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Why China doesn't want to talk about Tiananmen

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Ananth Krishnan
Ananth KrishnanJun 04, 2016 | 16:29

Why China doesn't want to talk about Tiananmen

This is my fifth June 4 in Beijing.

Twenty-seven years ago today, residents of the Chinese capital were waking up in a state of shock. The night before, blood flowed on the streets of this old city, as Deng Xiaoping, remembered today as the architect of China's economic reforms, sent in the tanks of the People's Liberation Army to clear Tiananmen Square of student protesters.

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That entire summer, the young and idealistic students had taken to the streets - not just in Beijing but across China, as is often forgotten - to call for an end to corruption and for democratic reforms.

Every June 4 sees remembrances of the 1989 protests, and the lives lost in their brutal denouement, in Hong Kong and Taiwan, in New York and London.

A few years ago, I witnessed thousands gather in Taipei to remember the students. Wu'er Kaixi, the exiled student leader who fled China in 1989 - and is number two on China's most-wanted list of student leaders - told me then that the flame of remembrance was still being kept alive.

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Wu'er Kaixi, the exiled student leader who fled China in 1989. (Reuters)

But not in Beijing or elsewhere in China. Today, there is no media coverage, remembrances, or vigils to mark an event that changed the course of history.

A common perception that explains this silence is that people in China simply don't know about what happened on the night of June 3, 1989. (I've often noticed that Indian tourists in Beijing seem to get a thrill from asking their tour guides about whether they know about 1989. They are usually met with an uncomfortable silence and a shrug of the shoulders.)

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In my more than five years in Beijing, I've had dozens of deep conversations about Tiananmen with Beijingers. The Chinese are no doubt reluctant to speak about it - especially to strangers, which is certainly understandable - but that doesn't mean that people are unaware about what transpired that night.

I've heard so many stories from older Beijingers about that summer, including memories of how they would cycle every day to the square to give the students boxes of dumplings to show their support.

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Tiananmen Square today. (Reuters)

And for young Chinese, who easily scale the "great firewall" of internet restrictions in China with widely available software, access to uncensored information about Tiananmen is no longer difficult to find. So reluctance to speak about Tiananmen certainly doesn't mean ignorance of the event.

One reason for the silence is certainly fear. Since 1989, the Communist Party has waged a relentless campaign to prevent remembrances of the event.

Every year, many Chinese human rights activists are placed in house arrest in the lead-up the anniversary, especially those like Ding Zilin, who started the group Tiananmen Mothers to remember the children they lost that night.

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As Louisa Lim, author of an excellent book on the fading memory of Tiananmen called The People's Republic of Amnesia told me in an interview a few years ago, "fear and survival all play a part, but I think it's also a very pragmatic choice. For the vast majority of people, the clear calculation is that there is nothing to be gained from remembering, in fact there is a price to pay for any overt acts of remembrance."

But as Lim writes, even that is only part of the explanation. As much as it may be easier to understand the silence as a result of suppression and fear, the reality is in some ways more complex - and more discomfiting.

In many conversations with young Chinese students, I often hear ready acceptance of Deng's actions, even from those fully aware of what transpired that night. To hear Chinese students say without hesitation that he was right to gun down girls and boys of their age is, to put it mildly, unsettling.

A common argument one hears is that the Chinese people are "afraid of chaos". But that is a fear that the Communist Party has carefully cultivated over decades.

A case in point was the recent 50th anniversary of the decade-long disaster that was Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution (1966-76), which was marked by editorials in state media that stressed that the main lesson was the danger of a descent into chaos.

As one editorial cautioned, China needed to "remain vigilant against the danger of all kinds of disorder". "Nobody fears turmoil, and desires stability, more than us," the editorial said.

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Chinese communist revolutionary and founding father of the People's Republic of China, Mao Zedong. 

As the historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom writes this week, "The Party likes historical episodes to resemble black and white struggles between heroes and villains, with the latter role played in (the Cultural Revolution) by the Gang of Four and to a certain extent an aged and misled Mao Zedong. A full accounting of the Cultural Revolution would be one in which blame for many incidents would need to be apportioned to individuals who were victims and then later perpetrators, or perpetrators and then later victims, as well as to some people who now hold positions of power or are related to those who do. As a result, moving toward a full reckoning with the past is verboten; partial memory rather than amnesia remains the order of the day." 

That's more or less the same argument I hear today from students rationalising the events of 1989, saying that "chaos" would have been a far worse outcome.

That the decades since Tiananmen have seen China's ascent into the world's second-largest economy, and 27 years of stability, further reinforce this view. As Lim writes, "People shifted focus devoting their energies to buying apartments, setting up companies, and navigating the myriad of new opportunities offered by the economic liberalisation that was changing the world around them".

Perhaps what is most discomfiting, as she argues, is that "all this happened not despite Tiananmen, but because of it". So the result is a continuing amnesia, and a wide acceptance of the party's verdict that 1989 was simply a "counterrevolutionary riot" that would have brought China chaos.

For Chinese more focused on bettering their lives, rehashing that verdict makes little sense, and that is, to some extent, understandable.

But not so for those who lost their loved ones on this day 27 years ago; for dozens of mothers like Ding Zilin who not only lost their children but had to bear the burden of seeing them vilified unjustly as rioters, despite the fact that they saw themselves as patriots trying to better their country.

So they will, against the odds and against the might of the Chinese state, continue their fight to preserve the dying flame of memory, like lone rocks in the sand being swept by the tide of amnesia.

Last updated: June 04, 2016 | 16:41
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