In late September of 2017, a traveler from California taking photos of campus bulletin boards in Hong Kongs felt an odd sense of familiarity. Two characters kept being included in his shots: min (“people”) and zhu (“rule”), which together mean “democracy.” He was taking the photographs in part because he thought that the protest posters student activists had posted would soon either be taken down or, as had already begun to happen, be covered by sheets of paper with different sorts of messages. The traveler felt like he had done the same exercise before—in Shanghai, in 1986. He had a vague memory of including a photograph in his first book that would confirm whether his memory was accurate or playing a trick on him. So, when he returned to the United States he found a copy of that book, Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai, and flipped through it. Sure enough, the shot he was thinking of was there, in a photo spread that begins after page 318.

Taken in late 1986, when the now 56-year-old history professor was a graduate student just shy of his 26th birthday, the photo shows students gathering in front of a bulletin board on a Shanghai campus during the now largely forgotten wave of protests that served as a sort of dress rehearsal or prequel for the Tiananmen struggle. The easiest characters to make out in the shot are min and zhu. The historian remembers that he took this photo to help document the look and feel of the movement, feeling a sense of urgency since he was pretty sure the posters would not be visible for long. And he was right: within days, the campus bulletin boards displayed only official materials.