University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Departmental Papers (ASC) Annenberg School for Communication 2001 Double-Edged Rituals and the Symbolic Resources of Collective Action: Political Commemorations and the Mobilization of Protest in 1989 Steven Pfaff Guobin Yang University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation Pfaff, S., & Yang, G. (2001). Double-Edged Rituals and the Symbolic Resources of Collective Action: Political Commemorations and the Mobilization of Protest in 1989. Theory and Society, 30 (4), 539-589. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1011817231681 NOTE: At the time of publication, author Guobin Yang was affiliated with the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Currently, he is a faculty member at the Annenberg School for Communication and the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/338 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Double-Edged Rituals and the Symbolic Resources of Collective Action: Political Commemorations and the Mobilization of Protest in 1989 Abstract The year 1989 was rife with resonant political anniversaries in both Eastern Europe and China ̶ as well as being the two-hundredth anniversary of France’s first great democratic revolution. Democracy and the future of socialism were on many peoples’ minds. Communist elites hoped to use these anniversaries as opportunities to celebrate the triumphs of the last forty years, but dissidents found these anniversaries even more auspicious as occasions to condemn “really existing” socialism. As a result, popular revolts erupted from Beijing to Berlin.