Taking it to the streets: Shanghai students and political protest, 1919-1949

This dissertation contains a mixture of case studies and analytical chapters on general themes. The four case study chapters trace the role Shanghai students played in four specific youth movements that helped shape the course of the Chinese Revolution: the May 4th Movement of 1919; the May 30th Movement of 1925; the Resist Japan Movement of 1931; and the Anti-Hunger, Anti-Civil War Movement of 1947. The topics treated in the three analytic chapters are: the student protest repertoire; connections between patterns of ordinary campus life and patterns of student mobilization; and the style and content of student propaganda. The thesis concludes with a summary chapter on the symbolic aspects of Shanghai student protests, which argues that mass actions involving educated youths were potent political rituals with the power to undermine powerholders' claims to legitimacy.; This thesis is different from previous works in the field in three important ways. First, many of the sources it uses--e.g. recently declassified files of the Shanghai Municipal Police and memoirs collected by the Shanghai branch of the Communist Youth League--have never before been used by Western scholars of Chinese student protest. Secondly, whereas all major monographic works on Chinese youth movements published in the West thus far have focused upon the events of a single year or at most decade, this dissertation traces continuities and discontinuities in Shanghai campus activism over the course of thirty years. Finally, while previous works have generally focused almost exclusively upon student ideology and/or the role political parties played in encouraging or suppressing campus unrest, this dissertation is most concerned with charting the social history of Shanghai youth movements and exploring the symbolic implications of student protests. To accomplish these tasks it draws upon the theoretical insights and methodological innovations of leading students of the dynamics of collective action and the significance of political rituals, such as Charles Tilly, Natalie Davis, E. P. Thompson, George Rude, Lynn Hunt, and Clifford Geertz.