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China and the Ghosts of Tiananmen!
As a Beijing-based scholar in Chinese history, Jeremiah Jenne couldnt have picked on a more striking date than today to deliver a lecture to visiting students on History, Memory and Politics in China. In the case of the students, from the University of Texas, it appeared that their memory did need a bit of jogging. When Jenne asked them the significance of the date it was the 24th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on the Tiananmen Square student movement of 1989 not one of the 35 made the connection, he observed.
Twenty-four years is a long time in the history of any nation, but in China, where the wheels of change spin faster than anywhere else, it means that an entire generation has grown up being virtually blind to the dramatic events of 4 June 1989.
For seven weeks in the spring of 1989, the vast Tiananmen Square in Beijing held the attention of a riveted world not for its tourist attractions but for being the epicentre of one of the largest, most explosive and spontaneous demonstrations of peoples power that very nearly toppled the Communist Party regime that has ruled China since 1949.
1989 was a year of intense economic turmoil in China, which was adjusting itself to the consequences of post-Mao economic reforms: that year, inflation ran at over 30 percent and over a million factories closed down because of severe austerity measures.
Winds of change were blowing in the erstwhile Soviet Union, where Mikhail Gorbachev had ushered in a programme of economic reforms and political openness. In China, students who craved similar freedoms began a movement to commemorate a reformist leader, occupied Tiananmen Square, and demand speedier economic freedom and action against corruption. But such was the disaffection against the government that their actions set off a prairie fire of protests in over 400 cities, and triggered demands for democracy.
The Communist Party was paralysed into inaction by internal division between conservative hardliners who pushed for a crackdown of the counter-revolutionary riot, and reformist-minded leaders who sought to open a dialogue with the student demonstrators. In the end, however, the hardliners won the day, and on the night of June 3-4, troops operating under martial law forcibly evicted the students from the square. An estimated 2,500 people were killed that night in the area around Tiananmen Square, many of them Beijing residents who had put up roadblocks to thwart troop advances, and bystanders.
One Indian journalist bore eyewitness to the student movement for more than month until the bloody end; four years ago, on the 20th anniversary of the event, he shared his experience with me.
Ironically, the events of that night became a spur for the most sweeping economic reforms in China, opening it up to the world, With the Communist Partys legitimacy shot to pieces, and facing international condemnation for the massacre, Chinas supreme leader Deng Xiaoping embarked in 1992 on a bold economic reform that would transform China economically over the next decade and a half. Its inconceivable that the Communist Party would have launched reforms if not for June 4, reasons human rights researcher Robin Munro.
Twenty-four years on, China has changed economically and socially in large parts for the better. And yet, the ghostly memory of Tiananmen continues to haunt Chinas rulers as evidenced by the elaborate lengths that the authorities go to even today in order to stifle public discussion of the events of that year.
Yet, even some of the student protestors of 1989 are not entirely convinced they were able to make a positive contribution to the course of politics in China. Shen Tong, one of the student protestors who fled to the US, told me that in fact China may have taken a step back in the matter of political reforms.
Yet, Tong added, it was important for the memory of that experience, tragic though it was, to be preserved. Its unfortunate for a nation that paid such a huge price in its effort to experiment with modernisation, with social policies, that it doesnt have that kind of memory available for generations to come so we can lower the cost of social experiments.
That memory is being kept alive by students in Hong Kong and in online cat-and-mouse games that Chinese netizens wage with censors.
But what relevance do the events of 24 years ago have for China and for Chinese people who have, in a larger sense, moved on? Andrew J Nathan, a specialist in Chinese politics and foreign policy and the editor of The Tiananmen Papers, a sensational account of the rift in the Communist Party during those heady days, reckons that the basic weakness within the Communist Party that was revealed that year is still built into the system. And whatever the party does, it hits a crisis of one kind or another: whether it is economic reforms or corruption or something else. And since the Communist Party does not allow channels of dialogue with society, it can easily lose public support quickly, Nathan added.
In a scene in Chinese director Zhang Yimous endearing film The Road Home, a group of school children chant that it is important to know the past if you wish to know the present.
The persistence of memory of the events of 4 June 1989 may seem a wasted emotion when theres so much to celebrate in a generationally different China. But those who insist on keeping the flames of those memories alive are, in a sense, defining a broader understanding of Chinas present by knowing its past.
Source: Tiananmen crackdown and the persistence of Chinese memory - Firstpost
As a Beijing-based scholar in Chinese history, Jeremiah Jenne couldnt have picked on a more striking date than today to deliver a lecture to visiting students on History, Memory and Politics in China. In the case of the students, from the University of Texas, it appeared that their memory did need a bit of jogging. When Jenne asked them the significance of the date it was the 24th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on the Tiananmen Square student movement of 1989 not one of the 35 made the connection, he observed.
Twenty-four years is a long time in the history of any nation, but in China, where the wheels of change spin faster than anywhere else, it means that an entire generation has grown up being virtually blind to the dramatic events of 4 June 1989.
For seven weeks in the spring of 1989, the vast Tiananmen Square in Beijing held the attention of a riveted world not for its tourist attractions but for being the epicentre of one of the largest, most explosive and spontaneous demonstrations of peoples power that very nearly toppled the Communist Party regime that has ruled China since 1949.
1989 was a year of intense economic turmoil in China, which was adjusting itself to the consequences of post-Mao economic reforms: that year, inflation ran at over 30 percent and over a million factories closed down because of severe austerity measures.
Winds of change were blowing in the erstwhile Soviet Union, where Mikhail Gorbachev had ushered in a programme of economic reforms and political openness. In China, students who craved similar freedoms began a movement to commemorate a reformist leader, occupied Tiananmen Square, and demand speedier economic freedom and action against corruption. But such was the disaffection against the government that their actions set off a prairie fire of protests in over 400 cities, and triggered demands for democracy.
The Communist Party was paralysed into inaction by internal division between conservative hardliners who pushed for a crackdown of the counter-revolutionary riot, and reformist-minded leaders who sought to open a dialogue with the student demonstrators. In the end, however, the hardliners won the day, and on the night of June 3-4, troops operating under martial law forcibly evicted the students from the square. An estimated 2,500 people were killed that night in the area around Tiananmen Square, many of them Beijing residents who had put up roadblocks to thwart troop advances, and bystanders.
One Indian journalist bore eyewitness to the student movement for more than month until the bloody end; four years ago, on the 20th anniversary of the event, he shared his experience with me.
Ironically, the events of that night became a spur for the most sweeping economic reforms in China, opening it up to the world, With the Communist Partys legitimacy shot to pieces, and facing international condemnation for the massacre, Chinas supreme leader Deng Xiaoping embarked in 1992 on a bold economic reform that would transform China economically over the next decade and a half. Its inconceivable that the Communist Party would have launched reforms if not for June 4, reasons human rights researcher Robin Munro.
Twenty-four years on, China has changed economically and socially in large parts for the better. And yet, the ghostly memory of Tiananmen continues to haunt Chinas rulers as evidenced by the elaborate lengths that the authorities go to even today in order to stifle public discussion of the events of that year.
Yet, even some of the student protestors of 1989 are not entirely convinced they were able to make a positive contribution to the course of politics in China. Shen Tong, one of the student protestors who fled to the US, told me that in fact China may have taken a step back in the matter of political reforms.
Yet, Tong added, it was important for the memory of that experience, tragic though it was, to be preserved. Its unfortunate for a nation that paid such a huge price in its effort to experiment with modernisation, with social policies, that it doesnt have that kind of memory available for generations to come so we can lower the cost of social experiments.
That memory is being kept alive by students in Hong Kong and in online cat-and-mouse games that Chinese netizens wage with censors.
But what relevance do the events of 24 years ago have for China and for Chinese people who have, in a larger sense, moved on? Andrew J Nathan, a specialist in Chinese politics and foreign policy and the editor of The Tiananmen Papers, a sensational account of the rift in the Communist Party during those heady days, reckons that the basic weakness within the Communist Party that was revealed that year is still built into the system. And whatever the party does, it hits a crisis of one kind or another: whether it is economic reforms or corruption or something else. And since the Communist Party does not allow channels of dialogue with society, it can easily lose public support quickly, Nathan added.
In a scene in Chinese director Zhang Yimous endearing film The Road Home, a group of school children chant that it is important to know the past if you wish to know the present.
The persistence of memory of the events of 4 June 1989 may seem a wasted emotion when theres so much to celebrate in a generationally different China. But those who insist on keeping the flames of those memories alive are, in a sense, defining a broader understanding of Chinas present by knowing its past.
Source: Tiananmen crackdown and the persistence of Chinese memory - Firstpost
