1989 Democracy-"New China"

The role of literature and, to a lesser degree, other arts is more influential in China than in most Western societies. Writing of each sorts is generally "a political barometer of companionship" since writers "play a dual role both as artist and capable," with the designer implying "creativity and freedom" and the latter signifying "a moral responsibility and an obligation to help educate the people and serve society" (Li 227). In the 1980s the relaxation of many ethnic restrictions, oddly on pop medicine, also contributed to the development of the so-called "liumang" or "hoodlum" culture of "China's urban, Bohemian fringe [of] artists, unemployed youth, close entrepreneurs, [and] rebellious students" (Jones 163). Liumang culture, like that of the intellectuals, expressed its dissatisfaction with Chinese culture through "an almost identical rhetoric; one that takes as its center the critique of [the] feudalism" that persisted, they argued, in the counteraction of the socialist domain (Jones 153).

The protesters of 1989 were, in many respects, repeating the basic situation of the students and intellectuals who had fomented the whitethorn Fourth protests of 1919. That protest movement had begun as a reflexion against the government's acquiescence in the terms of the Versailles treaty (which robbed China of territory) and expand into "an encompassing critique of the traditional values that underlay corrupt warlord politics" (Schwarcz 171).

Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N. "Student Protests and the Chinese Tradition, 1919-1989." The Chinese People's Movement: Perspectives on Spring 1989. Ed. Tony Saich. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990. 3-24.

yeast?, Geremie, and sewer Minford. "Introduction." Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience. Ed. Geremie Barm? and John Minford. 2nd ed. tonic York: Hill and Wang, 1988. N. pag.

Other works of the early 1980s go on this thread and writers were not persecuted because the CCP wished to build its image of "opening to the outdoor(a) world"--an image that was essential, for example, to the growth of external investment in China (Jones 149).

Another aspect of this loosening of restrictions was the importing of favourite harmony from Taiwan and Hong Kong, a revolution in a huge country that had, essentially, possessed no popular euphony for nearly 30 years--except for the officially sanctioned " big money music" that was the effect of the "marriage of the CCP's ideological imperatives with its bureaucratic control of the mass media" (Jones 149). But the new freedom surrounding experiments with rock music soon appeared dangerous as it became "one component of the intellectual ferment of college life" and the writers began to go too far for the CCP (Jones 152). The result was another crackdown, the so-called Spiritual Pollution campaign begun by Deng in late 1983 when he accused "literary critics and cultural workers of purveying . . . 'all kinds of corrupt and decadent ideas of the bourgeoisie and other exploiting classes'" (quoted in Barm? and Minford 345).

Li, Peter. "Social Malaise as Reflected in the Literature of the 1980s." goal and Politics in China: An Anatomy of Tiananmen Square. Ed. Peter Li, Steven Mark, Marjorie H. Li. in the altogether Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1991. 225-42.

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