MCLC: remembering Tiananmen, the view from HK

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: remembering Tiananmen, the view from HK
***************************************************

Source: Origins (June 2014):
http://origins.osu.edu/milestones/june-2014-remembering-tiananmen-view-hong
-kong

Remembering Tiananmen: The View from Hong Kong
By Denise Y. Ho <http://origins.osu.edu/users/denise-y-ho>

In between memory and forgetting, there is commemoration. Twenty-five
years ago this month, a protest in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square ended in
tragedy. As historical event, the contours of the Tiananmen student
movement have long since entered textbooks in the West.

The story goes something like this: In the wake of Mao Zedong’s death
(1976) and the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), then-paramount
leader Deng Xiaoping embarked on a series of economic reforms. Despite the
success of this “second liberation,” inequalities and corruption—combined
with an era of relative openness—led to calls for political change. In
April of 1989, student commemorations of the late Party Secretary Hu
Yaobang escalated into a wider protest, eventually numbering up to a
million people, and gaining the support of Beijing citizens.

Participants on the square staged a dramatic hunger strike captured by
foreign media and called for democracy. On the night of June 4th, the
People’s Liberation Army moved into the heart of Beijing, armed with tanks
and heavy artillery. The death toll remains disputed.

Today Tiananmen is referred to as an incident (shijian) by the Communist
state, and as a massacre by its detractors. But there are other ways of
referring to the event: the Chinese word for June 4th (liusi, or 6-4) is
one, while May 35th—a way to allude both to Tiananmen and its enforced
erasure from public discourse—is another. Both of these numbers are
politically taboo, and are among the terms most rapidly scrubbed from the
Internet.

Every year in the lead-up to the Tiananmen anniversary the Chinese state
goes on high alert. Foreign journalists are warned not to cover the event,
and Chinese intellectuals are arrested or otherwise made to disappear.
Tiananmen Square, once carved from imperial grounds to create open
political space for “the people,” once a place for kite-flying and for
college students to study into the night, is cordoned off under the hot
summer sky. It is perhaps a metaphor for the memory of June 4th itself,
blank and guarded.

One cannot commemorate Tiananmen in China, and one word that threads
through much of this year’s June 4th coverage is amnesia, wondering when,
from forgetting, China will eventually wake.

In between patriotism and counterrevolution, there was the student. The
Tiananmen movement began with a new generation of college student. In the
1980s, youths were once again allowed to go to college—after the Cultural
Revolution’s disruptions—and through the 1980s they had been calling for
greater freedoms.

These students followed in a long tradition of the
intellectual-as-conscience in Chinese society. In imperial times, the
upright official was to remonstrate his lord; in the eleventh century, the
literatus Fan Zhongyan wrote that the intellectual was the first to worry
over the world and the last to enjoy its pleasures.

In the twentieth century, when China became a republic, the new-style
student inherited this mantle, becoming a voice for the nation. These
college students, both men and women, would suffer in the post-1949
People’s Republic and possibly even pay with their lives. But even those
who survived would remember that they studied to “save the nation”
(jiuguo).

The students of 1989 consciously imitated their forebears. Recalling the
nationalism of the May Fourth (1919) Movement, they called for “science
and democracy.” In their hunger strike manifestos they invoked “Mother
China” and bade farewell as patriots.

Yet to the state the students were counterrevolutionaries. Borrowing from
the language of Maoist China, the official People’s Daily newspaper
branded the movement as one incited by a “tiny handful of people [who
took] this opportunity to fabricate rumors and openly attack Party and
government leaders.” Indeed, the escalation of the student movement can be
traced to the students’ own desire to proclaim that theirs was a
“patriotic and democratic student movement.” To this day the judgment of
the Party stands: PLA soldiers were martyred suppressing
“counterrevolutionary rebellion.”

One way of remembering Tiananmen outside of China is to call the students
the martyrs. In this year’s Tiananmen vigil in Hong Kong’s Victoria
Park—where Tiananmen can be commemorated—the participants rally to
rehabilitate (pingfan) June 4th. Almost 180,000 people attended the vigil,
and in one of its most dramatic moments its organizers—the Hong Kong
Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China—marched
towards the stage to a somber drumbeat and a reading of names, bearing a
wreath for the fallen.

In between state and society, there is the individual. One of the most
iconic images from 1989 is that of the “Tankman” (below right), a nameless
Beijing citizen who was caught on camera in a face-off with one of the
PLA’s tanks. A photograph that came to stand for the individual against
autocracy, it has had a mixed legacy.

In the West, the image has alternately been used as a symbol for activists
or, stripped of its original context, as a poster for the counterculture
dorm room. In China, the photograph is not recognizable to young college
students, and thus stands for Tiananmen amnesia.

We now know that the “Tankman,”standing in the path of power with a
plastic shopping bag, was someone called Wang Weilin, and his name was
invoked by the most moving speaker at Hong Kong’s Tiananmen vigil. This
individual was the rights lawyer Teng Biao, best known in the West for his
defense of the blind human rights activist Chen Guangcheng. To six
football fields of flickering lights, Teng argued that since Tiananmen 25
years ago, political suppression has continued, enumerating petitioners
and prisoners, Tibetans and Uighurs, homeowners facing demolition, and
lawyers and their own defenders.

Teng’s speech, calling for another 1989 but not another June 4th, was
inspiring less for his words and more for the drama of his presence. Of
all the participants holding candles, he took the greatest risk in
speaking out. Having known arrest, “disappearance,” and torture, he gave
his voice to the crowd and to the commemoration, while his own
family—unlike those of thousands of Chinese officials—is still resident in
the People’s Republic.

In between China’s past and China’s present, there is the exile. If Teng
Biao has come to live in a marginal space in China—instructed to vanish
and forbidden to speak around Tiananmen’s commemoration— a generation of
students who were nearly his contemporaries went into exile.

Most prominent among them was the Peking University history student and
leader Wang Dan (pictured left), who earned a doctorate at Harvard and
continues to be politically active outside of China. A video of several of
the student leaders, including Wang Dan, was included in the Hong Kong
vigil, offering their support of Tiananmen remembrance. Though the
student-leaders have led checkered lives since exile, it is poignant to
remember that none truly had the choice to reform the system from within.
And poignant too is it to see their faces on the giant screens that
flanked Victoria Park. In textbooks and documentaries, these men are
fresh-faced, sporting long hair and blue jeans and looking not unlike our
own students.

As the video flashes from historic photograph to contemporary video
message, one is shocked by the faces of men middle-aged and heavyset. A
young and intense Wu’erkaixi leads the 1989 crowd, perhaps to sing the
Internationale. A man without a country, nearly fifty, broadcasts his
greeting from Taiwan.

A second kind of exile is that of the Westerner’s reverse exile from
China. In the days before this year’s June 4th anniversary, the American
academic Perry Link came to speak at the Chinese University of Hong Kong,
in a panel moderated by Teng Biao. Link was instrumental in the refuge in
the American Embassy of astrophysicist and liberal intellectual Fang
Lizhi. Thus, though Link devotes his life to the study and teaching of
China, he can never return.

During the panel he joked that he had recently been invited to participate
in a conference on Chinese literature, but when he asked organizers to
check on the viability of his visa, the invitation was rescinded. Link
continues to speak on behalf of the Chinese people; he published a book of
Tiananmen documents, he testifies before Congress around Tiananmen
anniversaries, and he translates petitions like the pro-democracy Charter
 ’08.

While Perry Link’s is one of the most prominent kinds of exile, the threat
of self-inflicted banishment is one faced by journalists and other
Sinologists every day. Though they are quick to point out that no risk is
as great as that faced by their Chinese colleagues, it remains: studying
China is dangerous.

In between the living and the dead, there is mourning. The commemoration
in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park was meant to be a vigil for martyrs. Many of
the attendees were dressed in black, they lit candles from one to another,
and as the organizers lay a traditional wreath before a makeshift monument
they led the audience in the ritual bowing initiated in Republican times:
“First bow. Bow again. The third bow.”

China’s Communist state is finely tuned to the political significance of
public mourning. Mourning can be orchestrated by the state, as it was for
the funeral of Sun Yat-sen or for the death of Mao in 1976. But public
mourning remains a flashpoint for political sentiment, as it was for the
death of Zhou Enlai or the mourning of Hu Yaobang that sparked Tiananmen,
and for the children who died when shoddy school buildings collapsed
during the recent Sichuan earthquake.

Once the master of its own political spectacle, the Communist Party can no
longer afford to allow Tiananmen Square to be open for mourning (literally
and metaphorically). One must be searched to enter the Square.

And neither are people allowed to mourn in private. An activist group
known as the Tiananmen Mothers has long sought redress in the deaths of
their children, but especially in the lead-up to this anniversary their
members have been put under surveillance and forbidden to travel. Hong
Kong’s South China Morning Post reported that only a few family members
were allowed to visit the graves, and Zhang Xianling of the Tiananmen
Mothers reports being watched by twenty policemen. Unable to invite any of
the Tiananmen Mothers to attend the Hong Kong vigil, organizers instead
showed grainy footage of previously recorded videos.

The Communist Party’s unease with mourning reflects the tenuous state of
history in China. Deaths from the Great Leap Forward famine are taboo, the
one officially recognized Cultural Revolution cemetery in Chongqing is
chained and locked, and gravesites are carefully watched. One recalls from
the Maoist era that a counterrevolutionary could not be mourned by his own
parents, even as Mao-era propaganda critiqued the pre-1949 “old society”
for rending the home asunder and even as the family was required to pay
for the executioner’s bullet.

In between China and the world, there is Hong Kong. Many of those who
commemorated Tiananmen in Hong Kong this month see the former British
colony as the last redoubt, the canary in the coal mine. The Hong Kong
Alliance, the vigil’s organizer, was founded before the handover and it is
doubtful whether such a group could be established today. Teng Biao, the
rights lawyer speaking from the Victoria Park stage, thanked Hong Kongers
for “keeping the memory of the Tiananmen movement alive,” and underlined
that “Hong Kong has no place to back down either.”

To be clear, Hong Kong’s relationship with the mainland is deeply fraught.
Many are frustrated with the lack of universal suffrage and constricted
press freedom, and tensions rise with the perception that mainland Chinese
are taking jobs and other resources. Observers have argued that this
year’s Tiananmen vigil was a proxy for protesting against China. The
cynical view is that Hong Kong feels Chinese on two occasions: during the
Olympics, and when commemorating June 4th.

Left: The original plaster Goddess of Democracy statue, erected by Beijing
students in 1989. Right: On the campus of the Chinese University of Hong
Kong, a new statue of the Goddess of Democracy commemorates the original.
The Chinese University Students' Union laid these wreaths at its base this
June 4th (Photo by the author).

After the immediate post-June 4th-whirlwind of media coverage, life in
Hong Kong seems to have returned to normal. At Chinese University, where a
permanent statue pays tribute to the Goddess of Democracy erected by
Beijing students in 1989, the wreaths laid by the students’ association
had vanished. In the high-end shopping districts, one’s Chinese
compatriots (tongbao) are back to queuing up to get into Louis Vuitton.

But Hong Kong remains the place where journalists can write and where
academics can publish, where an activist like Teng Biao can defy his
marching orders and tell 180,000 people to carry the torch. Nonetheless,
his refuge is a temporary one. Not everyone was allowed into Hong Kong to
commemorate June 4th, and no one yet knows what will await Teng when he
returns. Between the voice and the mouthpiece, between the pen and the
sword, there is courage.