ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to document the extent of the students' ideological and organizational estrangement from the regime and the response of the authorities. In their postmortem analyses of the spring 1989 "turmoil," the more perceptive Chinese authorities were compelled to acknowledge that a significant number of students had become highly skeptical of some of the regime's core ideological, organizational, and economic values. Although the developments were gradually unfolding throughout the reform period of the 1980s, the extent of student estrangement from the regime was perhaps not fully appreciated by the authorities until the dramatic events of April-June 1989. If the regime's ideology has lost a great deal of its appeal to youth, a similar argument could be made for its key political organization, the Communist Youth League. Aside from a holding operation, however, the regime has been unable to arrest the movement of society away from the state.
