Research On The KMT Government’s Guarding Against The Youth Student Movement(1927-1937)

There were many student movements in the first half of the 20 th century China.Due to the social environment, many movements against imperialism, feudalism and foreign aggression had been organized by the young patriotic Chinese students during the period. Officials and college headmasters had different attitude towards the student movements. The KMT official attitude towards the student movements had experienced great changes since1924. The KMT government supported the student movements before its purge in 1927 and its attitude had changed into preventing and suppressing during the period 1927 to 1930, in which the internal power struggle of the KMT government had played an important role.The measures against youth student movement made by the KMT government can be divided into two parts——system level and behavior level. On the system level,the KMT government formulated a series of policies and regulations, many related instructions and issued orders to prevent youth student movement. Those policies and regulations were basically some macro specification of student organizations while the related instructions and orders were some more specific guidance for the local governments, school officials and school staff to deal with the youth student movement. With those policies and orders, The KMT government hoped to restrict the activities of the students,weaken the students`political consciousness and revolutionary consciousness, let the students and student organizations`actions in accordance with the KMT `s political ideology and let them under control of the KMT government. On the behavior level, the preventive measures included strengthening the party education, comprehensive investigation supervision,preventing further deterioration of the situation, peace guide and violent repression.The measures against the student movement made by the KMT government were comprehensive. in which peaceful guidance was effective in some degree but its effect was limited. In most time, those measures were non-effect. The cause of it was complex. The main reason is that the KMT government didn’t take peaceful effect measures to guide the students but to repress the student movement violently. Second,the students represented the KMT had few influence in students` activity so they couldn’t guide the students. Moreover, the credibility of the KMT government among students had declined, which made the KMT government more difficult to guide the students. In addition, the KMT government did not know how to unit social groups effectively. Finally, during the process of preventing, the KMT government’s internal groups did not work well with each other. All these led to a non-effective preventing.