Twenty years after Tiananmen

From Silence on the square

Outside the Communist Party, memories of the 1989 massacre get hazy

AMONG journalists at a Chinese newspaper, there has been some surprising talk of publishing a story to mark the 20th anniversary on June 3rd and 4th of the massacre of hundreds of Beijing citizens by Chinese soldiers. One journalist even told his colleagues he would be ready to go to jail for doing so. But such bravado, especially if it proves more than rhetoric, is likely to be rare. For many in China the nationwide pro-democracy protests of 1989 and their bloody end have become a muddled and half-forgotten tale.

This does not stop the Communist Party worrying about the issue. It fears that the efforts of even a small number of people to keep memories alive could be destabilising. The most senior official to serve jail time for his role in the Tiananmen Square unrest, Bao Tong, has been escorted by security officials from his Beijing home to a scenic spot in central China (far from muttering journalists) where he will spend the anniversary period. Mr Bao agreed to go, says a family member. But in China an invitation from the police can be awkward to refuse. Several other dissidents report heightened police surveillance.

This year’s anniversary has spurred a hardy few to pronounce on the massacre. A Beijing academic, Cui Weiping, told a gathering of intellectuals called to commemorate it that the party’s campaign to deter public discussion of Tiananmen, and public acquiescence to it, had damaged China’s “spirit and morality”. She posted her remarks on her blog.

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From The ghosts of Tiananmen

Ten years after the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 I wrote a book, Bad Elements, about the fate of the protesters, dissidents and free-spirited Chinese who had wanted to change their country. Much had changed in those ten years, and even more has changed since. New buildings, ever taller, ever bigger, have made cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing virtually unrecognisable to anyone who has been away for longer than six months. Old neighbourhoods disappear overnight, to be replaced by high rises, shopping malls and theme parks, sometimes replicating in miniature, or in painted concrete, razed ancient landmarks. This isn’t just a matter of economic growth; it is a transformation.

So was I wrong to detect a whiff of decay in the authoritarian one-party state when I travelled in the People’s Republic of China ten years ago? Was I misguided in my belief that the dissident “bad elements” still mattered? It is not hard to find educated, prosperous citizens in the wealthier coastal regions who will say so. The foreign traveller in China today will often be told, sometimes in excellent English, that the country is not yet ready for the freedoms my dissidents demanded. China is too big, one hears, too large, too old, the Chinese masses are too uneducated, in fact, China is just too damned complicated for democracy to take root. The whip-hand of authoritarian rule is still essential to keep chaos at bay and enable prosperity. Democracy is a luxury to be enjoyed after wealth and education; first food and shelter, then, possibly, freedom.

An alternative argument comes down to pretty much the same thing, but has a more patriotic ring. It claims that China already has a kind of democracy; a Chinese democracy in line with native traditions, a quasi-Confucian system where wise and benevolent rulers act, as if by osmosis, according to the wishes of the people. And the people, instead of indulging in selfish demands for rights—which suit the westerner, but are alien to the Chinese—sacrifice their private interests for the good of a great nation with 6,000 years of history.

These arguments will be expressed, usually with great conviction, while one’s attention is drawn to those tall, glitzy buildings, and those malls stuffed with the luxuries of the modern world. Look at what China has achieved in 20 years! Don’t the figures speak for themselves? So why should it matter what such voices in the wilderness as Wei Jingsheng, who spent 14 years in prison before being exiled to the US, still say about the lack of democracy in China? Or former student leaders of the Tiananmen demonstrations, some of whom now have business careers in the west. After all, their voices are no longer much heard in China. Those born around 1989 have barely heard of the protests, let alone of people who played prominent roles back then. Parents won’t talk about it lest their children get into trouble. And the children have other things to worry about, like getting ahead in the exciting but often brutal world of authoritarian capitalism.

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I am as loath to predict what might happen now as I was in 1999, but one can imagine certain possibilities. One is an old Chinese pattern of local rulers replacing a crumbling central power. Provincial bosses, like the warlords of 100 years ago, may take control of their regions. They are unlikely to be friends of democracy. Or extreme nationalism might be stirred by a fearful government, keen to deflect the middle-class resentment onto foreign targets. But this, too, is a tactic full of risk, as radical nationalism could be turned against the government itself, as a punishment for its weakness. Then again, China’s army, anxious to restore order in the unruly empire, might step in and crush all dissent.

There is a more positive alternative to these routes of violence and oppression. It was expressed with great eloquence in a remarkable document, first signed by more than 300 Chinese citizens—law professors, businessmen, farmers and even some party officials. The 300 signatories of Charter 08, launched at the end of 2008 on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, were soon joined by thousands more. It was drawn up as a conscious echo of an earlier charter by Czechoslovakian dissidents in 1977, seeking human rights in a stagnant satellite of the Soviet empire. It is not radical. The signatories demand free elections, an independent judiciary, free speech and basic human rights. But of course, in a one-party dictatorship, these demands are radical. And so one of the “bad elements” I wrote about 20 years ago, a quiet-spoken intellectual named Liu Xiaobo, who organised the charter, was promptly arrested and jailed. Others, too, were harassed, and interrogated. One thing is clear: dissidents clearly do matter to the rulers of the People’s Republic of China.

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