Jeffrey Wasserstrom on the Shanghai Mag-lev Protests
In the wake of last week's protests in Shanghai over construction of a
new mag-lev train, historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom has a great piece in
The Nation looking at the history of collective action in Shanghai.
It would be a mistake to ignore parallels between the current
Shanghai protests and earlier events in the city's history that
began with daily-life concerns and calls simply for greater
government responsiveness, yet ultimately swelled into broader
movements that challenged the legitimacy of an authoritarian ruling
party. Protests of this sort took place in the 1940s against the
Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-Shek, triggered by
hyperinflation. When students of the Tiananmen generation first
took to the streets in Shanghai in the mid-1980s, their grievances
were largely about the living conditions on campuses but mushroomed
into a much more radical set of demands that caught the world's
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