Foreign study as a safety-valve: The experience of China's university students going abroad in the eighties

Since 1978, a large number of Chinese university students have gone to Western countries, especially to North America. This paper argues that this widespread phenomenon of going abroad provided an important alternative for aggrieved university students, and that the increased difficulty for Chinese university students to go abroad in the late eighties was one of the major grievances of Chinese students on the eve of the 1989 Chinese Student Movement.