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Remembering Tiananmen, A Diary (Chaohua Wang - The London Review of Books)
June 29, 2007 12:27 AM
Copyright The London Review of Books
Contrary to their intention, commemorations of historical events are more often reminders of the power of forgetting: either official ceremonies that gradually lose their meaning, becoming public holidays like any other, or gatherings of tiny bands of militants or mourners, whose numbers dwindle to nothing as the years pass. In Los Angeles, you can see both kinds. If you ask people what Memorial Day stands for, virtually no one, not even professors of history, can tell you. As for the other sort, I myself stand every summer with a small band of friends outside the Chinese consulate in downtown Los Angeles, holding placards scarcely anyone notices. But what we commemorate has, unusually, not been forgotten elsewhere. It is now 18 years since soldiers and tanks entered Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Yet every year since then, on the night of 4 June, tens of thousands of people gather in Hong Kong and, whatever the weather, light candles in memory of what happened then, and those who died as a result of it. I don’t think any other mass commemoration has lasted so long. But what is remembered so powerfully in Hong Kong cannot even be mentioned on the other side of the border that separates the Special Administrative Region from the rest of the People’s Republic of China.
Eighteen years is not a short time; it’s long enough for a baby to become an adult. On 4 June this year, a strange incident occurred. In Chengdu, the capital of the province of Sichuan, a city with a population of 11 million, the small-ads pages of an evening newspaper contained a short item that read: ‘Salute to the steadfast mothers of the 4 June victims.’ The entry was noticed by some readers, scanned and uploaded onto the internet, where it rapidly circulated. The authorities jumped to investigate. Within days, three of the paper’s editors had been fired. How had the wall of silence been breached? The girl in charge of the small ads, born in the 1980s, had called the number given by the person who placed the ad to ask what the date referred to. Told it was a mining disaster, she cleared it. No one had ever spoken to her about 1989. Censorship devours its own children.
The mothers the ad was honouring are a small group of elderly women who have become the symbol of the event the country cannot refer to. Ding Zilin, who organised the women, is now 71. She used to teach Marxist philosophy at the People’s University in Beijing. In 1989, when Tiananmen Square was occupied by thousands of students, her 17-year-old son, who was still at school, got caught up in the movement. On the evening of 3 June, as the atmosphere grew increasingly tense, she feared the boy might join other demonstrators in the streets and locked him in her apartment. He escaped through a bathroom window, and was killed that night, when troops marched into the centre of the city. No one knows how many died alongside him. Government repression has been so complete that the number of victims remains a mystery. When Li Hai, a former activist from Peking University, tried to collect information about them in the early 1990s, he was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment for ‘leaking state secrets’. Despite constant police harassment and repeated house arrests, Ding persisted in her inquiry, and in 1994 published, in Hong Kong, a verifiable list of victims. Every year the list has expanded, and it now has 186 names. More and more people who lost family members have gathered around Ding. Inspired by the example of the Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina, and with help from human rights activists in Hong Kong, Ding and her friends some time ago named themselves the Tiananmen Mothers. Actually, the group also includes fathers, wives and husbands of those who were killed, as well as some of those who were injured during the repression. Qi Zhiyong, a worker, lost a leg from a bullet wound near Tiananmen. For trying to get redress and compensation, he has repeatedly been beaten by police thugs in his home; this year he was put under precautionary arrest before 4 June, and only released when the anniversary was over. His case is typical.
The government’s fears are not irrational. Over six weeks, what began as a student demonstration became a national political crisis, in which the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly of power was seriously challenged for the first time since the foundation of the People’s Republic. The government resolved the crisis by ordering regular troops, brought in from the provinces, to enforce martial law in Beijing, even at the cost of opening fire on the crowds and rolling tanks over peaceful protesters in order to seize control of Tiananmen Square, the most powerful symbolic space in modern China. For a whole week after the first gunshot, not a single political leader came out to face the nation, leaving the capital in the control of a professional army, a situation Beijing had not seen since the Allied Expedition against the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.
With Deng Xiaoping’s decision to crush the demonstrations the Party recovered its monopoly of power, but not its legitimacy or its authority. To fill the ideological void Deng set China on an accelerated path of economic change, announced to the nation by a speech in the southern city of Shenzhen in the spring of 1992, and expressed in the message ‘to get rich is glorious.’ Plastered on billboards across the country, the Party’s new slogan dismissed any possibility of discussion of ideas or principles, proclaiming simply: ‘Development is the Irrefutable Argument.’ Fifteen years later, China is the industrial wonder of the world. The average standard of living has improved, poverty has been reduced, urbanisation has exploded, exports and financial reserves are sky-high. Abroad, admiration for the People’s Republic has never been higher. National prosperity and pride typically go together. With such achievements to boast of, why should the Communist Party still be so fearful of something that happened an epoch ago? Why does it go to such lengths to distort and repress the past, and where it is unable to erase people’s memories entirely, why does it try to portray the demonstrations of 1989 as senseless turmoil and the movement’s activists as conspiring tricksters? But the real question is this: what was the conviction that led the protesters to stand up to the military machine?
Two opposing interpretations of the movement of 1989 have gained ground, mainly in the West but also to some extent in China. The first is socio-economic. In early 1988, the government pushed forcefully to free prices, but the inflation that followed provoked such strong reactions throughout the country that it was compelled to reinstitute food rationing in the big cities in January 1989. Some American scholars have argued that this was a factor in the massive social unrest that manifested itself in the spring of 1989. In China itself, thinkers on the New Left have taken this argument a step further, seeing the military crackdown of 4 June as essentially paving the way for the marketisation of the economy, by breaking resistance to the lifting of price controls (they were removed again, this time successfully, in the early 1990s). According to this view, the driving force behind the mass movement, even its inspiration, was the refusal of reforms that would deprive the population of established standards of collective welfare. What the gunshots in Beijing shattered were the last hopes for the ‘iron rice bowl’ of socialism, clearing the way to a fully-fledged capitalism in China.
Another school of thought turns this argument upside down. In this account, the mass movement, far from clinging to the socialist past, looked boldly ahead to a liberal future. The growing number of banners written in English, and the styrofoam statue of a ‘Goddess of Democracy’, modelled partly on the Statue of Liberty, erected on Tiananmen in the last days of May, all show that America was the demonstrators’ real dream: not the iron rice bowl, but the market and the ballot box. Last month, George Bush presided over the erection in Washington of a monument to the Victims of Communism, in the form of a scaled-down bronze replica of the styrofoam goddess.
It is true that socio-economic discontent, especially following on the rapid inflation of the summer of 1988, played an important role in generating support for the student protests of the next year. But these economic grievances were unambiguously transformed into political protests in the movement of 1989. Their target was the way Deng Xiaoping and Zhao Ziyang, then secretary-general of the Communist Party, ruled the country. Particularly powerful in mobilising protest was Zhao’s description of his reforms as ‘crossing a river by stepping one by one on stones under the water’. If all you can do is test the stability of unseen stones on the riverbed, what entitles you to a monopoly over policy-making? Why should we wait while you pick your way through the current, now and then finding yourself on the right stone, and letting us drown when you step on the wrong one? That was more or less the feeling of the movement. The economic slogans of 1989 were mostly attacks on past policies that had gone wrong, and especially on corruption among high officials. But these never took the form of specific economic demands, nor did any demands of that kind come into the many attempts at ‘dialogue’ – i.e. negotiations – between protesters and officials, before talks finally broke down. What dominated were unequivocally political demands for freedom of speech, civil rights and citizen participation.
As for the movement’s ideology, one must remember that this huge social upheaval erupted very quickly. When a hunger strike among the students put pressure on the government in mid-May, the news media, including the People’s Daily, enjoyed a week of press freedom unprecedented in the history of the PRC. On the streets people from the most varied social backgrounds were suddenly able to voice their ideas and debate among themselves. In the ensuing hubbub, it was easy to overinterpret a few isolated symbols. Popular imaginings of America are an example. A highly abstract idea of the US, based on very little knowledge, became one of the vehicles – a shell, if you like – in which people’s imaginative energy was invested. This shell was filled, however, with understandings – and critical reflections – based on life in the socialist, or semi-socialist, society of the previous decades. Socialist discourse and notions of an idealised America were mixed together in people’s minds. This can be a disappointment for today’s intellectuals, who occupy much more clear-cut ideological positions, liberal or leftist. Yet below the Goddess of Democracy, armbands on the picket line were red. The historical significance of the upheaval of 1989 in Beijing does not lie in one paradigm or another, espoused by this or that spokesman or leader. It lies in the space the movement opened up for creative imagination and the opportunities it offered for experiment. The focus was always on the right of citizens to participate in the public life of the country, and the channels that would enable them to do so.
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