several days of protesting the Shanghai government called in the police and ordered them to use force to remove the student demonstrators, an act that angered students across the country. In response to the tactics of the Shanghai government, students in Hefei engaged in a sit-in on December 23 in front of the Hefei municipal government building with the demand that the Hefei municipal government rebuke the actions of the Shanghai government. Fang Lizhi, who had a great deal of influence amongst the students, worked as a mediator between the government and students in Hefei and was able to get the students back to class and end their sit-in on the condition that the Anhui officials would forward the student demands to the Shanghai government. According to Fang, his involvement in this instance was later used as evidence by the party that he was the one behind these demonstrations. According to sociologist Julia Kwong, the demonstrations were never able to gain widespread support; the biggest demonstrations in Beijing and Shanghai numbered 30,000 in total and some demonstrations only numbered in the hundreds, such as the protests in Guangzhou. In total 150 Chinese universities out of 1016 took part in the demonstration across 17 cities with 2% of the student population taking part. The goals of the protestors were portrayed in western media like The Washington Post as being a pro-democracy movement but the students had many other grievances that had little to do with democracy and were reported by Hong Kong media. These grievances varied depending on the campus with students in Beijing protesting that lights were turned off after 11:00 whereas students in Nanjing criticized the inclusion of political studies in their curriculum. The protesters also focused on the problem of corruption and cronyism in the government, which affected students abilities to gain employment and slowed Chinese economic growth. Some of the student demonstrators did hold discussions with the government but they were largely ineffectual. The Shanghai students were unable to have any of their four demands met after a six-hour meeting with the Party Secretary of Shanghai Jiang Zemin. By mid-January all of the demonstrations had stopped, and the students returned to their campuses. Aftermath Hu Yaobang's response to the demonstrations was a major factor in him being forced to resign his position as General Secretary on January 16, 1987, as he was perceived as being overly liberal