MCLC: Tiananmen Exiles review

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Tiananmen Exiles review
Source: Human Rights Quarterly 38, 2 (May 2016): 516-519.
"The Lonely Few: Human Rights and the Dreams of the Tiananmen Generation"
By Vera Schwarcz
[Review of Rowena Xiaoqing He, Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China (Palgrave Mcmillan, 2014), ISBN 978-1-137- 43831-7, 212 pages.]
You will have to run the last lap deaf. You will have to run the last lap by yourself. Primo Levi, “Voices” 10 February 1981
Is dreaming of a better world a human right? It certainly does not appear explicitly in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights put forth by the UN to which China has nodded a most reluctant assent (with a loud proviso that countries still in lower stages of development cannot afford the “luxury” of fully implementing universal rights just yet).[1] Many scholars have already documented China’s horrific abuse of prisoners, the lack of free speech, free movement, and free association. Rowena Xiaoqing He’s book offers a different opportunity: To expand the lexicon of “rights” to include a more vague yet compelling spiritual longing for an improvement of the human condition, especially as experienced under totalitarian regimes.
This work does not focus primarily on what happened in Tiananmen Square in May-June, 1989, although every essential fact about the Beijing Spring is noted and documented. Instead, this scholar enables us to listen to the ongoing conversations of a few key activists who now have to go on with mundane daily lives, knowing that the seeds of hope that were sown twenty-six years ago (and which took root all over Europe with the collapse of Communist regimes) are nearly rotting in the soil of enforced amnesia imposed on the Chinese mainland. To be sure, the painful predicament of a few exiled intellectuals does not seem compelling when compared to the ravages witnessed every day and the flood of refugees due to the violent conflict in the Arab Middle East. Yet there is a powerful call to moral conscience embedded in this work; if we do not remember Tiananmen and the brutal crackdown of 4 June, the wounds of history will go on festering much as they do in places where the Holocaust was willfully overlooked or forgotten. Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz was worried about the next generation. This is also Rowena He’s concern in a very different historical context. What will happen when the next generation ceases to be moved by the painful past? In despair, Levi wrote his poem “Voices” and then committed suicide.
His vision of latter-day young people running the last lap deaf can also serve as a backdrop for Rowena He’s keen attentiveness to the voices of those who shaped the events of 1989. The loneliness she records is not analogous to that of Jewish survivors of the Shoah. Instead, she documents the fate of a dream squelched by state-sponsored patriotism and the most naked encouragement of materialistic consumption. Her methodology of oral history is indebted to a new trend which encourages narrative and autobiographical engagement with the subject. The author, like her three key interlocutors, was a participant in the events of 1989. Like them, she will not let its memory rest un-commemorated. While other researchers have written monographs about the student movement for democracy, Rowena He’s focus is on the enduring shadow of unrealized idealism in the lives of individuals and in China’s conscience as a whole.[2]
Her subjects can best be described as duxingxia (loners).[3] Once we begin to listen to them with a little more attention to the Chinese connotations of exile and homelessness, we are able to develop a keener empathy for those who long “for a time when idealism is not treated as garbage, when those who remain idealistic do not need to collect garbage.”[4] While the right to idealism does not appear in the UN declaration, this well-written book enables the imagination to ponder, what would happen if it did? Would we respond more keenly to the grief of men and women who cannot go back and visit aged parents on the Chinese mainland? This grief, of course is anchored in a culturally specific context that places high moral value upon filial piety, upon showing respect for aged parents, and upon being by their bedside at the time of their dying. Lin Yutang (1895–1976) described the diminishment of humanity that occurs when a culture is unable to give reverence to the aged: “The greatest regret that a Chinese gentleman could have was the eternally lost opportunity of serving his old parents with medicine and soup on their deathbed. . . .The tree desires rest, but the wind will not stop, the son desires to serve, but the parents are already gone.”[5]
Though no conventional “Chinese gentleman” by any standard, this is precisely the poignant grief expressed by Shen Tong, one of the student leaders in Tiananmen Square in 1989, who could not return to China when his father died. He fought for China’s democracy, but he also expressed serious regret for what this cost his family. In Rowena Xiaoqing He’s well-chosen words, idealistic activists of the 1989-generation gained the “sky” (of their moral conscience) while losing the “earth” of family and linguistic attachment to the land of their birth.[6] In the Chinese saying—dedao tiankong, shiqu dadi [7]—one can hear the vast emptiness of the heavenly dream for which the concrete great land was sacrificed by those who cannot return home.
This high cost for idealism is hard to grasp for Western supporters of democracy and human rights in China. They do not understand how effectively the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has hi- jacked the lexicon of patriotic fidelity in order to maintain its power after 1989. Rowena He’s work and the activities and memories of her subjects constitute an important challenge to the equation that China is the party and the party is China. Having been born during the Cultural Revolution, the generation of 1989 absorbed a high dose of state sponsored literature emphasizing heroism and self-sacrifice. Yet after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, this generation was able to use earlier propaganda to question the corruption and human rights’ abuses of the Communist regime. This book makes it clear that the Beijing Spring activists did not call for the overthrow of the CCP; they simply asked that it return to its earlier ideals. It was only after the brutal crackdown of 4 June that this generation understood the wider context of atrocities that frames the party’s rule in China from 1949 onward.
One way that Tiananmen activists consolidated their identity and commitment is through songs. They belted up the CCP-sanctioned “Internationale” to call into question a regime that has abandoned the poor and has thwarted freedom of expression. They chanted the nationalistic verses of “Bloodstained Glory” (composed for Chinese soldiers forced to “volunteer” in the Vietnam War”) mindful that the Party’s own history had become drenched in shame by the killing of unarmed students in 1989.
Now, as this work details, they gather solemnly at each major commemoration of the massacre to pay tribute to dead comrades. Often, their late night conversations end with the tear-jerking ballad entitled, “I want to go home.” In this compilation of voices from the Tiananmen exiles, the author is careful to note that the generational bonds are fraying after more than two decades of suppression. She is honest about the personal, political, and religious infighting among former student leaders. Her interlocutors are honest enough to acknowledge that only a very tiny fragment of the 80,000 students and scholars who were granted asylum in 1989 joins the commemorations of the event. Many more are doing business with China, settling down with their family lives in the US, and building careers upon a process of “forgetting” that is nearly as complete as the one being officially imposed behind the great fire- wall of China.
As human rights activists who have been hunted, jailed, tortured, and now prohibited from going home, Rowena He’s subjects do not minimize the attractions of ordinary life beyond the fierce grasp of history. Shen Tong speaks movingly about how his nightmares of jail finally ended with the birth of his daughter. Wang Dan, who earned a Ph.D. in history from Harvard, describes how hard it is to keep the flame of memory going when so many are tired of carrying the torch. In the end, he dares not dishonor the past. His honesty is both moving and sets a high bar for truthful recollection:
I view the democracy cause as a process of accumulating failed experiences. . . . If we were to remain the children of 1989, who only have dreams and ideals, we would have to give up the cause because over and over again we would face failure. . . . The essence of democracy is spiritual. This is most significant change in my thinking about democracy.[8]
These words capture the complex legacy of Tiananmen. Few of us can imagine the intellectual and ethical burden of making sense out of failed political activism. It is easier to quote universal ideals and assume that they are relevant to all people at all times.
Rowena He’s book is an essential corrective. Through her own writings and ongoing testimony about the events of 1989, she has refused to let the hope for democracy wither under the weight of platitudes and Party-imposed amnesia. The cost of this act of moral courage has been very high. Even as the propaganda machine of Xi Jinping churns out more and more slogans about the so-called “China dream,” middle-aged exiles hold on to the lexicon of a more authentic vision of freedom and human rights. The lonely few keep educating themselves about the vague ideals that they carried as youths into Tiananmen Square. They refuse to become deaf to history’s trauma, in the way that Primo Levi feared for the generation after the Holocaust.
They know that this is far from the last lap in the long marathon for real change in China. If we listen to their voices as recorded in this finely crafted work, we may be able to become more effective companions along the way. In Rowena He’s own words, the goal is both modest and truly transformative:
I hope to invite readers to enter our inner worlds for an empathetic understanding of our experiences, and to stimulate ongoing and deeper dialogues. . . .The roots are always there, but [the] dreams may die. I hope this project will keep the dreams alive—not only my own but also those of others.9
NOTES
1. See Anna Kent, China, the United Nations and Human Rights: The Limits of Compliance (1999)
2. See Craig J, Calhoun, Neither Gods nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy (1994); Perry Link, June 4th: Memory and Ethics, in China Perspectives No. 2 (Jonathan Unger ed., 2009); The Pro-Democracy Protests in China: Reports from the Provinces (Jonathan Unger ed., 1991).
3. Rowena Xiaoqing He, Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China 97 (2014)
4. Id at 10.
5. Lin Yutang, On Growing Old Gracefully, in Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life (Christina Sommers & Fred Sommers eds., 1993).
6. He, supra note 3, at 26.
7. Id.
8. Id. at 139. 9. Id. at 36.
Vera Schwarcz * Emerita Professor Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT
* Vera Schwarcz is a Emerita Professor at Wesleyan University, History Department. She has been writing about memory and historical trauma for four decades. One of her early books, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of he May Fourth Movement of 1919 (University of California Press, 1986) explored the student movement for science and democracy that provided the paradigm and the slogans for the Tiananmen events of 1989. She returned to these themes in her most recent work, Colors of Veracity: A Quest for Truth in China and Beyond (Uni- versity of Hawaii Press, 2014) She was also in China in April-June 1989 and witnessed first hand the student movement flourishing at Peking University (Beida) and the crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989
by denton.2 at osu.edu on October 1, 2016
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