Tiananmen in Memoriam
How we remember the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, both in drama and in silence.
The start of June every year marks the beginning of a grand censorship campaign for China’s mainland government as it vies to turn the public spaces frequented by Chinese citizens into a hermetically sealed expanse. This is done by enacting strict laws against physical gatherings and mass Internet censorship around the day of June 4th, known internationally as the day of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Whenever Chinese people evoke the day of the incident, colloquially dubbed “six-four” or liusi(六四), the conversation seems to grow heavier with the intricate political and social implications entwined in that very term. Tiananmen, for the people of China, is a controversial issue garnering splitting views along generational and sociopolitical lines. Abroad, in the liberal-democratic world, the views on Tiananmen seem to be unanimous—illiberal, authoritarian, and shockingly cruel. After all, Western media correspondents had been fortuitously offered a front row seat to the incident via the hotel across the street from Tiananmen Square itself in lieu of Mikhael Gorbachev’s visit to China. The reports on the incident were live on foreign news and the reactions were instantaneous and overwhelmingly negative. The Chinese government was reprehensible. It was a shocking violation of human rights. So on and so forth, the narrative went.
Yet in the decade following the incident, China became the rising star of foreign investment and development. In many ways, the incident was swept under the rug as the world pursued stronger economic ties with China during the 1990s and 2000s. After all, it was during this time period that the liberal-democratic West enthusiastically tossed its dollars into China’s emerging markets in the hopes that it would churn out wealth like an automated printer. In a way, this strategic choice, ushered in by the diplomatic leadership of the US, has made the rest of the world complicit in silencing an entire generation’s bid for long-term change.
Tiananmen Remembered
The memory of Tiananmen is unique, in that it is simultaneously well-documented and fraught with holes. The amnesia of an event witnessed live across the world makes for a particularly interesting study, especially as the event as it is remembered by Chinese citizens stands in stark contrast to how the rest of the world, especially the liberal West, remembers it. The contemporary global symbol of Tiananmen immortalized in footage now widely available on Internet is the Tank Man, an anonymous protester who bravely stood against an oncoming tank, refusing to let it pass. The Tank Man became the sensationalized icon of Tiananmen in the memory of those outside China, yet this icon paints Tiananmen as a single moment of violence—a short-lived point of combustion in which the government attacked its citizens with senseless violence. In some way, the icon of the Tank Man both helps and hinders the international memory of Tiananmen, as its vivid dramatization helps us remember the massacre at the same time it erases the true experience of the student protests in the summer of 1989.
The international portrayal of Tiananmen eclipses the arduous, long summer of protests in 1989, the way Tiananmen is remembered in China by those who had once participated. It lasted two whole months, from April 16th to June 4th, inspired by the sudden death of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Hu Yaobang, who became a symbol of push for political reform at the party level. What began as a public commemorative service for Hu quickly turned into a drawn-out peaceful protest by students whose grievances included government corruption, lack of government transparency, and economic woes caused by China’s transition towards a market economy. Almost every college student in Beijing showed up at some point during this two-month timespan, and it was only a small minority—stragglers that were not Beijing locals with no house to return to—who experienced the violent outburst on June 4th. The sensationalized “Tank Man” view of June 4th also fails to capture the post-Tiananmen fallout which sent ripples through the fabrics of Chinese society from top to bottom. At the party level, administrative measures were taken to make sure nothing like June 4th ever occurred again, while at the grassroots level, every student who partook in the protest during that two-month period were required to write letters of confession to reflect on their “mistakes.”
Post-Tiananmen Response
The international response, though initially one of unified anger and condemnation towards the actions of the CCP, soon fizzled out. Though it is true that Tiananmen launched China into the center of the international human rights discourse, Western powers’ foreign policy towards China spelled no long-lasting political consequence other than the US arms embargo towards China which is still in place today. However, the extension of the arms embargo is much less a condemnation of the CCP’s rule of its own citizens and more so US strategic wariness towards China’s military rise. The progression of the 1990s saw a pragmatic economic engagement with China by Western liberal democracies, and though human rights concerns about issues (i.e. Tibet) came and went in waves, the general enthusiasm for investment in China grew unabated. But be not mistaken, for this decision was more than just an economic one. In 1989, China was in a very different position from today. Namely, it was seen as a potential ally and buffer between the US and the Soviet Union in late Cold War politics. As the rogue offshoot of the Soviet bloc, China had been initially sought out as an ally by President Nixon in 1972, and by China’s reform and opening up in 1989, US politicians had high hopes that China would eventually democratize and come under the US-led liberal-democratic sphere of influence. Even if Tiananmen sowed doubts in the hearts of Western leaders, China’s move to a market economy and subsequent economic boom was enough to convince leaders that China was indeed on the right track. Whatever the case, China had served its purpose as a Soviet buffer, and there was money to be made.
This diplomatic decision is reflected in China domestically through the 90s spirit of mentou zhuanqian (闷头赚钱), or “putting one’s head down to earn money.” In this light, the speed with which China embraced “Western capitalism,”—which had earned it international and domestic praise—not only overshadowed the efforts of the student protesters in 1989 but was also politically strategic in shifting focus from political reform to churning out money. The CCP had successfully indoctrinated its people with the Chinese version of the white picket fence, actively encouraging citizens to improve their livelihoods through materialistic pursuits instead of demanding systematic political change.
And just like that, the 90s came and went in silence.
The Ghost of Tiananmen
Once, during one of my countless visits to Tiananmen, my mother looked up at the Chinese flag flying emblematically on a raised platform in the center of the square. The platform was roped off by a wide berth, to which she recalled bitterly, “They used to let you run around up there.”
The ropes were added after June 4th, and so too were the squadrons of armed patrols marching around the perimeter of the square through the clamoring groups of tourists. In a way, the square itself in its modern form has become a grand exhibition of the post-Tiananmen zeitgeist, a dynamic of post-reform China’s newfound endorsement of capitalism with carefully-constructed methods of control embedded within the vibrancy of sightseers ogling souvenir kiosks. Today, any attempt to commemorate Tiananmen is strictly censored and banned in Mainland China. Starting from the beginning of June, the government ramps up censorship upon both the virtual and physical public spaces of citizens, strictly monitoring all talk of public group gatherings and censoring all mentions of liusi on the Internet. Previously, the annual commemoration was held in the free press zone of Hong Kong, but since the tumultuous events of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement and the CCP’s encroachment over Hong Kong’s independent administration, this last remaining gesture of commemoration has also fallen prey to suppression.
Today, on the day of June 4th, one can find Chinese citizens patriotically cheering on the daily flag-raising ceremony and the incessant buzz of activity and tourism around the square. Things carry on as normal in usual displays of patriotism and loyalty, and celebration of the country’s meteoric rise as an economic superpower. And yet the marks of Tiananmen haunt the square like a ghost. From the ropes around the flag to the conscious avoidance of public and political discourse, slowly but surely, the erasure of Tiananmen has altered the contemporary landscape of China forever with the force of amnesia. Yet who are the true amnesiacs?
It is true that there has been an increasing interest in the legacy of Tiananmen in Western news media in the last few years, but this comes as a response to the perceived emergence of China as a threat to US primacy both economically and politically. Major news media outlets are plastered with articles portraying China as an agent of fear, sowed in the minds of Western liberal democracies who now consider Xi Jinping’s China to be the foremost threat to a US-led world order. China has succeeded the Soviet Union as the US’s number one competitor, leading to US media vilifying the nation in a manner not too different from the West’s portrayal of the USSR during the Cold War. . Along with this new hostile attention came the rise in interest in every human rights violation that China had been continuously guilty of in the past three decades, from Tibet to Xinjiang to Tiananmen. Suddenly, everything related to China is refashioned in the light of relevant competition to the US-led camp of self-proclaimed liberal democracies.
Yet, treating China’s historically complicated human rights issues in this manner is particularly problematic in the case of Tiananmen. The way the majority of the world recollects Tiananmen (or rather, is “re-recollecting” Tiananmen) is steeped in Sino-US geopolitical play, with no word on the impact of the silent 1990s. There is nothing said about the former leaders of the protest, most of whom went abroad to start new lives, or the famous professor of philosophy Liu Xiaobo, staunch supporter and active participant of the protest, who was incarcerated up until his fatal diagnosis of liver cancer in 2017. Almost every university student in Beijing during the summer of 1989 had joined in the student protests. Those very same people make up a significant portion of China’s current middle-aged population, each with a memory which they might never pass on to their children. There is no question that the CCP’s censorship mechanisms are directly to blame, but there is also no doubt that the US-led camp of liberal democracies was also complicit in this mass silencing. As narratives of Tiananmen are reduced and refashioned abroad whilst banned altogether in China domestically, we must ask ourselves: how do we grapple with what occurred during the summer of 1989? What exactly is the legacy of June 4th? And how should we preserve its place in our collective memory?
To further decolonize our minds, check out my sources for this piece:
Legacy of Tiananmen Square Incident in Sino-US Relations (post-2000) by XueYing Hu
The American News Media Volatile Perspectives on China by Ted Galen Carpenter
The People’s Republic of Amnesia by Louisa Lim
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