Friday, October 2nd, 2009 The Missing May 4th and the Eclipsed '89s: Remembering and Forgetting 20th Century Chinese Struggles for Freedom

Description

The May 4th Movement of 1919 and the Tiananmen Uprising that took place seven decades later are two of the best known protest struggles in modern Chinese history. They are movements that have been commemorated and discussed in many contexts, getting even more attention than usual in years, such as this one, that end with the number nine. They are also events that have been mythologized and oversimplified, as well as events that have been misremembered and misrepresented, sometimes intentionally and sometimes inadvertently. This talk will focus on aspects of the struggles of 1919 and 1989 that have tended to be overlooked, downplayed, or airbrushed out of the picture completely. It will ask what we can learn about the events themselves and about the dynamics of commemoration from focusing on some of the “missing May 4th” and “eclipsed ’89s,” and also suggest some things that the process of selective remembering of struggles of this kind reveals about Chinese politics and the way China is thought about in the West.

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a Professor of History at the University of California-Irvine, where he also serves as Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies. His most recent books are China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (forthcoming from Oxford University Press), Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 (Routledge, 2009), and, as co-editor, China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). A co-founder of the “China Beat” blog/electronic magazine and a regular contributor to the “Huffington Post,” he has contributed reviews and commentaries to newspapers such as the New York Times and magazines such as Time and Newsweek.