Student Activism in Asia: Between Protest and Powerlessness
Meredith L. Weiss and Edward Aspinall
Abstract
Since World War II, students in East and Southeast Asia have led protest movements that toppled authoritarian regimes in countries such as Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand. Elsewhere in the region, student protests have shaken regimes until they were brutally suppressed—most famously in China’s Tiananmen Square and in Burma. But despite their significance, these movements have received only a fraction of the notice that has been given to American and European student protests of the 1960s and 1970s. This book tells the story of student protest movements across Asia. Taking an interdiscipli ... More
Since World War II, students in East and Southeast Asia have led protest movements that toppled authoritarian regimes in countries such as Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand. Elsewhere in the region, student protests have shaken regimes until they were brutally suppressed—most famously in China’s Tiananmen Square and in Burma. But despite their significance, these movements have received only a fraction of the notice that has been given to American and European student protests of the 1960s and 1970s. This book tells the story of student protest movements across Asia. Taking an interdisciplinary, comparative approach, the chapters here examine ten countries, focusing on those where student protests have been particularly fierce and consequential: China, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, Burma, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. They explore similarities and differences among student movements in these countries, paying special attention to the influence of four factors: higher education systems, students’ collective identities, students’ relationships with ruling regimes, and transnational flows of activist ideas and inspirations.
Keywords:
authoritarian regimes,
student protests,
Tiananmen Square,
Burma,
student movements,
higher education systems,
collective identities,
ruling regimes,
activist ideas,
activist inspirations
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2012 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780816679683 |
| Published to Minnesota Scholarship Online: August 2015 |
DOI:10.5749/minnesota/9780816679683.001.0001 |
