Ecologies of Social Movements: Student Mobilization during the 1989 Prodemocracy Movement in Beijing

Based on 70 interviews with informants who were mostly students during the 1989 Beijing student movement, the author found that the ecology of university campuses in Beijing enclosed a huge number of students in a small area with a unique spatial distribution and regulated their spatial activities. This ecology nurtured many close–knit student networks, as well as directly exposed all Beijing students to a collective action environment when the movement started. These ecological conditions not only sustained a high rate of movement participation but also facilitated the formation of many ecology–dependent strategies of student mobilization, which in turn patterned the dynamics of the movement.