Slow Train to Democracy: Memoirs of Life in Shanghai, 1978 to 1979 , by Anne E. McLaren, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 4 stars Amid the plethora of China memoirs by Western writers over the years, Anne E. McLaren’s book set in Shanghai from 1978 to 1979 stands out because it takes place during a time of transition in China. But Slow Train to Democracy is more than just a record of McLaren’s time in China or the transition. It’s an account of a little-known democracy movement in Shanghai – around the time the government coined the term “socialism with Chinese characteristics” – that was eclipsed by the student-led movement in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square a decade later. McLaren witnessed and recorded the Shanghai poster movement while a student at Fudan University at a time when only 21 other foreign students lived in the city and months before the first American students were allowed to study in China. For the most part, she was the only Australian. As a PhD research student in China, McLaren met Chinese students who spoke about politics and the recent changes in China. The Gang of Four had been arrested just a of couple years earlier and Deng Xiaoping was wrestling for power with Hua Guofeng. While McLaren writes about the impending re-establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the United States, the Sino-US relationship is not central to her story. Instead, she mostly covers the Shanghai poster movement in 1978-79 that mainly took place on public bulletin boards. Unusually early and unusually neither American nor British, her account lends diversity to the corpus of expat China memoirs. Why Jewish refugees in Shanghai fled to Macau during WWII Posters mattered. Before the advent of the internet, Chinese newspapers were displayed for public viewing each day in glass-encased bulletin boards on streets and on campuses. While the newspapers were all state-run, the bulletin board area provided a natural space for protest posters that caught the eyes of people gathering to read the news on bulletin boards. These protest posters exemplified the openness in China at a time when people felt free to speak out against the failed policies over the previous two decades. The government allowed and even encouraged criticism of the Gang of Four, arrested two years earlier. The poster movement began as Beijing acknowledged the April 1976 crackdown in Tiananmen Square on what had begun as a student memorial to Zhou Enlai after his death earlier that year. The memorial ended in a violent police crackdown – McLaren writes that many were killed and thousands injured – and until a change of messaging in 1978 it had been labelled as “counter-revolutionary”. In late November 1978, the BBC reported on the poster movement: “Deng is said to have officially disapproved of posters criticising Mao, but such posters are still continuing. In a further news item, one learns that Chinese from the mainland are flooding into Hong Kong at an alarming rate – about three hundred a day.” Other reforms were occurring in China at this time. Departments of politics were formed in universities and dancing on college campuses was allowed for the first time in decades. McLaren also chronicles China’s war with Vietnam at the beginning of 1979, which ended almost as soon as it started. The poster movement was quashed by the government by April 1979, having lasted only six months. Whether by coincidence or otherwise, it ended just after the first Americans arrived in the city. McLaren’s quick observations about the impending influx of Americans are fascinating. Apart from the democracy movement – which was in fact rather a short period in which students and other activists joined together to call for more freedoms – her book title refers more to her many lengthy train trips. On one such train journey between Shanghai and Hong Kong – taking 33 hours each way – she wrote the following in December 1978: “American recognition is bound to make a deep impression on Chinese society. A new building at Fudan is being built to hold existing foreign students and the large number of Americans expected next year. “This is to be a self-contained building with its own foreign canteen, classrooms and small shops – nothing but the best for the Americans! At the moment foreigners dine in the university canteen [really grotty – a real shock when I first saw it!] and our classrooms are in the same building as the Chinese department.” Among the first foreign students in Shanghai, McLaren experienced the city in a different way than many who came after her. She fastidiously followed the democracy poster movement and copied the characters on the posters one by one over a period of half a year. Wuhan Diary: a personal tale of life during world’s strictest lockdown Her book is structured in a journal-like fashion, including excerpts from many of the posters she transcribed and how they evolved each day. While she does not mention translating the posters into English, one assumed she did: she was in Shanghai then to study Chinese. In an epilogue that takes place in 1986, seven years later, she notices great changes in the city. People’s Square, site of many of the 1978-79 democracy posters, had since moved to the old racetrack. Yet McLaren noticed the protest movement remained alive and well. Asian Review of Books