On the square, it was a total carnival. It was around 11pm, a beautiful, warm Beijing evening. Student groups surged up and down in front of the Tiananmen Gate with banners and chants. Jim took copious notes as I translated for him. A squad of students passed us by with a banner that declared themselves to be the "Dare to Die Brigade". Everyone was animated and alive. In the midst of the madness, there was a sense of safety.Memoirs of Tiananmen Square by former Reuters Asia editor Graham Earnshaw. Pictures from the 1989 protests. Charlie Rose 1996 interview with 1989 US Ambassador in China James Lilley and student protest leader Chai Ling about documentary Gate of Heavenly Peace (excerpts) which criticized student leaders. Virtual Museum of China '89 (graphic images within). Declassified US government documents dealing with the events of 20 years ago and the aftermath. Recently the memoirs of 1989 Chinese premier Zhao Ziyang were published and he blames Li Peng, Deng Xiaoping and hardliners for the massacre. Finally, here's Cui Jian's 一无所有 (Nothing to My Name), the rock song that became the anthem of Tiananmen Square protesters. 六四: 我们 沒 忘 了
"I think this is as great in world history as something like the French Revolution, maybe even greater. China occupies a very large area of the world and the political consciousness of the people of China matters a lot for the cause of democracy throughout the world."Today this strikes me as utterly naive. I think what the old man did not realize, was that in the west the powers that be had already learned how to co-opt democracy to get what they wanted. They learned to do that through the mass consumer society. The Chinese leadership took one look at that and realized they could build a mass consumer society themselves, with more restrictions, and that it would be a powerful tool to hold the intellectuals and the middle class in place. I am sad that, post-Tiananmen, we haven't been able to find a way out of this problem, the problem of a bought-off civil society.
When I think about the massacre in central Beijing that followed weeks of demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, which I covered as part of a team of Reuters reporters, I cannot help feeling troubled.posted by Abiezer at 5:10 AM on June 4, 2009 [7 favorites]
Of course it was a brutal and harrowing time, but that isn’t the reason for my disquiet. I’m concerned because I don’t think we – the western media – got the narrative of those days quite right.
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I do question, however, the western media’s basic assertion that the demonstrations had been “pro-democracy”. Even now, a raft of editorials commemorating the event’s 20th anniversary repeat the mantra that the students were “demanding democracy”.
The reality was less coherent, as shown in Beijing Coma, a recent novel by Ma Jian, a Chinese writer who experienced the demonstrations first hand. By interweaving individual motives and broad themes, Ma shows that the movement never adhered to tidy definitions. It was, above all, the unburdening of the hopes of a generation easing itself free of the strictures left from Chairman Mao’s rule.
Almost everything fell within its scope: campaigns against corruption, nepotism, inflation, police brutality, bureaucracy, official privilege, media censorship, human rights abuses, cramped student dormitories and the smothering of democratic urges. But to say the demonstrations were to “demand democracy” is an oversimplification.
The truth is that the students in the square had only the haziest understanding of western-style democracy. To the extent that the protests were directed at abuses of an existing system by an emerging elite, they were motivated more by outrage at the betrayal of socialist ideals than by aspirations for a new system. The mood in the square was at least as much conservative as it was activist.
Such arguments may seem arcane two decades later. But, in my view, they are keenly relevant. The styling of Tiananmen as a pro-democracy movement helped to miscast the west’s narrative on China’s past and future.
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By making available to the media, with Chai Ling's express permission in writing, the May 28, 1989 interview, I inadvertently contributed to a media process that put far too much focus on a vivid personality with very little actual power, though she was the titular leader of the students at the time and thus in the mind's eye in charge of tens of thousands of followers.I have some problems with the op-ed by James Kynge that Abiezer posted. While it is important acknowledge the complexity of what happened 20 years ago I feel that his argument that the West is culpable in some way for the propaganda that the Chinese authorities have employed to define the story of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest is strange (I may be misreading him here). Propagandists are capable of constructing all kinds of narratives, what the West does or did has very little to do with the efficacy of the Communist Party's propaganda within China.
The charged rhetoric she has subsequently been vilified for was not unique to her; one could hear it in the whispers and shouts of marchers; one could see ink-brush portents of it in poems scribbled on university walls that spoke of "blood flowing down Chang'an Boulevard" a full month before the massacre.
Talk of bodily, if not bloody sacrifice, along with the melodramatic last wills and testaments of the sort that Chai Ling handed me on May 28 were part and parcel of a mass hunger strike, an uncannily effective crowd precipitant that caused the square to swell with well-wishers beyond expectation.
Yet despite crowds a million strong and an abundance of over-the-top rhetoric, the hunger strike ended quietly without a single casualty.
For 20 years the official voice of China, and to a surprising extent, many of its foreign interlocutors, has found it expedient to sweep the basic facts of the crackdown under the carpet, by quibbling about details, cooking up various arguments about the overarching need for stability, or by giving it the silent treatment, in counterpoint to readily available lurid descriptions of what rascals and opportunists the student activists were.
To blame it on the students, as many young people in China do today, is to fall for a propaganda line, to take one's eye off the ball.
Arriving at night in Beijing after martial law had been declared, I found the road from the airport barred by citizens' checkpoints, staffed by local residents – their purpose to stop the army moving in to the city centre.posted by Kattullus at 10:29 AM on June 4, 2009
"We'll never let them in," they told me, "only the old people and the children are asleep. The rest of us are in the streets." They were the shimin – the working-class citizens of Beijing who had been brought up to believe that "the army and the people should be united", so they were rallying now to prevent the army from attacking the people.
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posted by wuwei at 11:36 PM on June 3, 2009