UC Irvine UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Blooming, Contending, and Staying Silent: Student Activism and Campus Politics in China, 1957 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4xk023h8 Author Wu, Yidi Publication Date 2017 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Blooming, Contending, and Staying Silent: Student Activism and Campus Politics in China, 1957 DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in History by Yidi Wu Dissertation Committee: Professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Chair Professor Susan Morrissey Professor Paul Pickowicz 2017 © 2017 Yidi Wu DEDICATION To All my interviewees, who kindly shared their time, experience and wisdom with me. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv CURRICULUM VITAE v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION vi CHAPTER 1: Introduction: Student Activism in 1957’s China 1 CHAPTER 2: 1919, 1957, 1966, and 1989: Student Activism in Twentieth-Century China 14 CHAPTER 3: From Moscow to Beijing: Chinese Students Learn from Crises in the Soviet Bloc 39 CHAPTER 4: Student Activism as Contentious Politics at Peking University I: Contentious Repertoire and Framing Techniques 78 CHAPTER 5: Student Activism as Contentious Politics at Peking University II: Political Opportunity and Constraint, Organization and Mobilization, and Divisions 131 CHAPTER 6: Variations across Campuses: Similarities and Differences in Beijing, Wuhan and Kunming 168 CHAPTER 7: Stand in Line: Classification of College Students’ Political Reliability in the Anti-Rightist Campaign 205 CHAPTER 8: Epilogue: The Past Has Not Passed 257 REFERENCES 269 APPENDIX: Interview List 274 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express sincere gratitude to my dissertation committee. I could not ask for a better advisor, as Professor Wasserstrom has continued to help me connect with various people in the field, and he has provided opportunities for co-authorship in several publications. Professor Pickowicz generously included me in the UC San Diego Chinese history research seminar and the joint conference at East China Normal University, Shanghai. Professor Morrissey gave me copious comments and critiques, which will help me beyond the dissertation. I believe that it is not accidental that both of us received our bachelors from Oberlin College and wrote our dissertations about students. I would also thank several professors who have offered useful comments for chapter drafts, including Professor Joseph Esherick, Professor Emily Baum, and Professor Réne Goldman. Among friends and fellow China historians-in-training, Kyle David and Steven Pieragastini have read my dissertation in full, and I cannot appreciate more of their timely feedback. I have presented Chapter 3 and Chapter 7 in a number of conferences, and I thank my panel discussants, especially Professor Steven Smith and Professor Fabio Lanza, for their comments and the audience for their questions. For my dissertation research and writing, I have received external fellowships from the National Academy of Education / Spencer Foundation, the American Council of Learned Society, the Association for Asian Studies China and Inner Asia Council, Harvard-Yenching library, Oberlin Graduate Alumni Association, and UC Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education. At UC Irvine, I have received support from Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship, UC Humanities Research Institute, Humanities Commons Individual Graduate Research, Humanities Collective Individual Graduate Grant, Center for Asian Studies, and Charles Quilter Research and Travel Grant. I would not be able to write my dissertation without the help of people who have provided sources and interview contacts. Among them, I owe tremendously to Song Yongyi, the chief editor of the Anti-Rightist Campaign Database, and Wu Yisan, manager of the 57 Association HK who gave me a list of contacts. Finally, I thank my family and my partner for their patience and support while I finish my dissertation. iv CURRICULUM VITAE Yidi Wu 2011 B.A. in History, Oberlin College 2012 M.A. in History, University of California, Irvine 2012-13 Teaching Assistant, History Department, University of California, Irvine 2015-16 National Academy of Education/ Spencer Dissertation Fellow 2016-17 UC Berkeley, Center for Studies in Higher Education David Gardner Fellow 2017 Ph.D. in History, University of California, Irvine FIELD OF STUDY Student activism, social movement, modern Chinese history PUBLICATIONS Wu, Yidi. “Chinese Documentaries.” In Popular Culture in Asia and Oceania, edited by Kathy Nadeau and Jeremy Murray. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2016. Wu, Yidi. “延安的铁菩萨：在整风运动中抓特务” [Yan’an’s Iron Bodhisattva: Hunting Spies in the Rectification Movement] in 1943: 中国在十字路口 [1943: China at the Crossroads], translated by Xiao Chen and edited by Joseph Esherick and Matt Combs, Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2016. Wu, Yidi. “Yan’an’s Iron Bodhisattva: Hunting Spies in the Rectification Movement,” 1943: China at the Crossroads, edited by Matt Combs and Joseph Esherick, 203-241. Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia Series, 2015. Wasserstrom, Jeffrey, and Yidi Wu. “You Say You Want a Revolution: Revolutionary and Reformist Scripts in China, 1898-2012.” In Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions, edited by Keith Baker and Dan Edelstein, 231-250. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Wasserstrom, Jeffrey, and Yidi Wu. “1989 People's Movement.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Chinese Studies, edited by Tim Wright. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Blooming, Contending, and Staying Silent: Student Activism and Campus Politics in China, 1957 By Yidi Wu Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Irvine, 2017 Professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Chair What are the continuities and changes of student activism throughout twentieth-century China? How did students carry out contentious politics during political campaigns of the Maoist era? Scholarships on Chinese student activism have concentrated on two major events: the 1919 May Fourth Movement and the 1989 Tiananmen Protests. Others have also paid attention to student protests in the Republican era, as well as the Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution. However, studies of student activism in the 1950s have been missing, a decade which was presumably dominated by Communist political campaigns, thus leaving little space for social dissent. There has been no short of research on elite politics regarding the Hundred Flowers and the Anti-Rightist Campaigns of 1956-57, though a bottom-up approach to the topic would reveal a different picture of the events. My dissertation fills the gap by investigating the spectrum of college student participation in the political campaigns of 1957, including activists, loyalists and those who stayed silent, from Peking University, Wuhan University and Yunnan University. My sources come from declassified archival documents, digital database, documentary films, student journals, official newspapers, memoirs and oral history interviews I conducted in 2014-15 with around sixty vi college students from the late 1950s. I use social movement theories to treat this episode of student activism as contentious politics, and look at student repertoire, organization and mobilization, framing technique, and political opportunity and constraint. Overall, my dissertation argues that Chinese students in 1957 carried out and passed on similar repertoire and framing technique in comparison to other episodes of student activism, but what made it distinctive was the ambiguous political opportunity and divisions among students that consumed the brief yet intense activism. My dissertation contributes to the ongoing scholarly challenge of the 1949 divide by connecting student activism in the Republic era and the Communist reign, and sheds light on grassroots contentious politics in the Maoist era. As 2017 commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of the Hundred Flowers and the Anti-Rightist Campaigns, student activism of 1957 deserves a bright spot as it has been forgotten for too long. vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: STUDENT ACTIVISM IN 1957’S CHINA Peking University (Beida) students made posters asserting that “it is the right time” to move. They openly criticized the privilege of Party cadres, and started a journal called Public Square. Many observers would think that these activities happened in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Protests. In fact, these events occurred in 1957 during the Rectification Campaign, which came between Chairman Mao’s famous speech to “let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend” and the subsequent Anti-Rightist Movement which stifled dissent. For the first time since the foundation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), 1957 saw student activists claim that they were carrying forward the May Fourth spirit of 1919, hold a movement of their own, and pay a huge price for doing so. Drawing upon archival sources from both central and local levels, digital database of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, oral histories, student memoirs and documentary footages, my research investigates student activism and campus politics in 1957’s China. I situate China in the Communist world history after Khrushchev’s secret speech of 1956; I use social movement theories to examine political opportunity, repertoire, framing and organization