Student Activism as Contentious Politics: Repertoire of Collective Actions at Beijing University, 1957

Beijing University students made big-character posters asserting that “it is the right time” to move. They openly criticized the privilege of Party cadres, and started a journal called “The Square.” These events took place between late May and early June of the Rectification Campaign in 1957, when university students across China had a brief yet intense period of blooming and contending. My paper focuses on the repertoire of collective actions deployed by students at Beijing University, including posters, speeches and debates, accusation meetings, and journals. I argue that in this case contentious repertoire has an amphibian feature, which allows both student activists and loyalists, as well as the authorities, to adopt for different purposes. Using repertoire as an example, I illustrate that the contention was not only binary between students and the authorities, but also within students as well as various levels of the leadership. Looking from the perspectives of both students and the authorities, this paper presents tensions in the historical context between a top-down campaign and a bottom-up initiative. More broadly, I compare and contrast the repertoire used in 1957 with its precedent in the Republican era as well as its descendant in the Cultural Revolution, as a way to seek continuities and changes of student activism across the 1949 divide.