Proud

China's young demonstrators had only to consult the pages of their history books last week for a bit of inspiration -- and even a few lessons. Throughout this century, massive student rallies have often augured or advanced social and political change in China, ushering in new eras or helping set the country's political agenda. Indeed, the recent outpouring of unrest shares familiar themes with the outcries of earlier student generations: a fervent call for renewed national purpose and a noisy demand for domestic reform.

Foreign intrusion has frequently spurred student reaction. When Japan presented the Chinese government with its "21 demands" in 1915, which included the ceding of the northeastern province of Shandong to Tokyo, thousands of Chinese students studying abroad returned home to protest what they saw as a humiliating affront to the country's sovereignty. Reports that Britain, France and Italy had agreed at Versailles to support Japanese claims to Shandong sparked a demonstration of some 5,000 students in Peking on May 4, 1919, and protests at more than a dozen universities across the country. Mao Tse-tung later labeled the "May 4 movement," as it came to be called, "an anti-imperialist and antifeudal bourgeois-democratic revolution in China." The protests ushered in a decade of radical opposition to foreign encroachment.

China's new generation of student leaders undoubtedly had their rebellious predecessors in mind when they chose to conduct the first protest in the latest round of outbreaks on Dec. 9. The date is a revered one: 51 years ago, during the "Dec. 9 movement" of 1935, thousands of students took to the wintry streets of Peking and other Chinese cities to protest the expansionist designs of Japan, which had established a puppet state in Manchuria. The ) demonstrations helped weaken the government of Chinese Leader Chiang Kai-shek and paved the way for the comeback of Communist forces after the historic Long March of 1934-35. Many of the young demonstrators later became officials in the new Communist government that was established in 1949.

In 1966 Mao turned the restless energy of the country's youth inward, recruiting thousands of students to serve as Red Guards, the ideological shock troops of the Chairman's tumultuous Cultural Revolution. Though students played an often brutal role in the ten-year purge of the country's intellectual elite, their participation in the Cultural Revolution, like the epoch itself, seems to have been a historical aberration. More typically, China's young demonstrators have called for a quickened pace of reform. On April 5, 1976, students swelled the ranks of the 100,000 demonstrators who massed in Peking's Tiananmen Square to protest the removal by Maoist radicals of thousands of wreaths that had been placed at the Monument to the People's Heroes in memory of Premier Chou En-lai, who had died the previous January. The protesters obliquely attacked Mao and waved banners declaring support for Deng Xiaoping, then senior Deputy Premier. The demonstration quickly turned violent and was suppressed by authorities, who pronounced it "counterrevolutionary." The incident marked the beginning of the end for Mao's Gang of Four and served as a harbinger of Deng's long-awaited ascent to power -- and of the social and economic liberalizations that spawned the latest round of unrest.