MCLC: ghosts of Tiananmen

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: ghosts of Tiananmen
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Source: New York Review of Books (6/5/14 issue):
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jun/05/ghosts-tiananme
n-square/

The Ghosts of Tiananmen Square
by Ian Johnson 

============================================
The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited
by Louisa Lim Oxford University Press, 248 pp., $24.95

Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China
by Rowena Xiaoqing He Palgrave Macmillan, 212 pp., $95.00; $29.00 (paper)
============================================

Every spring, an old friend of mine named Xu Jue makes a trip to the
Babaoshan cemetery in the western suburbs of Beijing to lay flowers on the
tombs of her dead son and husband. She always plans her visit for April 5,
which is the holiday of Pure Brightness, or Qingming. The traditional
Chinese calendar has three festivals to honor the dead and Qingming is the
most important—so important that in 2008 the government, which for decades
had tried to suppress traditional religious practices, declared it a
national holiday and gave people a day off to fulfill their obligations.
Nowadays, Communist Party officials participate too; almost every year,
they are shown on national television visiting the shrines of Communist
martyrs or worshiping the mythic founder of the Chinese people, the Yellow
Emperor, at a grandiose monument on the Yellow River.

But remembering can raise unpleasant questions. A few days before Xu Jue’s
planned visit, two police officers come by her house to tell her that they
will do her a special favor. They will escort her personally to the
cemetery and help her sweep the tombs and lay the flowers. Their condition
is that they won’t go on the emotive day of April 5. Instead, they’ll go a
few days earlier. She knows she has no choice and accepts. Each year they
cut a strange sight: an old lady arriving in a black sedan with four
plainclothes police officers, who follow her to the tombstones of the dead
men in her life.

Xu Jue’s son was shot dead by a soldier. Within a few weeks, her husband’s
hair had turned white. Five years later he died. Qisile, she explained:
angered to death. On her husband’s tombstone is a poem explaining what
killed both men:

<<Let us offer a bouquet of fresh flowers
Eight calla lilies
Nine yellow 
Chrysanthemums 
Six white tulips
Four red roses>>

Eight-­nine-­six-­four: June 4, 1989.

This is a date that the Communist Party has tried hard to expunge from
public memory. On the night of June 3–4, China’s paramount ruler, Deng
Xiaoping, and a group of senior leaders unleashed the People’s Liberation
Army on Beijing. Ostensibly meant to clear Tiananmen Square of student
protesters, it was actually a bloody show of force, a warning that the
government would not tolerate outright opposition to its rule. By then,
protests had spread to more than eighty cities across China, with many
thousands of demonstrators calling for some sort of more open, democratic
political system that would end the corruption, privilege, and brutality
of Communist rule.1 The massacre in Beijing and government­led violence in
many other cities were also a reminder that the Communist Party’s power
grew out of the barrel of a gun. Over the coming decades the Chinese
economy grew at a remarkable rate, bringing real prosperity and better
lives to hundreds of millions. But behind it was this stick, the message
that the government was prepared to massacre parts of the population if
they got out of line.

When I returned to China as a journalist in the early 1990s, the Tiananmen
events had become a theater played out every spring. As the date
approached, dissidents across China would be rounded up, security in
Beijing doubled, and censorship tightened. It was one of the many
sensitive dates on the Communist calendar, quasi­taboo days that reflected
a primal fear by the bureaucracy running the country. It was as if June 4,
or liu si (six­four) in Chinese, had become a new Qingming, but one the
government was embarrassed to admit existed. Now the crackdowns in May and
June have lessened in intensity but are still part of daily life for
hundreds of people throughout China, such as Xu Jue, the mother of a
Tiananmen victim.

What remains? The author Christa Wolf used this phrase as the title of a
novella set in late­1970s East Berlin. A woman notices that she is under
surveillance and tries to imprint one day of her life in her memory so she
can recall it sometime in the future when things can be discussed more
freely. It is a story of intimidation and suppressed longing. Is this the
right way to think of Tiananmen, as an act frozen in time, awaiting its
true recognition and denouement in some vague future?

Two new books tackle the Tiananmen events from this vantage point. One is
set in China and is about repressing memory; the other is set abroad and
is about keeping it alive. They agree that June 4 was a watershed in
contemporary Chinese history, a turning point that ended the idealism and
experimentation of the 1980s, and led to the hypercapitalist and
hypersensitive China of today.

Neither of the two books claims to be a definitive account of the
massacre, or the events leading to it. That history is recounted in
Timothy Brook’s Quelling the People: The Military Suppression of the
Beijing Democracy Movement, a work by a classically trained historian who
turned his powers of analysis and fact­digging on the massacre.2 Even
though Brook’s book doesn’t include some important works published in the
2000s (especially the memoirs of then Party secretary Zhao Ziyang3 and a
compilation of leaked documents known as The Tiananmen Papers), Quelling
the People remains the best one­volume history of the events in Beijing.
His closing remarks sum up much of what has been subsequently written:

<<The original events slip deeper and deeper into a forgetfulness into
Which many, foreigners and Chinese alike, would like to see them
disappear, as a new and more profitable relationship to the world economy
disciplines the next generation away from worrying about civil rights.4>>

The two new books take place during this post­Tiananmen era, investigating
how Tiananmen has come to shape Chinese society, and how it affected some
of its principal participants in exile.

Louisa Lim’s The People’s Republic of Amnesia is brilliantly titled,
showing how much of what we take for granted in China today is due to
efforts to forget or overcome the massacre. The book is a series of
profiles of people who were involved in Tiananmen or were affected by it,
some of which appeared as features on National Public Radio, for which she
worked as a correspondent in Beijing for several years. This episodic
structure has some drawbacks, primarily an absence of a complete
background section early on about the massacre— what led up to it, how and
why it happened.

But Lim helpfully starts out with a chapter called “Soldier,” which lays
out the mechanics of the killing, as told from the perspective of a
People’s Liberation Army grunt whose unit was ordered to clear the square.
It’s well known that the army bungled clearing the square, first massing
troops on the outskirts of town, then only halfheartedly trying to enter
Beijing on successive days as crowds of people pleaded with and cajoled
the young soldiers not to listen to their commissars’ propaganda and to go
back to their barracks. Finally, when the troops were given clear orders
to move, they inflicted horrific civilian casualties, which one can
interpret—depending on one’s standpoint—as a result of the soldiers’ poor
training, their superiors’ crude tactics, or as a deliberate attempt to
pacify through terror.

Lim brings these broad­brush conclusions to life through her character, a
befuddled, brainwashed young man whose unit had to be smuggled into town
in transports disguised to look like public buses, while others came in by
subway. It was the only way to get his unit past the civilian roadblocks
and to spirit the soldiers and weapons into the Great Hall of the People,
one of the principal buildings on the square that they used as a launchpad
for their assault. In the days following the killing, we learn something
even more surprising— how quickly ordinary people began siding with the
soldiers, at least in public:

<<He did not believe this about­face was motivated by fear, but rather by
A deep­seated desire—a necessity even—to side with the victors, no matter
the cost: “It’s a survival mechanism that people in China have evolved
after living under this system for a long time. In order to exist,
everything is about following orders from above.”>>

The book continues with other chapters built around portraits of many
different figures. We meet a student leader turned businessman, a
contemporary student curious but cautious about the past, a reformist
official under permanent government surveillance, a former student leader
in exile, a mother of a dead student, and a nationalistic youth. Each
helps Lim to make broader points about how costly forgetting is for a
person, and for a society.

In her chapter on the former official, Bao Tong, Lim also makes use of
newly published memoirs to question central tenets of how we understand
the internal political machinations that led to the massacre. Until now,
most observers have assumed that the students caused a split in the
leadership, with Deng siding with hard­liners against Zhao, the reformist
Party secretary who had some sympathy for the students. This was also
Bao’s view until he read the memoirs of then premier Li Peng, himself a
hard­liner, who argued that Deng had become frustrated with Zhao’s liberal
tendencies much earlier. It’s hard to know if this interpretation is
correct, but Lim is right to highlight it, showing how Zhao had been
doomed from the start:

<<“This had nothing to do with the students,” Bao told me. He believes
That Deng used the students as a tool to oust his designated successor.
“He had to find a reason. The more the students pushed, the more of a
reason Deng Xiaoping had. If the students all went home, then Deng
Xiaoping wouldn’t have had a reason.”>>

This raises the question, much discussed over the past quarter­century, of
whether the students could have avoided the massacre by dispersing a few
days earlier when the military action seemed inevitable. In reviewing the
material, however, one gets the feeling that not only Zhao’s fall but the
massacre itself was almost inevitable. Deng had consistently opposed any
political dissent and he seemed determined to send a message once and for
all that outright opposition would not be tolerated.

Lim’s larger concern, however, is with how Tiananmen plays out in society
today. Time and again, she demonstrates how little people under forty know
about Tiananmen. In one chapter, the activist turned businessman finds
that there is no point bringing up Tiananmen with his younger wife. “The
reason they do not like to talk about 1989 is not because it is a
politically sensitive topic or because it makes them uncomfortable. It
simply does not register.”

This point is even more forcefully made in a chapter on a mainland Chinese
student Lim met at an exhibition on the massacre in Hong Kong (where a
museum devoted to it has just opened). She found the young man, named
“Feel” because he had a feel for the English language, engaged and excited
to learn more. But when she later visits him on his campus back in China,
he is subdued and careful, learning as little as possible about what
happened and conforming to the social norms prescribing that it be
ignored. Lim explains the pervasive lying and mistrust among young people
by quoting a statement by China’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo
that China had entered an age “in which people no longer believe in
anything and in which their words do not match their actions, as they say
one thing and mean another.”

One of Lim’s most important points is that Tiananmen made violence
acceptable in today’s reform era. After the violence of the Mao era,
people had hoped that social controversies wouldn’t be solved by
force—that there would be no more Red Guards ransacking homes of real and
imagined enemies, or mass use of labor camps. And while many of these more
drastic forms of violence have been curbed, the Party regularly uses force
against its opponents, illegally searching and detaining critics. Street
protests haven’t ended. Although the state talks continually of social
harmony and reportedly spends more on “stability maintenance” than on its
armed forces, China is beset by tens of thousands of small­scale protests
each year, “little Tiananmens,” as Bao tells her. Some are innocuous
protests by retired workers seeking pensions, but others are by people
trying to defend their homes from being taken away, and they are punished
by violent attacks by government thugs or by lynchings carried out by the
notorious chengguan street police.

Lim tells her stories briskly and clearly. She moves nimbly between the
individuals’ narratives and broader reflections, interspersing both with
short, poignant vignettes, such as the artist who had cut off part of his
finger to protest the massacre but now doesn’t feel he can tell his
twelve­year­old son why. Clearly Lim has thought and cared a lot about the
Tiananmen events, and she is taking a great risk in writing this book; if
history is any guide, the book could make it difficult for her to return
to China, where the government has a blacklist of academics and
journalists whose works have touched on sensitive subjects. This makes her
book courageous, probing one of the Communist Party’s sorest wounds.

Lim’s final chapter is one of the most worthwhile, but also suggests some
of the problems of her book. Instead of a profile, she recounts the
crackdown on protesters in Chengdu, a large southwestern city and China’s
second­most­ important center of intellectual life. Lim dug up State
Department cables and interviewed eyewitnesses who described the extremely
violent suppression of the protests there. It is a frightening chapter,
written with verve.

At times, however, Lim is a bit too breathless in describing the novelty
of her findings. Other writers have made the broader point that what
happened in 1989 was a nationwide movement, especially in The
Pro­Democracy Protests in China: Reports from the Provinces (1991), edited
by Jonathan Unger. As for the events in Chengdu, Chinese authors have
discussed them, especially the writer Liao Yiwu.5 Lim is to be commended
for recounting the events in a more complete form, and for finding so much
new information. But the fact that outsiders often reduce June 4 to a
Beijing story mainly reflects the fact that the nationwide events of 1989
still haven’t received full­scale treatment in a single volume. This
probably says more about the myopia and fragmentation of modern academic
studies than it does about Lim’s main theme of amnesia.

Rowena Xiaoqing He also moves the picture beyond Beijing in her moving and
very personal account of life as a political emigrant, Tiananmen Exiles:
Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China.6 Now a teacher of a popular
undergraduate course on Tiananmen at Harvard, He was a high school student
during the protests. Still, she was a passionate participant in the
demonstrations in her southern Chinese hometown of Guangzhou, joining
protests despite her parents’ misgivings. After the protests were crushed
there, she dutifully memorized the government’s propaganda so she could
pass her university entrance exams, graduate, and eventually land a good
job during the start of China’s economic boom.

In her heart, however, she couldn’t forget the protests. Eventually, she
surprised family and friends by quitting her job to get a graduate degree
in Canada. She chose education as her field of study, thinking that it was
central to avoiding another Tiananmen. She also began an oral history of
the uprising.

Her book is written in the tradition of contemporary academic narrative
research, which invites her to tell her own story as a way of making clear
her standpoint. We learn of her upbringing during the Cultural Revolution,
the problems her family faced, and how her father’s idealism was crushed
during the Mao period. She spends time with her mother in an opera troupe,
and is shuttled between city and countryside as her parents struggle to
adapt to that era’s political winds. All of this helps us understand the
sense of entrapment that the Tiananmen generation felt growing up during
the Mao era, and the resulting desire to break out and embrace the 1989
Movement.

He’s own story is balanced by three other stories of better­known
participants: the student leaders Yi Danxuan, Shen Tong, and Wang Dan. Her
questions and answers are interspersed with parenthetical notes that
explain her interlocutors’ answers, silences, and moods.
Although the stories of Shen and Wang are fairly well known, He’s gently
probing questions and psychological insights help us understand the
sometimes egotistical idealism of these people, who plunged into the
student movement despite entreaties by their parents not to get involved.
As Yi puts it to her:

<<My friends and I never thought that the government would order the army
To open fire although early on my father had said that would happen. This
showed that we didn’t understand the nature of the regime well.>>

The people He writes about can be considered failures. Their battle lost,
they were forced to live abroad, where they remain in a permanent state of
mistrust and unease—little wonder considering that state authorities
continue to try to hack their computers and follow their movements. Even
if they constructed workable lives for themselves in business or
academics, as He puts it, Tiananmen is,

<<in many ways, a continuing tragedy because the victims are no longer
considered victims and the perpetrators no longer perpetrators. Rather,
the latter have become the winners against the backdrop of a “rising
China.”>>

But He has deeper concerns than keeping score. Instead, she is trying to
figure out what happens when something one loves is extinguished. Does it
really die or does it continue on in other forms? Is the exiles’ memory
less valid than the reality of a political and economic oligarchy that has
obliterated the idealism of an earlier generation? Which vision has more
staying power?

<<For me, research is an experience in space and time, a connection
between here and there, between the past and the future, with us living in
the present, trying to make old dreams come true. The roots are always
there, but our dreams may die. I hope this project will keep the dreams
alive—not only my own but also those of others.>>

At times, He’s book is wildly romantic and too heavily focused on the
experience of students to be representative of the entire
movement—thousands of workers also participated, and are hardly mentioned.
But I found it a convincing and powerful account of a central experience
in contemporary Chinese life. One shouldn’t forget that, because of
Tiananmen, some of China’s greatest public intellectuals of the late
twentieth century died in exile. Fang Lizhi, Liu Binyan, and Wang Ruowang
are among the most prominent (Fang and Liu contributed to The New York
Review).

In this, China’s exile movement parallels the great émigré communities in
Europe during the twentieth century: the Poles in London, the Russians in
Paris, the subterfuge and mistrust of Eastern European and Soviet ethnic
minorities in cold war Munich. They were sometimes ridiculed and reduced
to backdrops in spy novels, but they also had their dignity and an
ultimate triumph, even if for the most part they did not become well known
in their home countries after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Living in today’s China, one realizes that amnesia is pervasive and exile
all too common, but so too is the idea that the Tiananmen events still
have meaning— that they continue to have a presence, not only in the
negative sense of causing repression and censorship, but in more positive
ways too. I was reminded of the New York Times correspondents Nicholas
Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who titled their 1990s best­selling book about
that era China Wakes. Today, such a book would probably be about GDP,
peasant migration, and aircraft carriers, but their genius was to include
Tiananmen too, not merely as a background to economic growth—including the
theory of the economic takeoff as, in effect, compensation for political
repression—but as part of a broader awakening among the Chinese people,
even if the political aspects of that awakening have been eclipsed by the
economic development of the past quarter­century.

If this sounds naive, consider that almost exactly a decade after
Tiananmen, ten thousand protesters quietly surrounded the Communist
Party’s Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing, asking that their
spiritual practice, Falun Gong, be legalized. Had they missed the
government’s brutal message, or were they on some subconscious level
emboldened by a rising consciousness among ordinary people—a sense that
they had rights too?

The Falun Gong protesters met with intense repression, including torture,
and most people are now more circumspect in pushing for change. But in
talking to intellectuals, activists, teachers, pastors, preachers, and
environmentalists over the past years, I’ve found that almost all say that
Tiananmen was a defining point in their lives, a moment when they woke up
and realized that society should be improved. It can’t be a coincidence,
for example, that many major Protestant leaders in China talk of Tiananmen
in these terms, or that thousands of former students—not the famous
leaders in exile or in prison, but the ones who filled the squares and
streets of Chinese cities twenty­five years ago—are quietly working for
legal rights and advocating environmental causes.

It’s true that many of these people are at least forty years old, and one
can rightly wonder, as Lim does, about the upcoming generation, for whom
idealism might seem childish or irrelevant. But idealists are a minority
in any society. Cynicism and materialism are of much concern, but Chinese
people themselves—including young people—discuss their presence and their
danger in person or online every day.

Equally telling is a widespread yearning for something else—a search for
values and a deeper meaning to life. Some Chinese find this in religious
life, hence the ongoing boom in organized religion. But many are active in
other ways, too. Some are resuscitating and recreating traditions, or
engaging with the age­old Chinese question of how to live not just an
ordinary life of labor, marriage, and family, but a moral life. It would
be simplistic to trace this concern solely to Tiananmen, but some of this
humanistic impulse surely is rooted in that era’s unbounded idealism.
Perhaps this is another, less didactic way of looking at Tiananmen: as a
sacrifice, unwitting and unwanted, that helped define a new era.

This certainly is how He sees it. After the massacre, she went back to
high school, defiantly wearing a black armband of memory for the dead. Her
teachers made her remove it, and she cried bitterly, thinking the dream
was over:

<<When I was forced to remove my black armband in 1989, I thought that
would be the end of it. Bodies had been crushed, lives destroyed, voices
silenced. They had guns, jails, and propaganda machines. We had nothing.
Yet somehow it was on that June 4 that the seeds of democracy were planted
in my heart, and the longing for freedom and human rights nourished. So it
was not an ending after all, but another beginning.>>

Notes: 

1 The number of cities involved in protests was highlighted in an
exhibition after the massacre in Beijing’s Military History Museum and
cited by James Miles in The Legacy of Tiananmen: China in Disarray
(University of Michigan Press, 1996).

2One should also note the works of Wu Renhua, a Tiananmen participant and
author of two Chinese­language works, as well as a forthcoming book by
Jeremy Brown of Simon Fraser University. Thanks to Perry Link for pointing
these out. 

3 Reviewed in these pages by Jonathan Mirsky, July 2, 2009.

4 Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 218. The book was originally
published in 1992. The 1998 edition adds an afterword from which this was
cited. 

5 For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet’s Journey Through a Chinese
Prison (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), reviewed in these pages by Perry
Link, October 24, 2013.

6 For a version of Perry Link’s introductory essay to the book, see “China
After Tiananmen: Money, Yes; Ideas, No,” NYRblog, March 31, 2014.


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