the destruction of the GMD at the hands of the CCP; they simply
wanted to limit the government's power in order to achieve a greater sense of these concepts in
China (Pepper 700). Thus, from 1945-1949, the students, using the best means which they could
fine to foment change, protested. Specifically, each protest had their bases in incidents that
would seem isolated and specific only to the students of each university. And the demands from
the students would also seem specific on the surface; they were largely contained within the
realm of student demands. However, when penetrating deeper into the origins of these demands,
as well as the specific desires of each student, the thought processes and motivations of the
students were in fact simply an extension of general opinion.
Foremost in detailing these parallel sentiments between movement and masses would be
the dominant underlying anti-Americanism expressed by the students but reflected by the people.
The Movement Protesting the Brutality of American Military Personnel (Anti-American
Brutality Movement), the second of the student tides, was one of the premier student protests that
aligned itself so obviously and so directly within the people's interests. Stemming from the rape
of a student at Peking University, the Anti-American Brutality Movement was quick to gain
momentum, and distinct in that it managed to gain popular support from the population.
Demands for fair treatment and due justice were met with approval and rallying from both
corporate and women's organizations, as well as from the population at large. In this case, the
people's support was the primary showcase for similarity between the population and the
protesters. And while a divide between specific causal motivations behind the support of the
people and the motivation of the students' existed, it was nevertheless trivial to the extent that it
did not matter. In specific, while serving as a reactionary response to the grotesque crimes of
American the quickly expanding movement soon became more than simply a call for justice on
the perpetrators. In fact, to describe the movement as simply an expression of student outrage
over the rape of one of their own would be grievous oversimplification of the truth of the matter.
This was not simply the protesting of a crime by students that was unrelated to the people. It was
a culmination of the burdens of the past century that had dried in the minds of the people for so
long that the inevitable spark ignited into a wildfire of cries for social justice and anti-American
attitudes in the population as a whole. Students in the Beijing area, joined by the people would
march along streets of the city shouting anti-American slogans, demanding justice, as well as
demanding an end to Civil War and the commencement of stability. The girl had become a
martyr to the people, a symbol of imperial injustices done by the Western world and the
government's failure to answer both for the wrongs committed against her and for the wrongs
that had been committed against the people (Pepper 708-709).
More so than anything, the Anti-American Brutality Movement was a reflection of the
people's opinion in that it so distinctly and clearly showed the anti-Americanism which "had
become a dominant ingredient in Chinese nationalism" (Lutz 91). The emphasis placed on the
protests was, in fact, a reflection of Chinese nationalism both among people and students.
Students saw the affair as "calling into question the dedication of their fathers to the defense of
Chinese sovereignty" (Lutz 97). The younger and educated generation of Chinese students would
have nothing to do with such a serious affront to themselves and to their people. And the Chinese
people at large would have nothing to do with further mistreatments from the imperial oppressors
that had plunged their glorious empire into the Century of Humiliation. Cries of "China is not a
colony of the United States!" simply and clearly expressed the will of both the people and the
students. In this manner, the inspiration, message, and sentiment of civilian and student had
become as figures in hall of mirrors. The common ground of nationalism, it seemed was a cross-
generational territory. Young, old, university, and urban areas alike were united by the power of
their shared views.
The students and the people were not unified singularly by anti-American sentiments,
however, they were further connected through the common desire for reform and peace. Whether
indirectly or directly, both students and people alike desired stability and peace for a land that
had, for the past centuries, seen anything but. From the Kunming Movement that began the
student tides to the Anti-Hunger Anti-Civil War Movement of 1947, the students had
consistently urged for the cessation of conflict and the formation of coalition government. This
ravenous appetite for peace can be explained in two distinct ways: the desire for functional,
democratic government, and the desire for economic improvements.
In terms of the political aspect, students and general people alike could see the need for
changes in government, and thus had similar thought processes. Foremost on the students' reform
agenda, since the first movement in Kunming, had been their overarching demand for a coalition
and government reform. Government insensitivity, repression, denial of civil rights, corruption,
and dependence on American aid all represented glaring signs to the students that change was
necessary (Pepper 700). It had become only too apparent that Sun Yat-Sen's promises of the
"most complete and the finest [government] in the world... of the people, by the people, and for
the people" (Columbia History Sourcebook) were empty. To the students, it became their priority
to fulfill this promise through their own hands. Yet the marked elitism shown by the students
was not an alienating factor between them and the population at large. While the previous
generations and other peoples may not have agreed to coalition government as the specific
answer (indeed many prayed for Communist victory), there was no sense of them condemning
such "obvious goods as independence, sovereignty, and peace" (Lutz 98) Ideological differences
between the educated and the urban dwellers, met at a common ground between the two. The
form of reform may have differed, but the goal of all views was the same: to make the
government more accountable. Thus, by 1947, students had gained the public support of the
Communist Party, Communist sympathizers within the government (of which there were many
by 1947), and those who desired democracy. The left-wing, a significant portion of the
population, had joined the student cause from similarities in thought and sentiment (Lutz 102).
Even though each protest initially had nothing to do with the general population of China, the
vast majority had, by that point, begun to ally themselves on the side of the students. In turn, the
students had begun to see Communist victory as the only way to achieve their desires for
personal sovereignty and rights. The ideological gap closed. The people had reciprocated the
goals of the students, and the students had, in the end, reciprocated the thoughts of the people.
Despite starting in different mindsets with a common goal, the two groups ended with the same
mindset and the same goal (Lutz 95). Continued deterioration of the political situation only
served to strengthen these supports for the students. Neither majority, neither students nor
general population, gave their support to the GMD by 1948. And both were supportive and
reflective upon each other's political demands, even if their end-goals were not the same.
The final unifying factor between the urban population and the student population was
overwhelming desire for economic restructuring and improvement. Following decades of decay
and war, the Chinese economy was in ruin and the effects were felt both by the people and
students. In the Anti-Hunger Anti-Civil War Movement, students once again called for an end to
Civil War. But in this case, the origins of their desires were their stomachs. By 1947, as a result
of the continued conflicts, food rations had been further decreased and more and more people
soon began to have less and less to eat. None felt this harder than the common people of China to
whom "the ramshackle lack of amenities of modern life" was compounded with the "all-
pervasive fact of inflation" (Fairbank 314). The Nationalist government was coping with a
starving people. And while the students were the only group to protest for the end of the war and
saw the end of the war as a means to no longer be hungry. And despite their unique approach to
solving the hunger problem, they were nevertheless joined by the masses in rice riots and calls
for increased rations. The undeniable commonalities of hunger and desire for economic
improvement united these two otherwise disconnected and disjointed members of the same
society. And to the urban populations, as well as the students, the advent of full scale war meant
only one important thing: that their hopes for economic recovery were officially destroyed
(Pepper 712). To both parties, the protests were not simply a cry to stop the war. They were a cry
to feed the people. Yet again, the students, although they had begun protesting for higher food
allowances at the university cafeterias, had inadvertently exposed the unseen unities of the
people.
Of course, to say that student and civilian ideologies were absolute mirror images of each
other would be an oversimplification because there were obvious departures between two
systematically different groups. The newly educated and the urban, as well as the previous
generation all departed on issues in key areas. Specifically for the students, their way of thinking
was characterized by an elitist mindset. As Lutz puts it, even as "populism pervaded the rhetoric
of student manifestoes, the elitism of the students and the purist quality of their ideology
contributed toward authoritarianism, a tendency often accentuated during the course of the
movement" (Lutz 90). Despite the turn to the left of the students, they thought themselves as
separate from the population at large, that they were on a higher plane of thinking. Thus, to the
students, the distinct root of each idea was in of itself radically different from those of the urban
population. In terms of anti-Americanism, whereas the populous identified with the nationalistic
aspect of the Anti-American Brutality Movement, the students to a degree were more concerned
with such a marked insult and crime to one of their own. A girl from the most prestigious school
in China and of the newly educated had been raped, and to the students, much of the movement
was for social justice for the girl. (Lutz 97) However, in spite of this, even if it is assumed that
the movement itself, for the students, was exclusively done in the name of protecting and re-
affirming their own importance, or as a manifestation of elitism, it was still permeated by the
same nationalism. As much as it was an offense to the students, it was only so because it had
been essentially the rape of their own student culture. The students had become so inextricably
tied to the idea of their superiority and their rightful place in the new generation of the Chinese
ruling class that they had tied themselves into the selfsame nationalism of the population.
Inadvertently, they were still united with the people as a whole, because, even inadvertently, they
participated in the same anti-Americanism with the same nationalistic ideals.
Invariably, the area in which student and people's sentiment varied the most during the
Student Protests was in terms of government ideology. As previously stated, the students
identified themselves more with the ideas of national government favoring authority in spite of
the ever-present specters of communism, populism, and democracy. They in fact, to an extent,
feared Communism because they knew of its shortcomings (Pepper 700). Whereas the average
Chinese worker or businessman at the time longed for the revolution, or of democracy, the
students longed for representative government. They wanted their own say and wanted to create
for themselves a future in their own image. But of course the ideals the students sought to create,
the ideas of rights, liberty, sovereignty, these were common dreams of a much larger class of
people. As much as the university student demanded, desired, and fantasized of days of glorious
liberty, the urban population were as much concerned with such. It is for this reason that the
student protests were met with such support to begin with. The overwhelming majority leftist
portion of the general population found the students to be martyrs for the cause of equality and
rights (Lutz 101). They were the ones who faced brutal government retaliation solely for the
cause of creating an image of the people, for the people, by the people. Divided as the students
and the population were by base principle, opinion (in this case, self-image), and method, they
were still united by the overwhelming desire for the same thing. Despite all of their differences,
and the elitism of the students, the population still found itself looking into a mirror of their
younger, more educated selves when they looked at the student protests of 1945 to 1949.
A shallow overview of the four Chinese student waves that occurred during the Chinese
Civil War from 1945-1949 would be an analysis of the events and their roots in specific to the
students. But upon closer analysis, the distinct reflection of student and civilian is shown by the
ideas, manifestoes, demands and opinions, these fruits of student activism. To the extent that the
population could sympathize with the nationalistically driven anti-Americanism, understand the
student's government goals, and see the necessities of peace both for themselves and for the
students, these two groups, one of elitists, and one of the common man were indeed reflections.
As far apart as they may have seemed, and as distant as they may have wanted to put themselves
from each other, the issues of the nation proved too universal to allow for such a divide.
Ultimately, the most powerful factor in connecting two groups of distant yet connected people is
that connection itself; the bridge between generations of the same nation is the nation itself.
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