Submissive Resistance: An Empirical Study on Student Movements of Peking University Post-1989

Student movements have persisted in mainland China since the 1989 protest, especially in elite universities, contrary to the lack of studies. The participants’ repertoire, mobilization, and interaction with authorities have vastly changed. Prevalent theories emphasizing organizing capacity, resource mobilization, or professional leadership would indicate a step-up in their scale and tension, for the past score in China has seen turbulent transition, rising resent and dissent, less pervasive control over students, and new interspace and instrumentality for resistance facilitated by social media and mobile technologies; yet the reality proves otherwise.

This study observes 11 appreciable collective actions from 1996 to 2014 among students of Peking University, a top-tier university in China and the origin of the Tiananmen Prodemocracy Movement. These actions were generally limited within the campus, not public and widespread; their themes self-interested, not value-oriented; the agents’ mobilization fragmented, not extensive; the interest subjects isolated, not integrated; usually ended in compromise between students and authorities (the University); and were fraught with anonymous mechanism. These characteristics of submissive resistance were non-existent in the 80s.

I propose the concept ‘cognitive restraint’ to illustrate the aforementioned characteristics of student movements in China, as a counterpoint to the political process model. Agents, cognizant of the high cost of action and their vulnerability to the state and authorities, curtail certain repertoire or themes of resistance to reduce action and discourse into the dominant institutional field, in hope of obtaining legality and averting suppression. After the reverberant bloodshed, state not only inhibits action, but also affects agents’ volition, cognition and expectation. Such institutional structure creates irresolute participants. “Bring the state back in” would shed light on the vicissitudes of student movements in non-democracies, where civil society is undeveloped, liberty is lacking, and hegemonic political system and severe social control could easily eliminates perceptible, autonomous, organized force.