The 19th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre is tomorrow.
There are very few things that give me that painful twisty feeling in your stomach and that lump in your throat, but whenever I read or think about the Tiananmen Massacre, I get that feeling of pure sadness. All those naive students getting butchered, citizens mowed down by machine gun fire as they tried to protect the students, the sad resignation of Zhao Ziyang as he spoke to the students one last time. It is brutally depressing, not only by what happened, but also the lack of remorse by Deng Xiaoping in his speech congratulating the soldiers afterwards and the complete censorship of what happened. Some people like to call the students martyrs.
But martyrs for what? The students only had a vague idea of what democracy was. They know they didn’t have it and that they wanted it, but that was about it. They wanted freedom, but their demands were vague and constantly changed throughout the entire protest. They called for an end to corruption, of equal opportunity, free love, and rock and roll. They all had their own little bureaucracies set up at the square, they had special squads with neat names, they had dramatic fainting spells after fasting for a few days, and they had fun. It was one big party in Tiananmen during those days. They ditched school, chilled with their friends, and danced around all in the name of a better China.
It was like the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution or The Mob that attacked Carrefour. They’re young people caught up in big ideas which justified actions that would usually be condemned and gave purpose to their boring lives. Did some people truely believe in the cause of democracy, fighting counter-revolutionary elements, or giving the French a black eye? Sure there were some, but they couldn’t have been the majority. The Tiananmen Protests were no different than any other mass movement in that most of the participants know little about what they’re fighting for.
The difference between the Tiananmen Protests and the other two mass movements in China that I mentioned is that they were killed.
In ‘Red China Blues’, the author described a scene where a group of protestors were being machine gunned by the PLA. They ran, then crawled back towards the scene crying and screaming only to be shot down, sending the survivors running before they turned back again. It was insanity. They weren’t dying for democracy. They weren’t crawling back at the guns to die for the movement. The man who stood in front of the tank didn’t do it because he wanted elections. The citizens who defied the PLA didn’t do so because they wanted to overthrow the CCP.
All the hype that attracted the protesters to the square disappeared when the guns began to fire. Once people started to die, the reason to protest became much simpler: to demand for the right to live, to not get shot, to not get crushed.
But in the end, those who died became martyrs for democracy in China. However, their martyrdom was meaningless except for college students who buy the ‘Tank Man’ poster for their dorm room. Their movement caused the liberal faction of the CCP to lose influence and be purged from the party. Political restrictions became tighter. Ideological training in schools became stricter. The memory of their deaths have been wiped from the people’s memories.
Maybe someday, their deaths will be acknowledged and they’ll be held up as heroes of a new China like all those students back in the early 20th century who were executed by warlords, but until then, there’s little to do with the Massacre except to remember.
There is a 北岛 poem I love, 悼亡.
All of it is good, but here are two lines from the last stanza:
不是肉体是灵魂
每年一起再过一次生日
I was recently reading a biography of Deng Xiaoping by Richard Evans, the former British Ambassador to China. On the Tiananmen, it says the Deng was “angry about the manner in which the whole operation had been conducted”. The evidences it uses are: first, at the television appearance on June 9, Deng praised the officers and men of the army and the police, but “he did not say a word about the conduct of operations by their commanders or about the orders these had received from above”. To support that, it cites “a story from a party source that Deng called in Li Peng and Yang Shangkun … and told them that they had bungled the military operation appallingly”. Secondly, “there is the fact that, when the time came to replace Zhao Ziyang…, it was not Li Peng, …, but Jiang Zemin …”. It’s a lot of speculation. But to say Deng is not remorseful is probably speculation too. Of course it is a fact that he didn’t show remorse. But he may have other reasons for that.
@ Wood – yeah, it is a lot of speculation. Not showing remorse is mostly a political thing and he might/probably felte at least a little bad for the death that resulted.
However, I think the decision to not promote Li Peng is mostly because it would cause a lot of conflict within the NPC in that the surviving members of the liberal factions would definitely resist Li Peng a lot more than Jiang Zemin.
I recently met one of the leaders of Six Four who lives very near me. He doesn’t tell people about his past, but his wife told me. I mentioned it to my husband, and we both had the same reaction of respect for his efforts. But when my husband asked him in private about it, he looked angry that my husband had found out, and didn’t answer him. Interesting reaction.
I do think that although we didn’t see any real change as a result of their protest, there were still things we as a world gained from their efforts.
1. I myself learned that even though we may not be in the majority, we can still make our voices heard. Although no lasting change came from that experience, still the whole world took notice.
2. I think their efforts raised awareness world wide. No one who saw what happened will ever forget, and we all were emotionally pulling for them.
3. It’s hard to say how other governments would have handled the same situation. We in the U.S. have had protests that ended badly too.
4. The incident with the “tank man” showed that even one person with conviction can make other people think.