Public Lecture: Grassroots Marxism in the 1978-81 Chinese Democracy Movement

Title: A Glimpse at Grassroots Marxism in the 1978-81 Chinese Democracy Movement

Speaker: Dr Yang Yang, Department of History, University of York

Time and date: 11-12:30, Thursday 11 December

Venue: TLC039 (Teaching and Learning Centre)

Abstract: While the Communist Party leadership launched a series of what later became known as the “reform and opening up” economic policies in late 1978, China also entered a brief period of political liberalisation. During this time, intellectuals, students, and ordinary citizens were encouraged to criticise the Party’s past “errors” and initiated the first wave of the Chinese Democracy Movement (CDM), calling for broader political reforms. Within this wave, some self-identified “grassroots Marxist” activists, such as Wang Xizhe, sought to link socialism with democracy. In 1979, Hong Kong Trotskyists began focusing on China’s prospects for democratic change. Some regularly traveled to the mainland to meet and exchange ideas with grassroots Marxists and other CDM activists about the future of socialist democracy in China. This emerging pro-democracy grassroots Marxist tendency, as a form of political opposition, soon became a target of the authoritarian state. By 1981, key activists had been arrested, including two Hong Kong Trotskyists, Wu Zhongxian (Ng Chung-yin) and Liu Shanqing (Lau Shan-ching). This talk will explore the ideas of Chinese grassroots Marxists and the intellectual exchanges between them and Hong Kong Trotskyists, as well as the political repression they faced. Though this left-wing tendency did not contribute substantially to proposals for China’s economic reforms, the crackdown on these voices arguably cleared the path for the Party-led neoliberal economic experiments that followed. As a result, liberal intellectuals who embraced the rise of global neoliberalism and thus supported free-market theories with no difficulties rose to prominence within the intelligentsia.

Speaker’s bio: Yang Yang is a visiting fellow at the University of York. He received his PhD in History from the University of Essex in 2018. In late 2024, he co-authored with Prof Gregor Benton a 1,200-page edited volume, The Longest Night: Three Generations of Chinese Trotskyists in Defeat, Jail, Exile, and Diaspora. His recent research primarily focuses on left-wing radicalism in contemporary China and Britain, and he is currently drafting a book on the Trotskyist movement in Hong Kong under British rule during the 1970s.