Ding says he is not surprised by the eruption of student protest at this time. According to him, the current political climate is ideal for students to voice demands.

"By mid-1986 political reform was seen as an end in itself--and not just a means to economic reform--by Deng and other leaders of the Party. And just recently, authorities have emphasized the implementation of a constitution which gives people the right to go to the streets, to protest, to spell out opinions," he explains. "So this is a way for students to try to prove their constitutional rights."

The initial protests were based on complaints about the hard life of students in Chinese universities. Dorms are usually under-heated and cafeteria food is both expensive and inedible. Furthermore, Chinese students are required to work very long hours and are rarely permitted to take classes outside their concentrations.

Food At Heart Of The Matter

"Our life is terrible in the universities," says Yu, who attended Fudan University, one of the flashpoints of student unrest. "The food is very bad, we have no money, and we are expected to work very hard. I read an article that said students lack exercise, that they are in poor health because they don't exercise. That's not true. It's nutrition. Student health is not good because they are not well-nourished."

Indeed, the quality of the food may have been one of the primary reasons for the demonstrations, at least at first. The students quickly moved from demanding better meals to demanding more say in university affairs and more control over their own lives.

Yu also thinks they want more privacy, because "in China there is hardly any privacy left."

"At all universities students are not allowed to have boyfriends or girlfriends. We are not supposed to fall in love," he says. "My wife used to be my classmate and our political conduct tutor warned us against seeing each other."

Yu says that if he had not been a good student and gotten the opportunity to study in America, he would have been assigned a job far away from the woman he was dating.

In China graduates are assigned jobs by the government. "If [students] refuse to take what is offered to them, they are not given another choice. So they stay at home with no work," says Yu. "Maybe the cafeteria will be changed [as a result of these protests], but I don't think the students will get to choose their own jobs."

"The first demonstrations may have been about cafeteria food, but now the demonstrators are calling for democracy and freedom," says Zhang Longxi, a fourth-year graduate student and tutor in the Literature Department here. "This is a sign of democracy awakening."

Although people like Zhang and Yu feel that the protest movement is indeed a positive sign of student concern over the political future of China, some at Harvard disagree.

"How could a banner with a vague word like democracy or liberalism lead to action?" Li asks.

What They Say And What They Mean

Benjamin I. Schwartz, Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science has written an article on Chinese student demonstrations for an upcoming issue of The New Republic. "While there's been a considerable amount of talk about freedom and democracy, what the students mean may be something quite different." The China expert thinks the demonstrations will taper off soon because students are busy studying for their January exams.