"[This] is the first book to compare the Tiananmen demonstrations with Taiwan's Month of March Movement in 1990, which protested the lack of public voice over the choice of the new President." --China Journal, January 2003

"This slim book succeeds in illuminating important aspects of the student movement--often in engrossing fashion--and provides readers with a better grasp than before of why the dramatic events of 1989 unfolded as they did." --Journal of Asian Studies, November 2001

"In comparing protest movements in Taiwan and the PRC, Teresa Wright sheds important new light on the dynamics of contentious politics in authoritarian political systems. The empirical information, based upon intensive interviews with participants, will be of interest to China specialists while the broader analysis raises questions with standard theories of social mobilization." --Elizabeth J. Perry, Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University

China's student movement of 1989 ushered in an era of harsh political repression, crushing the hopes of those who desired a more democratic future. Communist Party elites sealed the fate of the movement, but did ill-considered choices by student leaders contribute to its tragic outcome? To answer this question, Teresa Wright centers on a critical source of information that has been largely overlooked by the dozens of works that have appeared in the past decade on the "Democracy Movement": the students themselves. Drawing on interviews and little-known first-hand accounts, Wright offers the most complete and representative compilation of thoughts and opinions of the leaders of this student action. She compares this closely studied movement with one that has received less attention, Taiwan's Month of March Movement of 1990, introducing for the first time in English a narrative of Taiwan's largest student demonstration to date. Despite their different outcomes (the Taiwan action ended peacefully and resulted in the government addressing student demands), both movements similarly maintained a strict separation between student and non-student participants and were unstable and conflict-ridden. This comparison allows for a thorough assessment of the origins and impact of student behavior in 1989 and provides intriguing new insights into the growing literature on political protest in non-democratic regimes.

Teresa Wright is assistant professor of political science at California State University, Long Beach.