June 4th Around the World: Notes from One Week After the Anniversary

A week (or so) after the anniversary of the "May 35th" events (as some Chinese netizens put it to circumvent automatic blocks on mention of a highly charged date), we got several more responses to our request to Friends of the Blog for word on how June 4th was commemorated, discussed, or ignored in various parts of the world. The most substantial (reproduced in full below) is a second contribution to the series (click here for her first) by Paola Voci (an Italian-born, American-trained, New Zealand-based specialist in Chinese visual culture whose book, China on Video: Small Screen Realities, is due out later this year). [Her post explains the eye-catching image we are running here, which she sent to us along with her e-mail.]

We also heard from a couple of people regularly or temporarily based in Central or Eastern Europe, both of whom noted how relatively little interest there was in looking back to Tiananmen and connecting China's 1989 to the upheavals that took place in that same year in the region.

Grabriella Ivacs, a Budapest-based archivist at Central European University's extraordinary Open Society Archive (it has holdings on human rights, the history of Communism in Europe in particular, and other topics that are too special to try to summarize, so we'll just encourage readers to make the jump and explore their website, where they'll also find information on the innovative exhibitions OSA has mounted, some of which have dealt at least in part with China) wrote to say that "Hungarian papers and online news portals were not particularly interested in Beijing events" last week. She stressed that "Hungary is going through a serious political crisis, and [the press in] early June was focused on [the] EU election campaign." She notes that there were occasional articles on the anniversary, including one in a "left wing daily," Nepszabadsag, that placed the Massacre "in the context of 1989...the symbolic year of Transition in Eastern and Central Europe," but, "(i)nterestingly," claimed that the "1989 changes in Europe had no direct connection" to the contemporaneous "Beijing events."

A. Tom Grunfeld, an American scholar spending the year in Romania (and a two-time past contributor to this site before), confirmed this sense of relative lack of interest: "Apart from CNN and a single article in every Romanian and Hungarian paper on the appropriate day (edits from the wire services as best as I can make out) there is no interest here."

Here's Paola's comment in full:

Yesterday I got my copy of The New Zealand Listener (the 13-19 July issue) in the mail and, to my surprise, "Has China learnt from the Tiananmen Massacre?" was included as part of a much longer feature story on "Wealth: How Chinese consumers could drive our recovery? " While NZ seemed uninterested to remember June 4th when most other countries' media were covering the anniversary (i.e., just before or on that very day), one of NZ most popular national magazines chose to have a reflection on those events 10 days later, when almost every other national media had moved to different topics. But maybe, rather than reading this choice as a belated answer, one can interpret it as an attempt to look at the event outside the specific temporality of the 20 year anniversary and frame it instead in the on-going economic and political engagement of NZ with China. Tiananmen becomes a provocative footnote to the economic partnership that is both needed and feared by many in NZ.

The Tiananmen anniversary was discussed from two main critical angles: firstly, the issue of forced memory loss imposed by the Chinese government and how, despite the government's efforts, many are still remembering; secondly, much more interestingly (I think), June 4th was remembered with a piece on Zhao Ziyang's Secret Journal (an edited extract from the book's preface (by one of the three co-editors, Adi Ignatius).

But, possibly even more interestingly, the magazine's cover itself was particularly surprising as the image (attached) clearly evokes the visual rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution posters; one wonders how familiar this visual metaphor is to the Kiwi readership. I personally find the cross-cultural mix (or mess?) that the image conveys is really intriguing and open to quite contradictory readings. See and judge for yourself.

Historical Bafflement of the Chinese People

David Kelly, researcher at the University of Technology Sydney, translated the following opinion piece by overseas political commentator Liang Jing. He has published several previous pieces at China Digital Times, including, “Trigger for an Earthquake in Chinese Society” and “Where Does Wen Jiabao’s Faith Come From?”

One of the most significant cultural phenomena in Chinese society in recent years is the growing interest in history. Everyone—elite and general populace, leftists and rightists—shows an unprecedented enthusiasm for understanding China's past. And in 2009 a series of major historical anniversaries, including the 90th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, have pushed China's “historical fever” to new highs. One of the major reasons stimulating the keen interest in history is that the “reforms” that followed June Fourth, returned China to a “pre-liberation” scenario almost overnight: bureaucratic corruption, moral bankruptcy, social injustice; to the point that, in some important aspects, such as higher education, the status quo in China is not as good as the KMT era, and many phenomena that people thought could not happen again, such as prostitution and the sale of official posts, not only occur, they do so on a far greater scale than in the past.

History has played a big joke on the Chinese, who having experienced countless sufferings and paid the price in countless lives, rather than gaining social progress with their bloody struggle, have turned full circle to find themselves back where they started. How exactly did this come about? Not only the elite, but also many ordinary people are puzzled by this problem. This historical puzzlement of unprecedented numbers of people is what drives China's historically unprecedented “public history movement.”

The heroes emerging from this enlightenment are a group of intellectuals who have consciously and unconsciously enhanced the public's knowledge of history. The role they play in promoting China's social progress may far exceed that of the elite in control of the current political discourse. Two figures who, in my opinion, well represent these “modern heroes”, are Yi Zhongtian, and Shi Yue, who wrote Things Ming under the pen name Dangnian Mingyue [Moonlight Back Then]. One thing these two writers of very different age and experience have in common is use of modern mass media, to tell ordinary people, honestly and wittily, the true logic of the Chinese history in layman's language. They not only subvert the “proper history” as repeatedly distorted by China officialdom, but also upgrade the “unofficial history” of China to new levels, because their telling of Chinese history is imbricated with the spirit and values of modern civilisation.

The old tales retold by Yi Zhongtian and Shi Yue, are clearly a cultural rebellion not only against the official historiography and its materials, but against the CPC’s political message as well. Because they tell people—the younger generation in particular—there are no differences in human terms between the emperors of thousands of years ago and the big shots in the political arena today; no political figures, therefore, should be mystified or treated as sacred. The CPC rulers understand the political implication of this cultural rebellion, of course, hence do not allow the likes of Yi Zhongtian to extend their historical fascination to the CPC’s history. As relations between the KMT and the CPC ease, however, more restricted areas of history are being broken, and as the fruits of research of the network of overseas Chinese continue to break the CPC blockade, a new generation of intellectuals in the PRC can see more and more of the whole picture of China’s modern history.

Even so, optimism about the Chinese people waking up from their historical bafflement, and avoiding being led into another great disaster is hardly called for. The level of materials and artifacts of the China of 90 years ago cannot be compared to today’s, of course; but the degree of political tolerance of those in power, the morale and ideological independence of academia, the energetic spirit of young people in China of that day, were incomparable greater than now. Had they seen the deference and obedience of faculty and students “dancing attendance” upon Hu Jintao when he came to Chinese Agriculture University on May 3, the students and scholars who took part in the May Fourth Movement would have given it a thumbs down.

The paradox of history is that the historical responsibility for China’s subsequent big disasters lies precisely with the movers and shakers of the May Fourth Movement 90 years ago. So, today, many of China's intellectual elite hold severely critical attitudes towards May Fourth cultural radicalism, arguing that cultural conservatism should be the guideline for China’s future development.

I accept that cultural radicalism takes some of the blame for the disasters of the last century, but fail to understand the actual proposals of cultural conservatism. Will cultural conservatism be able to succeed where cultural radicalism has failed? Such simplistic thinking is disturbing. Connected to China’s present realities, the regime controls unprecedented resources, and has formed a huge bureaucratic class who are incapable of providing basic social security to the majority of the population. Officials in Guizhou prostituting young girls [1], profiteers in Ningxia suborning judges in a joint fraud [2]—appalling scandals like these show that the regime is losing its governing capacity. What does it actually mean to call for cultural conservatism it such times? Won’t a day come when the Chinese people, once again falling into historical bafflement, find that when making a stand is called for, no one is there to make it?

* Liang Jing, “Zhongguoren de lishi kunhuo” [Historical bafflement of the Chinese people], 5 May 2009 [梁京：“中国人的历史困惑”， 2009年5月 5日.]

[1] Wang Zhiqiu, “Guizhou Xishui gongzhi renyuan shexian piaoshe younü an kaiting shenli” [Trial of public officials in Xishui, Guizhou charged with prostituting young girls], Xinlang, 8 April 2009 [汪志球： “贵州习水公职人员涉嫌嫖宿幼女案开庭审理”， 新浪，2009年4月 8日 (http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2009-04-08/201517570490.shtml).].

[2] Huang Xiuli, “Ta ba 25 ming faguan la xiashui” [He dragged 25 judges underwater], Nanfang zhoumo, 30 April 2009 [黄秀丽： “他把25名法官拉下水”， 南方周末，2009年4月 30日 (http://www.nanfangdaily.com.cn/epaper/nfzm/content/20090430/ArticelA05002FM.htm).].

6/4 Reader

A set of links to readings about 6/4 from various sources:

1. A short and straightforward documentary from Al Jazeera (in English), posted at YouTube in two parts: Part I and Part II. This documentary has notably less emphasis on the influence of Western-style democracy than the average (Western) doc on the subject, and more on the opposition to authoritarianism…

2. Mara Hvistendahl has written a piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education on a well-trod topic—the shifts in China post-89, particularly among those of the 6/4 generation. Yet, Hvistendahl, in addition to getting the basics right (unlike others we could—okay, we will mention), phrases the current tensions between those who want to remember 1989 and those who have already forgotten it in a compelling way:

Even the staunchest critics of China's regime acknowledge it now allows discussion in areas that were once off limits. After his release from prison, Zhou became an investigative journalist, tackling sensitive issues like food safety, and only sometimes encountering government intervention. At the same time, some contend that economic growth has merely allowed the Chinese government to fine-tune its control of dissent. As the government's spending power grew, so did the carrots it could offer for obedience. "The government has great ambition for scholarly work that can make considerable breakthroughs, like shooting satellites into outer space," says Wang Chaohua, who edited a volume of work by Chinese intellectuals titled One China, Many Paths(Verso, 2003). "But to do work in the social sciences and humanities, you need to have a real independent spirit, and that isn't what the government wants to see. So you have a lot of political intervention."

Intellectuals who follow the state line are rewarded with trips abroad and generous research grants, critics say. "There are many research programs now that are sponsored by the government," says Wang Tiancheng, a former law professor at Peking University. "It's a type of corruption. They're buying scholars."

Wang, now a visiting scholar at Columbia University's Center for the Study of Human Rights, knows that power play firsthand. He spent five years in prison in the 1990s as one of the "Beijing Fifteen," a group of intellectuals persecuted for their opposition to one-party rule. When he was released from prison in 1997, no university would hire him. "If you don't go along with the Communist Party, if you don't censor yourself, you'll lose out on many benefits, including promotions and honors," he says.

If the Chronicle version is not available (usually their content is only available to those with subscriptions), the full text was reposted at Howard French’s blog.

3. One of the most extensive profiles of the 1989 leaders that we have seen in the press: at The Guardian, Isabel Hilton profiles not just Wuer Kaixi and Wang Dan but also Wang Chaohua, Shen Tong, Diane Wei Liang, Wang Juntao, Chen Ziming, Ma Jian, and Shao Jiang.

4. Hat tip to Danwei (a long time ago), for pointing to “Standoff at Tiananmen,” which is chronicling the events of 1989 day-by-day.

5. James Miles, who was the BBC’s China correspondent in 1989, recalls the events in an audio recording.

6. Jeff Wasserstrom published a piece in The Nation last week, “Tiananmen at Twenty”:

One reason to keep dwelling on 1989 is that common misunderstandings about that year persist, in China and in the West. For example, many Americans still think protesting students were the main victims of the massacre, even though the majority of the dead were workers who had turned out to support the educated youths. Many Americans also misremember those students as people who wanted to bring Western-style democracy to China. The reality was much more complex.

The students did celebrate the virtues of minzhu (democracy), but they spent even more energy denouncing corruption. And while their outlook was cosmopolitan, they were intensely patriotic. They presented themselves as carrying forward a longstanding Chinese tradition: that of intellectuals speaking out against selfish officials whose actions were harming the nation. In addition, the students' grievances were not all purely political. They complained about the party's interferences in their private lives and about its failure to make good on economic promises (Wuer Kaixi, a leader of the student movement, noted that a desire to be able to buy Nike shoes and other consumer goods was among the things that inspired members of his generation to act).

China specialists have another reason to revisit 1989: to stay humble. We pride ourselves on our deep understanding of China, but each of us was surprised by what happened twenty years ago--if not by the fact that a massacre occurred then by how long it took for the tanks to roll; if not by how many people risked their lives to fight for change then by the role rock music played in the protests.

7. NPR recently broadcast an interview by Louisa Lim with Jiang Rong (the author of Wolf Totem), which touches on the events of 1989 as well.

8. The Economist examines memories and remembrances of 6/4’s anniversary:

The party has also tried to deflect attention from the army’s contribution to the slaughter. Twenty years ago the official media repeatedly sang the praises of dozens of soldiers killed during the “counterrevolutionary rebellion”—and posthumously considered “guardians of the republic”. Now they are all but forgotten. Meanwhile, public support for the armed forces, which was badly damaged in 1989, appears to have rebounded. The army’s rapid response to the deadly earthquake in Sichuan Province a year ago, a gift to party propagandists, played a part in this. When tanks roar through Tiananmen Square on October 1st in a grand parade to celebrate China’s national day (the second such display since 1989), they will be greeted with widespread approval from a nation hungry for symbols of China’s growing power.

May Fourth Movement: Top Five Readings

By Rana Mitter

The May Fourth Movement – so famous in China it doesn’t need a year, although 1919 – the year it happened – has become legendary too. On that date, some three thousand students marched through Beijing demonstrating against Japanese imperialism and started a political movement that would become identified with Chinese demands for “science” and “democracy” through the next century. From the Cultural Revolution to Tian’anmen Square, May Fourth echoes through China’s modern history. The Chinese Communist Party still claims the movement as its point of origin. On May 4, 2009, the movement will be ninety years old. In some ways, its significance to China is like that of the Sixties in the West – a celebration of youth and possibility combined with often extremist and hardcore politics.

But what was this event, why did it matter, and how can you find out more about it?

Here are five ways into this fascinating topic – famous in China, little-known in the West.

1. Jonathan Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace (Viking Penguin 1981): still the classic account of the May Fourth generation and their revolution. Sweeping account that goes from the late Qing all the way to the end of the Cultural Revolution, with May Fourth intellectuals at its heart.

2. Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman. Iconic short story by China’s major modern writer, written on the eve of the seminal events of May Fourth, 1919. Searing indictment of traditional Confucian society. Translations into English by Gladys Yang and William Lyell.

3. Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (1986). This is a fine academic account of the movement and its consequences – not for the beginner, but very subtle.

4. Chen Duxiu, “Call to Youth.” Chen’s call to China’s youth to “save the nation” in 1919 symbolizes the May Fourth Movement’s attempt to overcome Confucian attempts to venerate age and instead celebrate youth.

5. “Acting Out Democracy: Political Theater in Modern China,” Joseph W. Esherick and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, in Journal of Asian Studies (November 1990) – classic article on how the 1989 student protesters in China “acted out” their political protests with references to the past.

Rana Mitter is Professor of History and Politics of Modern China at Oxford University and the author of works such as A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World and Modern China: A Very Short Introduction.

Digital Traces of 1989

China Beat sent out a note to a few scholars and journalists who have carefully watched and written about the events of 1989, asking them to send in short commentaries detailing what they wish more people knew, associated with, or remembered about that spring. We ran the first piece in this limited series, by John Gittings, on April 23, the second, by Jonathan Unger, on April 26. This is the third piece.

Yang Guobin is an Associate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College.  He has written essays on many subjects, including the students protests of 1989, and is the author of The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online, which will be published in June by Columbia University Press.

Media played an important role in the mobilization of Chinese protesters in 1989. Twenty years afterwards, the protest movement is still linked to media, except that it is now the new media. The Internet has become a reservoir of the history and memories of that fateful year.

The most comprehensive English-language material on the Internet is perhaps the web site The Gate of Heavenly Peace run by the Long Bow Group. Because it is already well known to readers of China Beat, I will mention two other sources.

One is CND’s “Virtual Museum of China '89.” CND has a large “Virtual Museum of the ‘Cultural Revolution,” which I often use. Its “Virtual Museum of China '89” is smaller in scale, but nonetheless contains many valuable resources. The archives of the “Virtual Museum of China '89”consist of “Images,” “Sounds,” “Writings” and other documents related to the protest movement. The “Writings” section contains, among other things, a diary by a student in Tsinghua University, two novels, ten special issues about the movement published in English from 1989 through 1999, and many special supplements published in Chinese from 1992 through 1999. The diary had many touching details. For example, the entry for May 20, 1989, the first day of martial law, begins with the following words (in my hasty and awkward translation):

The morning sun lit the Square once again. Nothing happened. No troops were in view. Then there came news from all quarters that this morning, at the main crossroads in the suburbs, local residents spontaneously hit the streets, formed human walls, and blocked the troops from entering the city! I was surprised and extremely moved to hear this news. Who would have thought that Beijing’s residents could do such brave things! Beijing residents were just great!...Because the hunger strike had ended, the medical personnel sent to the Square by the Red Cross began to withdraw today. The two young girls who worked as nurses in our broadcast station were leaving  too. They were reluctant to go and asked us to sign our names on their white uniforms and hats, saying that they didn’t know when we could ever meet again.

The other source is a photo exhibit I found here. The photographer was Kiang Hei. I communicated with him a couple of years ago but have since lost touch with him and haven’t been able to find out the circumstances under which he took these pictures. But the pictures are soul-stirring. For anyone who was there on the scene, they would instantly bring back the sounds and silences and the joys and desolateness of the time. Who was the woman in this picture? What was she saying to the young man facing her, with others in the background listening attentively? The characters written on the yellow paper mean “Children are the future of our country’s democratic movement.” The children of 1989 have grown up. Are they living up to these expectations? The bulletin boards shown in the photograph here look like those in the famous sanjiaodi (Triangle) area in Beida. I passed that area whenever I visited Beida. Eventually, as China forged ahead with its market transformation, the same bulletin boards became plastered all year round with advertisements of TOEFL and GRE preparation classes. Then in 2007, these stands, so closely tied to Beida’s political history, were demolished.

These are not the only traces of 1989 in cyberspace. But they are particularly unforgettable.

Tiananmen Moon: Beida Summit

Philip J Cunningham marched with student protesters in 1989 at Tiananmen Square and conducted interviews with student activists for BBC and ABC news. His memoir of that time, Tiananmen Moon; Inside the Chinese Student Uprising in 1989, will be published in May by Rowman & Littlefield, but he will be sharing excerpts of it here (such as the first and second in this series).

By Philip J Cunningham

For the second time in a day I’m on the run with Chai Ling. For the second time in a month I find myself in a beat-up jalopy racing towards the Beida student center at Sanjiaodi. Again I am huddled together with members of the vanguard, only this time it’s not musicians wanting to know what the students are up to but the student leadership itself.

The interior of a moving van is a reasonably good place to hide, assuming the driver is trustworthy and the vehicle not bugged. Chai Ling sits behind me in the third row, curled up like a kitten, snuggled next to her puppy dog husband Feng Congde. They look like feuding lovers who have just made up. I am seated in the middle of the second row with a bodyguard named Yang on one side, a professor on the other. Way in the back, and up front, yet more students are squeezed in, keeping pretty much to themselves.

The driver turns north then eventually works his way west. Chai Ling is reviewing the familiar scenery with the intense appreciation of someone ready to take an extended trip abroad. Both she and her husband had been talking about studying abroad; maybe they had one foot out the door already. Start a revolution, then fly away in time for the start of a new school year.

"There's that restaurant!" she exclaims. A few minutes later, she gets nostalgic about another landmark known to her and her husband. "Remember the time we went there?"

The mop-headed driver, who could have passed for the fifth Beatle, zooms at high speed along the ring road, only shifting gears to slow the van down when we get to the busy streets of Haidian District.

"Do you think we could visit Beida one more time?" Chai Ling asks. She does not seem to be addressing the question to anyone in particular.

"That's possible,” the bodyguard next to me says after a pause. "But let's wait till it gets dark."

"Beida, Beida, I want to go to campus! I want to go home one last time!" she pleads with a girlish flair.

Talk turns to politics again. I choose not intrude and cannot fully grasp what is going on, but I don’t want to bring undue attention to myself asking too many questions. From what I could gather, Chai Ling is still on the verge of running away, but due to the intervention of her husband and some friends, she dumped Wang Li and is now going to postpone "going underground" until a more necessary and appropriate time. More importantly, she seems to be enjoying some kind of high-level support for her political line, and even the protection of bodyguards. If so, who was the ultimate protector?

Are the students working in tandem with protégés of the fallen Zhao, or perhaps a military protector? There had been rumors of old generals being supporters of the cause, but students also liked to say they were free agents, not aligned to any faction. That’s what the May 27 meeting was about.

Who could possibly be lending support to the students at this late stage, enough tacit support to make them utterly unafraid of arrest in the Beijing Hotel? Was it Public Security? A rogue intelligence group? Or just plucky citizen volunteers?

And how does the interview we did this morning fit into all this? At that time she expressed disappointment with fellow students but she also talked of overthrowing the government! ABC News had already indicated they were going to use the tape, and it was nothing if not highly incriminating. If Chai Ling is still in town when the interview is aired, her likeness and passionately expressed anti-government ideas will be all that much better known.

Finally, I decided to interrupt their back-seat musings. "Chai Ling?”
“Hi, Jin Peili,” she smiles as I turn around to face her.
“You know, that interview, the interview today, you said a lot of things that could, like, get you in trouble. Are you sure you want it to be broadcast?"
"Yes."
"It's not too late to call ABC and ask them not to air it, or at least delay it," I advise. "If your life is in danger."
"I want it to be broadcast," she answers pointblank, without batting an eyelash.
"But you said some things. . .like about the government, you know, wanting to overthrow it."
"When will it go on the air?" asks Feng, with a sudden perk in interest.
"Sometime tomorrow."
"Don't worry, we will be gone by then."
"You're sure?"
"Yes. After we visit Beida, one last time," he says.

I was beginning to feel the immense responsibility that goes with putting something provocative on the air, especially something political. Millions would see it, but more to the point, it would be closely monitored by Chinese security.

Feng grins at me to dispel my doubts "Don't worry, you've done a good job. We all appreciate your help."

"Since satellite transmission has been cut," I explain, "ABC has to take the tape out of China by hand. It will be carried to Hong Kong or Japan, and then relayed by satellite to New York. The earliest it could be on the air is the evening news, American time, which means early tomorrow morning here."

"It's fine, no problem," he says. Feng is disarmingly self-assured.
"It's not too late to call, if you need more time."
"Jin, don't worry. We will be gone by then."

So, they still plan to run away, and this little jaunt, this little joy ride they have invited me to partake in, is for what? For fun? Or a mix of business and pleasure, saying goodbye while just taking care of some last-minute logistics.
I have trouble putting together the young woman who confessed and cried her heart out earlier today, face contorted and full of pain, with the breezy young woman in the van.

What's going on? Why is Feng Congde so confident that nothing will happen to them? Was he reckless or did he know something that his wife did not when she made her mad dash for the train station? What happened at the train station, anyway? There were so many things I wanted to ask, but given the gentle cooing sounds behind me it didn’t seem like the right time.

Chai Ling was no stranger to the Beijing Hotel, she had been there twice today. A few days before, I had seen her meeting there at midnight in a darkened coffee shop with Wang Dan and Wuerkaixi. Yet on the square, one had to pass through all kinds of security ropes just to get in her vicinity.

The student leaders seemed unnecessarily stringent in their security, but an illegal movement of that size required vigilance. So why was it that, in the most-heavily monitored hotel in town, the student rebels seemed so at home, if not outright welcome? I knew from talking to the floor attendants that many ordinary workers supported the students, but ordinary workers also knew not to get in the way of police.

Beijing Hotel workers had marched under banners indicating their work affiliation and a gigantic ten-story banner proclaiming solidarity with the striking students had been draped from the top of the hotel during the height of the protest. The multi-storied banner, partially draped in front of my room, each character the size of a person, read:

WHO IS TO SAY WHAT IS THE FATE OF SO VAST A LAND? DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM ARE THE SHARED IDEALS OF ALL HUMANITY!

With a banner like that, suspended from the 17th floor, running all the way down to the seventh floor, right past my window as it turned out, one could imagine why the students might be attracted to that particular building, but why was the banner permitted in the first place? Was there some kind of connection between the security staff of the Beijing Hotel and the student movement?

If there was support, it was hidden and erratic. Even now, the van took precautions in ferrying us across town. Not only had the driver made some unnecessary turns on the way, but he took to circling Haidian District like an airplane, awaiting official permission to land.

When I ask about this the bodyguard explains that the driver is killing time, waiting for the cover of darkness before slipping onto campus. But Beida is a gated community. Would the guards let this vehicle, the student command on wheels, pass through the gated checkpoint? It was no secret Beida harbored activists, wouldn’t the secret police be looking for student radicals on campus, or were they such Keystone cops that it never occurred to them to look in obvious places?

As Yang shrewdly observes, the driver will not attempt to enter Beida until darkness falls. When he at last pulls up to the front gate on the south side of campus and greets the guards, I worry how they might react to my presence, --did the presence of a foreigner make the entourage look less innocent, or more? One guard presses his face up to the window, mentally registering my presence with eye contact, but it ends with that. We are then waved in. Once inside the huge walled campus, the driver again adopts a defensive posture, crawling in long slow circle around the lake and tree-dotted grounds while Chai Ling and her friends heatedly discuss if they should get out of the van, and, if so, where.

The tentativeness of the travelers upon arriving at Beida reminds me of my midnight visit to Beida with Cui Jian on the eve of May 4. Sitting inside a vehicle creates a certain perception, perhaps illusory, of security. One feels safer inside than outside. For me, sitting in the back of a car reminded of the security of childhood when everything important was decided by your parents sitting up front. For an American like me, being in a car had deep associations going back to childhood. But what comfort did the hum of a vehicle give Chai Ling and Feng Congde, for whom riding in a car was still a novelty?

The tree-shrouded campus is quiet and dark. We make a clockwise sweep, tooling past Shao Yuan, the foreign dorm, then the library and then back down a dirt road leading to the Chinese student dorm adjacent to the hot spot of Sanjiaodi.

The van draws up to the stairwell of the dorm and the driver tells everyone to get out. As soon as we have all clambered out, he hits the pedal and speeds away. We are whisked into the unlit hallway by waiting escorts. We mount a dark, dank stairwell, then turn down an empty corridor. A door is opened, revealing a plain room lit by a bare bulb, a room packed full of people.

Once we are inside, the door is closed and Chai Ling is greeted with hugs and pats on the back by her comrades, like a war hero just in from the battlefield. A few of her supporters eye me curiously, with stares neither friendly nor unfriendly, because I arrived with her group, but the attention is clearly focused on her.

We are led up another flight of stairs and into another room. Again the door was closed quietly but firmly behind us. Chai Ling is no stranger to the makeshift student headquarters, and quickly assumes the role of host rather than guest. Sensing my bewilderment if not discomfort, she leads me by the arm into an adjacent dorm room, where the furniture has been rearranged to serve as an office. She is a known entity on her home turf, just being seen with her makes my presence more acceptable, just as being with me made it easier for her to navigate the Lido Hotel earlier in the day.

We squeeze into a dorm room that had been converted into a primitive communications office. There are three bunk beds and a desk in the middle of the floor, from the ceiling dangles the usual no frills light bulb. In the corner there is a rack of metallic washing basins, hot water mugs, toothbrushes, and thermos bottles. What made this room different from nearly every other dorm room in China was the addition of a communications devise both rare and highly useful: a telephone.

Seeing the phone made me think of my friends. Was Bright still waiting for me back in my room? What about Lotus? And where did Wang Li run off to after Chai Ling changed her mind about taking the train south?

"Can I make a phone call?" I ask.
"You may," one of the students answers, "But be careful about what you say, the phone is bugged."
As often is the case in China, convenient communication comes at a price.
"I want to call the Beijing Hotel."
"Go ahead."

I dial my room number, wondering what cryptic words I should use for a phone call bugged on both ends, but no such luck for the eavesdroppers tonight. No answer.

Chai Ling is preoccupied, instantly immersed in student dealings, though she manages to flash a friendly little smile my way every once in a while. For the second time today we sit on the same bed, she on one end, me on the other. At one point she breaks from her group to come over and offer me a drink of water, perhaps trying to return the hospitality of the morning. But basically she is too busy to chat, let alone field my questions.

I lean back against the wall, sipping hot water, trying to take it all in. One by one her friends and followers pop in to talk with her, sometimes waiting on line to do so. It’s like a campus version of the broadcast tent.

Some of the talk is semi-confidential, judging from excited whispers, cupped hands and hushed tones. I overhear talk about going somewhere by airplane. I hear talk about the military. Just at a moment where the conversation takes an interesting turn, with military overtones, my appointed companion Yang, the young bodyguard, takes a seat next to me and, almost deliberately it seems, begins to distract me with a different sort of conversation.

"What sports do you like?"
"What are your hobbies?"
"Do you like music?"

When I tell him that I like to play guitar, he gets up and retrieves a cheap folk guitar that had been abandoned on the other bed. He presses me to play something, anything. I refuse several times but can’t bring myself to say I’d rather be eavesdropping than singing, so at last I yield to his request.

I finger a few chords, tune the strings a bit, and strum some more. The reverberations of the guitar comfort me and without even a glimmer of conscious thought, my hand starts to finger chords to “Tiananmen Moon.” I strum lightly and sing quietly to myself, in a whisper really, because I don’t like to perform. The song sounded so innocent, so anachronistic now.

"Midnight moon of Tiananmen,
When will I see you again?
Looking for you everywhere,
Going in circles around the Square."

The Tiananmen Protestors, Then and Now

China Beat sent out a note to a few scholars and journalists who have carefully watched and written about the events of 1989, asking them to send in short commentaries detailing what they wish more people knew, associated with, or remembered about that spring. We ran the first piece in this limited series, by John Gittings, last week. This is the second piece.

Jonathan Unger is a Professor at Australia National University, the former editor of the China Journal, a co-author of Chen Village, and editor or co-editor of many books, including The Pro-democracy Protests in China: Reports from the Provinces.

By Jonathan Unger

Looking back in time from a distance of two decades, we are apt to forget the economic circumstances in which the nationwide protests of 1989 arose, as well as the vantage points of the protests’ participants.

In the late 1980s, people across China felt frustrated and angered by inflation and mounting corruption. This dissatisfaction had been moving toward a crisis point over the previous couple of years despite the fact that urban living standards, on the whole, had been rising steadily throughout most of the Eighties. But expectations of a better life had been rising even faster, and when inflation in 1988 began to overtake wage rises in the state sector, frustrations sharpened. Workers who had been willing to countenance the corruption of officials when their own wage packets were growing healthily became resentful in 1988 and 1999 when they saw that the close kin of officials were cutting themselves an undue share of the pie while their own slices shrank.

What held the protesters together was the very fact that theirs was a protest movement, without a clear platform. Had there been one, far fewer people might have participated – for the solutions to China’s economic ailments favored by different groups among the protesters were very much at variance. Some of the protesters who came into the streets – in particular the leading intellectuals and most of the students – wanted the economic reforms to proceed faster. Others among the protesters contrarily had discovered that the economic reforms had not been to their advantage: particularly those in the working class whose incomes were declining, and those whose jobs were no longer secure or who had already been laid off. Only a fragile unity was pasted together among these groups. The better educated had little sympathy for the circumstances of the laborers, and for much of the time the university students sought to keep the working class at arms’ length, preventing workers from entering the perimeters of their own demonstrations.

All the same, more than merely anger at economic woes and corruption held the various protesters on the same side of the political divide. They did project a vague common vision of what they wanted, and it was summed up in the word “Democracy.” The word was blazoned on a multitude of their banners. But by “democracy,” few of the protesters meant one person, one vote. Most of the university students and intellectuals had no desire to see the nation’s leadership determined by the peasants, who comprised a majority of the population. Many urban residents held the rural populace in disdain, and their fear was that the peasants would be swayed by demagogues and vote-buying.

Some of the protesters were nonetheless vaguely pro-democratic just so long as democracy could be put off to a future time. The then-Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang favored a policy called “neo-authoritarianism,” under which the Party would act as a benevolent autocracy until such time as the middle class had developed sufficiently to predominate in a very gradually democratized polity. Until then, China would remain in a state of tutelage, much as Sun Yat-sen had proposed in the 1920s. This was the program of the Party’s reform camp, and it drew support from among the urban educated elite.

If not immediate political democracy in the shape of multiparty elections for the nation’s leaders, what some of the educated protesters in Tiananmen Square wanted, rather, was an independent press that could play a watch-dog role over the political leadership. They wanted access to more interesting magazines and films. They also wanted what they considered a more fair distribution of incomes, in which they would be beneficiaries. They wanted academic freedom, and the ability to safely advise and constructively criticize the government.

But their use of the word “Democracy” also represented more than that, and its mass appeal lay in this additional dimension. Above all, the great bulk of the participants in the protests wanted freedom from the petty constraints imposed upon them at their place of work or school. For decades, access to travel tickets, entertainment, accommodation, medical care – a vast range of advantages and sanctions large and small – had been controlled by work-unit bureaucrats, who dispensed favors to those who kept their noses clean or, worse yet, to those who obediently kowtowed to these Party hacks. People wanted out from under these stifling controls.

Everywhere across China, they named their new student groups Autonomous Student Associations (in China, literally Student Self-ruling [zizhi] Associations). So too, the organizations that the intellectuals established almost invariably were titled Autonomous associations. The workers’ groups were titled Autonomous Workers’ Leagues. The key demand quickly became that the government recognize their organizations, and not exact retribution for having established them. What the urban populace of China was demanding, in short, was no less and no more than “civil society” – an intermediary sphere between state and society that is not controlled by the state and that creates a ‘space’ between the polity and the populace. In China, even innocuous independent organizations had not been allowed. For the previous forty years all “mass organizations” were creatures of the party-government. What the populace essentially demanded was simply an opportunity to relate to each other without interference or oversight. It was for this reason that this word Autonomous held importance to them.

It was precisely these demands, harmless though they might appear, that seem to have frightened the old men of Zhongnanhai, China’s Kremlin. It is likely that the crisis could have been brought peacefully to a close had they formally recognized the new organizations’ right to exist. But from beginning to end, China’s leaders felt they needed steadfastly to refuse that recognition. Their whole conception of the reformed Leninist state was at stake. Earlier in the Eighties, they had already bent enough to allow advisory forums containing “leading personages” to be formed. But even if some semi-autonomous forums were to exist in the new China, they, the Party leaders, would initiate them. First the students and then quickly other social groups were taking that initiative out of the Party’s hands, were grabbing the nettle for themselves. It signaled to the aged Party leaders a dangerous political environment in which people not only were shaping their own operational sphere but, worse yet, might well wish to use that new-found ground in future to play an active role in the political arena. In fact, they were in the midst of doing so in Tiananmen Square. This went against everything that the Party leaders were accustomed to or believed in – which is that the Communist Party is uniquely positioned to steer China into a better future, without interference. They were not willing to see the Leninist polity, their polity, successfully challenged and weakened.

Out in the Square, meanwhile, a new rights consciousness was quickly emerging, but it was still a crudely formed consciousness. As noted, the protesters who had joined one or another of the new jerry-built associations had been acting on an emotional feeling about what they were against – irritated by corruption and the difficulties in the economy and tired of the Party’s control over so many aspects of their lives. But very few of the activists and protest leaders held any real notion of what type of political structure might conceivably take the place of the strong-handed Party machine. Very few, even among the intellectuals, had any coherent political program to offer – just very vaguely worded demands for a liberalization and relaxation of the system. It was a movement of protest that was groping blindly in the dark.


Then and Now
If anything, many of the protesters at Tiananmen were more in favor of political liberalization than they are now. At the time, they admired Mikhail Gorbachev and the political reforms he was carrying out. But the collapse and dismemberment of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the corruption and plunging living standards that soon followed under Boris Yeltsin’s rule soured China’s educated on the idea of Party-led political liberalization along Gorbachev’s lines. By the mid-1990s, young Russian women were flowing into China to work as prostitutes. Chinese considered this shocking evidence of Russia’s penury and humiliation. Many of the urban educated who had demonstrated in 1989 began to feel relieved that China had followed Deng Xiaoping’s policy of economic rather than political reform.

Nevertheless, many of them today still think of themselves as pro-reform, albeit in modest ways. They are apt to shake their heads in dismay at China’s environmental problems and express hopes that the government will give greater priority to the issue. Those with expertise are often eager to offer up suggestions on how to enact this or that small, incremental reform. What pass in China for academic papers are often really policy prescriptions on how to improve one or another aspect of China’s physical or administrative infrastructure, or relieve traffic congestion, or provide for a more effective education curriculum.

Generally, the urban educated today have what they wanted at the time of the Tiananmen protests. They feel they can make such recommendations and that their expertise is respected. They and their children also now have their personal space, in the shape of access to websites, chat rooms, and a wide variety of publications and films. They can say what they want so long as they stay within increasingly generous boundaries and do not challenge the Party’s political monopoly.

Above all, in their material livelihoods the urban educated are doing very well, whereas at the time of the Tiananmen protests in 1989, they had good reason to be angry. Their salaries were low, and sour jokes circulated about private barbers earning more with their razors than hospital surgeons with their scalpels. But in the years since, there has been a deliberate government policy to favor the well-educated. Year after year the professionals on government payrolls have been offered repeatedly higher salaries. During one year in the late 1990s, the pay of all of the academics at China’s most prestigious public universities was literally doubled in one go. Opportunities to earn high salaries opened up just as much in the private sector. Many of the university students at Tiananmen Square in 1989 now drive cars and live in fancy high-rise apartments. They have gained a lifestyle that they had never imagined possible, and they do not want to upset the apple cart. If the government’s plan was to co-opt the salaried middle class, it has worked.

Reflecting on the Tiananmen protests, one of the most famous of the student leaders, Wuer Kaixi, flippantly articulated their desires, “So what do we want? Nike shoes. Lots of free time to take our girlfriends to a bar. The freedom to discuss an issue with someone. And to get a little respect from society.” They now have all that, in spades.

As a result, the members of the educated middle class, including many of the former university students who crowded Tiananmen Square two decades ago, have become a bulwark of the current regime. Summarizing a large survey of political attitudes in Beijing, a recent book concludes that, among all urban groups, “those who perceive themselves to belong to the middle class and who are government bureaucrats are more likely to support the incumbent authorities.” If there is another outbreak like Tiananmen, in fact, many of them might prefer to be on the government side of the barricades.

Reflecting on Tiananmen, 20 Years Later

China Beat sent out a note to a few scholars and journalists who have carefully watched and written about the events of 1989, asking them to send in short commentaries detailing what they wish more people knew, associated with, or remembered about that spring. Here is the first of their responses.

John Gittings is a research associate with the Centre for Chinese Studies at the School of Oriental & African Studies and a former writer and editor at The Guardian. He is the author of The Changing Face of China: From Mao to Market and numerous other books and articles, including this 2008 review essay, “Here Be Dragons…”

There are always two points I make about 1989:

1. It was the Beijing Massacre, not the Tiananmen Square Massacre: only one or two seemed to have been actually killed in the square (I'm not even entirely sure of the evidence for that); though some students were crushed by tanks at Liubukou after they had marched out of it. This is not a pedantic point but reflects the important fact that it was the laobaixing, the people of Beijing, including students, who were killed, not students alone. Most were killed either as the army made its way in or, after it had occupied the square, when it fired lethally to keep protestors (and bystanders) at bay, and in subsequent days up and down the avenue. I don't think it helps either to continue to say that thousands may have died (as in the weaselly formula "hundreds if not thousands" used by one wire agency). Most estimates of massacres are likely to err on the high side: this was hundreds not thousands -- and it does not diminish from the horror in the slightest.

2. While the students were the mobilizing force, the events of May-June 1989 should be understood as the time when a coalition emerged of students, dissenting scholars, worker activists, and the ordinary people of Beijing -- particularly the mums and dads who watched over the barricades and who reproached the soldiers for forgetting about army-people unity. It was this coming together of different social forces which so freaked out the reactionary/conservative/dinosauric leaders.

When the Past Catches Up

By Lauri Paltemaa

In December, the Chinese Communist Party celebrated the 30 years anniversary of reforming and opening up policy that became possible in the now almost legendary 3rd plenum of the 11th Central Committee where Deng Xiaoping defeated his “Whateverist” (read Maoist) rivals in the Party leadership. This coming March, however, we will celebrate another thirty-year anniversary of one of the key policies in reforms. It was then, on March 30, 1979, that Deng Xiaoping announced that the Party would continue to uphold the “four cardinal principles” of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong thought, proletarian dictatorship, party leadership, and socialism. This laid the foundation for the authoritarian Chinese development model, which now faces probably one of its most severe challenges. The model itself was copied form China’s near neighbours, which had been able to pull off their own “economic miracles” through a combination of authoritarian governments and economic reform policies. The Chinese addition to this was to show that a Communist country could also accomplish an “economic miracle” – although by losing almost all features traditionally associated with communism in the process.

Deng’s March 1979 speech on the cardinal principles therefore marked an important decision of how the reforms would unfold. This becomes more visible when we remember that, theoretically at least, Deng had a choice when he gave his speech. He, and his reformist followers in the Party had engineered a political thaw that made possible the emergence of the Democracy Wall Movement, which in turn helped Deng score his victory. The Movement, although never coherent or united over most issues, offered an alternative vision to economic modernization. Its activists all supported the economic reforms and the four modernizations, but they offered an alternative way of getting there by establishing socialist democracy as an integral, and indeed necessary part of the modernization of Chinese society. In his March speech Deng basically rejected this road and chose the authoritarian way.

For the next thirty years the strategy seemed to work well enough. It yielded an “economic miracle” in China when the economy grew, opened up, urbanized, and industrialized at break-neck speed. However successful economically, the regime nevertheless had, and still has, an existential problem, which liberal systems do not face, which is shown in the fact that the debate on democratization has never died out. The Democracy Wall Movement was silenced by 1981, but some of its activists moved overseas and established a Democracy Movement there. In 1989 the question of democratization almost caused the collapse of the regime.

That the debate goes on was last demonstrated in December, when a number of people (originally 303, now reportedly at least over 7,000) published a co-signed petition labelled “Charter 08” where a road to democracy was mapped out for the CCP. The charter shows interesting parallels to, but also important differences from the Democracy Wall Movement thirty years ago. Both answer the same question of “Whither now, China?” The Democracy Movement answered that the key to modernizing socialism was in the direct supervision of the officialdom and the Party by the people and economic reforms. Charter 08 lacks any references to Marxism as its source of inspiration, but also seeks to answer how to create a more just and better-governed society after thirty years of the growing social inequality and corruption that has plagued the economic miracle. The Charter’s signatories answer is grounded in liberal democratic institutions of competitive elections, rule of law and respecting human rights, but also in fairer distribution of wealth, environmental protection and care for the weak.

The disappearance of Marxism from Chinese democratic activism is hardly surprising, as the international and domestic developments of the past thirty years have made it more or less passé as a source of inspiration for political thinking for the masses of people. However, there is also a notable, and telling, change in the demographics of activists of thirty years ago and at present. The Democracy Wall Movement was predominantly a movement of ex-Red Guard youth who had gone through the Cultural Revolution and developed their thinking about socialist democracy during it. This narrow social basis was one of the reasons why the movement was relatively easy to snuff out. A distinctly high number of the signatories of the original Charter 08 were of middle class and well educated professional origin. This is a development the CCP has been afraid of. Its legitimacy has been based on economic growth, promoting nationalism, and rhetorical devices such as telling the Chinese people that there are no, or only worse, alternatives to the Party. One of its methods in staying in power has been co-opting emerging middle classes to the regime by offering access, perks, and stability to allay its fears of the “mob rule.” For some members of the middle class, at least, this is clearly not working.

Is the past then catching up with the party? Opting for authoritarian growth thirty years ago has paid off, but for how long will it do so? Will there be a revision of the authoritarian development model? It is hardly likely in the near future, but Charter 08 is not the only instance of middle class protest. The recent Shanghai Maglev protests, 2007 Xiamen PX-factory protest, and the 2008 similar protest against a government backed petrochemical plant in Chengdu offer other examples. Of course, one must not make too far-reaching conclusions on this handful of instances, which still count as only a fraction of the staggering number of protest all over this big country, but all of them show how members of the middle class are starting to demand something more than just economic perks – good governance. They want a say in decision-making that affects them and their neighbourhoods. In the Democracy Wall Movement, the members of ex-Red Guard youth who demanded a say in society were relatively easy to suppress, but in 2009 discursively well-developed middle class activism poses a trickier challenge for the regime. Thus far, the official response has been mostly repressive, but as these interesting times continue, we can expect more on this front.

Lauri Paltemaa is a professor and director of the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Finland and author of numerous articles on social movements and protests in China.