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AbstractThis paper explores Chinese people's pursuit of human rights through the Hegelian lenses of abstract rights and the master–slave dialectic. By juxtaposing the 1989 Tiananmen Incident and the Falun Gong movement, it illuminates how Chinese people's struggles for human rights have been informed by Confucianism and other Chinese philosophies, although they have also looked to the West for inspiration and endorsement. Moreover, Hegel's very own dialectic reassures us that Chinese people do not need to have an affirmative, conscious knowledge of 'rights' before they pursue them. While the student protests in 1989 were fuelled by a nationwide economic crisis, the Falun Gong movement was the result of an increasingly prosperous but spiritually blighted society. In both cases, the people, like slaves, struggled against their master, the Chinese government, for freedom and recognition so as to attain a full self-consciousness. Thus, this paper appropriates Hegelian concepts and his dialectical view of history to add to the existing criticisms of his Orientalist views, namely his belief that China is a stagnant nation and its people have no independent personality but only a servile consciousness.

Initiated by Beijing college students, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests—"Tiananmen"—shook all of China with their calls for democratic and social reforms. They were violently repressed by the Chinese state on June 4, 1989. Since then, their memory has been subject within the country to two kinds of censorship. First, a government campaign promulgating the official narrative of Tiananmen, while simultaneously forbidding all others, lasted into 1991. What followed was the surcease of Tiananmen propaganda and an expansion of silencing to nearly all mentions that has persisted to this day. My dissertation examines fiction and film that evoke Tiananmen from within mainland China and Hong Kong. It focuses on materials that are particularly open to a self-reflexive reading, such as literature in which the protagonists are writers and films shot without authorization that in their editing indicate the precarious circumstances of their making. These works act out the contestation between the state censorship of Tiananmen-related discourse on the one hand and its alternative imagination on the other, thereby opening up a discursive space, however fragile, for a Chinese audience to reconfigure a historical memory whose physical space is off limits. The dissertation is organized historically by time, place, and medium. Chapter 1 focuses on a Chinese state-sponsored collection of literary reportage published shortly after the June Fourth crackdown that, in my rereading today when the entire state literature on Tiananmen is itself marginalized, allows for an untimely commemoration of the protests. Chapter 2 looks at the same immediate post-June Fourth period in a Hong Kong approaching the 1997 reversion to Chinese sovereignty, analyzing the recoding of Tiananmen in two audiovisual works, in particular, that question the possibility of a Hong Kong public in the face of collusive pressure from Chinese and British authorities. Chapters 3 and 4 consider fiction and film, respectively, that illustrate the historicity and medium specificity of censorship and its contestation. The two mainland novels that I read in Chapter 3, one published in print and the other online, create sites both where the elided memory of 1989 can reenter and where a participatory readership can emerge. Chapter 4 concerns two fiction-features whose different trajectories of production and exhibition across the mainland-Hong Kong divide demonstrate the Chinese state's continual displacement of Tiananmen. As a whole, the four chapters reveal the dual aspect of censorship and its effects, both the authorized pronouncements that set its terms of engagement in making the _censored_ public (Chapter 1) as well as the unauthorized reworkings generated within its sphere of influence that make the censored _public_ (Chapters 2-4).

This work began as a study of the dynamics of Chinese state socialist society under the impact of ten years of reform. Workers, lower level state cadres and private entrepreneurs were interviewed on the ordinary strategies of daily life in China; on such phenomena as corruption, the use of kinship and friendship networks, relations with superiors and colleagues at work and the rapidly increasing use of money for legal and illegal purposes. Approaching the problem from the perspective of the common Beijing resident illuminated the dynamic interaction between the fabric of daily life and the cou

Examines protest movements within the country and internal and external dissent from government policies, with some focus on Tiananmen Square and its aftermath, 1989-97; China. Summary in English p. 220.

Key role of the People's Liberation Army in politics, focusing on the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 and purge of the PLA following the 24th Communist party congress in 1992.