Learning politics: Locating student activism in Beijing, 1917--1923 (China)

This work explores the time and the place in Chinese history at which we can locate the emergence of the "modern student" as well as of the "modern university" as politically charged categories: Beijing University (Beida) during the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Before May Fourth 1919, "Beida" and "Beida students" did not exist as stable positions to be occupied but were instead both produced because of and through the practices and the struggles of those years. The premise here is that an understanding of the emergence of student activism can be achieved only if we consider how it challenged the distinctions between the cultural and the political, the intellectual and the quotidian. Political expression during the May Fourth years was located and took shape in different aspects of the realm of students' lived practice in and around Beida: in the daily life in classrooms and dorms, in the reformed curriculum and teaching routines, in the evolving relationship with the city and its people, and finally in allegedly "cultural" student organizations. The goal of this work is not so much a history of Beijing University or of the May Fourth Movement, as it is to develop a claim for a different kind of historical inquiry, a methodological and histonographic project that bridges the gap between the lived experience of the actor and the eye of the historian.