MCLC: Peng Liyuan serenaded Tiananmen troops

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Sean Macdonald <smacdon2005 at gmail.com>
Subject: Peng Liyuan serenaded Tiananmen troops
***********************************************************

Source: AP (3/28/13):
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_CHINA_FIRST_LADY

CHINA'S FIRST LADY SERENADED TIANANMEN TROOPS
BY GILLIAN WONG 
ASSOCIATED PRESS

BEIJING (AP) -- A photo of China's new first lady Peng Liyuan in younger
days, singing to martial-law troops following the 1989 bloody military
crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, flickered across Chinese cyberspace
this week.

It was swiftly scrubbed from China's Internet before it could generate
discussion online. But the image - seen and shared by outside observers -
revived a memory the leadership prefers to suppress and shows one of the
challenges in presenting Peng on the world stage as the softer side of
China.

The country has no recent precedent for the role of first lady and faces a
tricky balance at home. The leadership wants Peng to show the human side
of the new No. 1 leader, Xi Jinping, while not exposing too many perks of
the elite. And it must balance popular support for the first couple with
an acute wariness of personality cults that could skew the consensus rule
among the Chinese Communist Party's top leaders.

The image of Peng, wearing a green military uniform, her windswept hair
tied back in a ponytail as she sings to helmeted and rifle-bearing troops
seated in rows on Beijing's Tiananmen Square, contrasts with her
appearances this week in trendy suits and coiffed hair while touring
Russia and Africa with Xi, waving to her enthusiastic hosts.

"I think that we have a lot of people hoping that because Xi Jinping walks
around without a tie on and his wife is a singer who travels with him on
trips that maybe we're dealing with a new kind of leader, but I think
these images remind people that this is the same party," said Kelley
Currie, a China human rights expert for the pro-democracy Project 2049
Institute in Arlington, Virginia.

"It's using some new tools and new techniques, for the same purposes: to
preserve its own power."

Peng, 50, a major general in the People's Liberation Army who is best
known for soaring renditions of patriotic odes to the military and the
party, kept a low profile in recent years as her husband prepared to take
over as Communist Party chief. Her re-emergence has been accompanied by a
blitz in domestic, state-run media hailing her beauty and charm, in a bid
to harness her popularity to build support for Xi at home and abroad.

"Peng Liyuan: Let the world appreciate the beauty of China," declared the
headline of a China News Service commentary that said the first lady's
elegant manners, conversation and clothing would highlight Chinese
culture. Her presence on diplomatic trips would demystify the first family
for the Chinese public, the commentary said.

However, the government is stepping into little-charted and possibly
treacherous waters for China.

In 1963, the glamorous Wang Guangmei, wife of President Liu Shaoqi, wore a
tightfitting qipao dress to a state banquet in Indonesia. When the
political tides turned against Liu four years later, radical Red Guards
forced Wang to don the same dress and paraded her through the streets as a
shameful example of capitalist corruption.

Revolutionary leader Mao Zedong's wife, Jiang Qing, played a key role in
the same radical campaign in which political opponents were mercilessly
persecuted; after his death, she was put on trial and imprisoned, then
moved to a hospital where she hanged herself.

The lifespan of Peng's Tiananmen image in the finicky world of the Chinese
Internet has so far been short, and she remains a beloved household name
with huge domestic popularity. The photo has circulated mainly on Twitter,
which is blocked in China. The few posts on popular domestic microblogs
did not evade censors for long.

Many young Chinese are unaware that on June 3 and 4, 1989, military troops
crushed weekslong pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing with force,
killing hundreds, possibly thousands, of people. Those who do know about
the assault tend to be understanding of Peng's obligations as a member of
a performance troupe in the all-powerful People's Liberation Army. At the
time, her husband Xi was party chief of an eastern city.

"The photo probably has a negative impact more so internationally than
domestically," said Joseph Cheng, a political scientist at City University
of Hong Kong. He said more scrutiny of Peng is likely and such images
could raise questions about Xi's interest in reforms.
"It has been several months now that Xi Jinping has assumed the top
leadership role and certainly, we have found no indicator that he is
interested in this stage to push serious political reform."

The image is a snapshot of the back cover of a 1989 issue of a publicly
available military magazine, the PLA Pictorial, according to Sun Li, a
Chinese reporter who said he had taken a photo of it on his cell phone
several years ago when it was inadvertently posted on his microblog. Sun
said he quickly deleted it and had no idea how it resurfaced on the
Internet years later.

Microblog users can easily save images and recirculate them even after the
original posts have been deleted. The picture spread further after it was
tweeted by the U.S.-based China Digital Times, which tracks Chinese online
media.

Warren Sun, a Chinese military historian at Monash University in
Australia, said he had little doubt about the authenticity of the image,
citing a 1992 academic report as saying that after the crackdown, Peng
performed a song titled "The Most Beloved People" in a salute to martial
law troops.

While most of her army career has been in singing, the militaristic
overtones of many of Peng's public appearances set her apart from Michelle
Obama, former French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and most of their
counterparts in other countries. But for Peng, the Tiananmen photo was no
one-off: She has been in the military since age 18 and has fronted TV
music videos featuring dancing lines of men with combat fatigues and heavy
weaponry.

She also starred in a song-and-dance number in 2007 that has perky women
in Tibetan garb sashaying behind her while she sings an ode to the army
that invaded Tibet in 1959. "Who is going to liberate us? It's the dear
PLA!" go some of the lyrics. The video has provoked severe criticism from
Tibetan rights groups.

In an indication of Peng's appeal in China despite her past, a man whose
19-year-old son was killed in the Tiananmen crackdown said he bears no
grudges against her.

"If I had known about this back then, I would have been very disgusted by
it. But now, looking at it objectively, it's all in the past," said Wang
Fandi, whose son Wang Nan died from a bullet wound to his head. "She was
in the establishment. If the military wanted her to perform, she had to
go. What else could she do?"

Wang was a teacher at the China Conservatory of Music when Peng had been
sent there by the military to study singing in her 20s. Though he never
taught her directly, Wang had known who she was and describes her as being
modest, a talented folk singer and an outstanding student.

"When I look back at history, I will look at it from other perspectives,"
Wang said. "Even if she had done something wrong, we shouldn't make a fuss
about it. What's important is what happens in the future."