Student Protest in East and Southeast Asia: Understanding the Variations

Over the course of decades, students across East and Southeast Asia have risen up collectively to confront authoritarian political regimes and to press claims on democratic regimes. Their influence has been especially keen in regime crises and transitions since the 1970s, in Thailand, South Korea, Burma, China, Indonesia, and elsewhere. However constant the notion of student protest, however, its form, objectives, participants, and outcomes vary dramatically. Drs. Weiss and Wright explore how variations in the specific features of political regimes, institutions, and higher education policies have shaped the character and outcome of student protest in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, China, and Taiwan.

Meredith L. Weiss is a Research Fellow at the East-West Center Washington. She earned her PhD in Political Science at Yale, then was an Assistant Professor at DePaul University. She has held visiting fellowships at the National University of Singapore, Australian National University, Georgetown University, and Universiti Malaya. A specialist in Southeast Asian politics, she is the author of Protest and Possibilities: Civil Society and Coalitions for Political Change in Malaysia and co-editor (with Saliha Hassan) of Social Movements in Malaysia: From Moral Communities to NGOs. Her articles have appeared in Perspectives on Politics, New Political Science, South East Asia Research, Journal of East Asian Studies, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, Asian Survey, Contemporary Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, and she has contributed chapters to numerous anthologies.

Teresa Wright is an East-West Center Visiting Fellow and Scholar during the 2007-08 academic year. Since 1996, she has been a professor of Political Science at California State University, Long Beach. A specialist on protest, dissent, and democratization in China and Taiwan, she is the author of The Perils of Protest: State Repression and Student Activism in China and Taiwan. Her articles have appeared in Comparative Politics, China Quarterly, Asian Survey, and Asia Pacific Issues, and she has contributed chapters to a number of edited volumes. Dr. Wright received her Ph. D in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

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