Making non-dissident youth

Nineteen sixty-eight is known first and foremost as a year in which youth protests shook the world and produced a crisis in authority. Most often the literature explaining this phenomenon has focused on urban milieus and university campuses. Describing the protests that swept the globe in 1968, Jeremi Suri writes that “men and women on diverse city streets perceived themselves as participants in a shared ‘movement’ against the police, the military, and established political institutions.” ¹ But not all of the world’s youth were urban. In many places agrarian youth remained an equally important if somewhat less volatile constituency. This was especially true in Asia, where economic growth was creating a revolution in expectations that encompassed the countryside as well as the cities. During the late 1960s, agrarian youth became just as much a cause for concern among Asian political rulers as did university students.