The Perils of Protest: State Repression and Student Activism in China and Taiwan

Chapter 2. The Political Environment of Students in China and Taiwan

8 Chapter 2 The Political Environment of Students in China and Taiwan The outcomes of China’s Democracy Movement of 1989 and Taiwan’s Month of March movement of 1990 could hardly have been more different. In China, the student protests were brutally crushed, initiating a period of harsh repression toward any and all attempts at autonomous or dissident organization. Across the straits, in contrast, student demonstrators met with a conciliatory official response, resulting in the acknowledgment and implementation of their demands and the subsequent democratization of the political system. Yet student protestors in both movements exhibited strikingly similar behaviors. How can we explain this likeness in behavior yet difference in result? A key part of the answer may be found in the political environment within which the students acted. Overall, commonalities in the political opportunity structure bred similar student protest behavior. Students in both cases reacted to single-party domination of the state, the media, and social organization, as well as to a high likelihood of harsh state repression. These realities combined to create an environment of great danger and risk for student protestors, causing them to be extremely hesitant to compromise and exceedingly careful in choosing their allies. Oddly, this atmosphere also led students to place a premium on courage as a leadership credential and to see any calls for moderation as suspect. At the same time, the relatively less threatening environment in Taiwan made such behavior less extreme in the Month of March movement. What relation did student behavior have to the outcome of each movement ? In general, the less disruptive the students appeared, the greater chance they had of succeeding in their goal of reform. For, in both cases, the ruling elites were split into two major factional groupings, one more Political Environment of Students • 9 reform-oriented, and the other more conservative. When the student protests began, each party faction hoped to use the demonstrations to buttress its power. In general, party hard-liners gained when protestors were disorderly, thus providing evidence that the country would fall into turmoil if reforms proceeded too quickly. Conversely, organized and moderate actions on the part of the students supported the more reformist faction’s claim that the populace was “ready” for further political loosening. At the same time, protest mobilization that did not include groups which the regime found threatening made it less likely that the hard-line faction would insist on repression. Concurrently, however, if the demonstrations included only “nonthreatening ” sectors (such as students), the hard-liners could feel safe in ignoring the protestors’ demands, as doing so likely would not expose the party to the risk of widespread unrest. Nondemocratic Political Environments Although there is no general agreement as to the proper definition of “democracy ,” most identify it as a type of rule with meaningful elections, and that it protects basic civil liberties such as legal rights to a fair trial and freedom of expression, assembly, organization, and the media.1 Nondemocratic, or “illiberal ” regimes, lack these characteristics. At the same time, scholars have long stressed the great variation among nondemocratic forms of rule, especially regarding the extent to which a regime attempts to permeate and suffocate all independent social interaction.2 With this in mind, I suggest that it may be useful to envision a spectrum of regime types extending from the most democratic to the least, based on the degree of: (1) single-party monopolization of state institutions; (2) party–state domination of the media; (3) party penetration of social organizations; and (4) harsh state repression. On this continuum, by 1989 and 1990 China and Taiwan had moved away from the more extreme oppressiveness of their pasts, with Taiwan having made notable strides in the direction of liberalization (and having started from a less severe position). Yet, in each case a single party continued to dominate and penetrate society, and a legacy of repression remained fresh in the minds of the population. To what extent did China in 1989 and Taiwan in 1990 exhibit the four features listed above? To begin, in each case a single party had completely dominated the governmental structure for over forty years, with virtually no viable challenges to its power. At the same time, by the late 1980s the KMT’s grip was much looser than that of the CCP. In China, single-party rule was 10 • The Perils of Protest justified by an ideology that claimed...