A Different Kind of Student-led Protest Took Place Thirty-Five Years ago

Every generation of Chinese will sooner or later discover how insufferable the regime is and launch their own movement.

Jian Liu/Humanitarian China

In the last several months, anti-Israel and pro-Hamas protestors have dominated many college campuses in America, especially the elite ones. These champagne Marxists’ real and ultimate objective is not peace in the Middle East. Eric Mann, a long-time radical-left activist who called the United States a “white settler state” and served as a regional coordinator for the radical-left group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), said quietly and loudly during an interview that regardless of issue, be it race, climate, or the Israel-Palestine conflict, the goal of the radical left is always to overthrow the U.S. system. The rest is just “a little division of labor.”

Thirty-five years ago, a different kind of student-led protest occurred in China. Many Chinese people already felt anxious at the start of 1989. The economic reform was about to enter its tenth year and wasn’t going well. China’s GDP per capita was only $300, and people felt even poorer given the rising inflation. The government’s official inflation reading was 30 percent in 1988. But Yaoyilin, a senior Communist Party official in charge of the economy, estimated that the actual inflation was close to 50 percent.

The Communist Party sought to address rising prices with severe price control on household necessities such as pork. Such an approach was bound to backfire since the government’s price control didn’t reflect the actual cost of production. Farmers refused to sell their pigs to the government at the artificially low prices set by Beijing. Consequently, the pork supply dropped so drastically that Beijing reimposed food rationing on pork: each household could have only a kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, of pork each month.