The Impact of China's 1989 Tiananmen Massacre

Jean-Philippe Béja

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136906848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The 1989 pro-democracy movement in China constituted a huge challenge to the survival of the Chinese communist state, and the efforts of the Chinese Communist party to erase the memory of the massacre testify to its importance. This consisted of six weeks of massive pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing and over 300 other cities, led by students, who in Beijing engaged in a hunger strike which drew wide public support. Their actions provoked repression from the regime, which - after internal debate - decided to suppress the movement with force, leading to a still-unknown number of deaths in Beijing and a period of heightened repression throughout the country. This book assesses the impact of the movement, and of the ensuing repression, on the political evolution of the People's Republic of China.

The book discusses what lessons the leadership learned from the events of 1989, in particular whether these events consolidated authoritarian government or facilitated its adaptation towards a new flexibility which may, in time, lead to the transformation of the regime. It also examines the impact of 1989 on the pro-democracy movement, assessing whether its change of strategy since has consolidated the movement, or if, given it success in achieving economic growth and raising living standards, it has become increasingly irrelevant. It also examines how the repression of the movement has affected the economic policy of the Party, favoring the development of large State Enterprises and provoking an impressive social polarisation. Finally, Jean-Philippe Béja discusses how the events of 1989 are remembered and have affected China's international relations and diplomacy; how human rights, law enforcement, policing, and liberal thought have developed over two decades.

1
June Fourth

Memory and ethics

Perry Link ¹

In the minds of people who experienced or witnessed the June Fourth Massacre of 1989, the events scream in memory as if they happened only yesterday. For these people, it can seem odd that the intervening 20 years are fully one-third of the history of the People’s Republic of China, or that the same years are more than 10 per cent of Chinese history since the founding of the Republic of China in 1912. To realise that events that feel like ‘only yesterday’ in fact occurred 20 years ago startles us, in part, because we normally expect that memory will fade. Most memories do. But with traumatic memories like those of June Fourth, the fading does not happen – or, at least, happens much more slowly – and the result is that events of 20 years ago do indeed present themselves in the mind as if little time has elapsed since they occurred.

But unusual vividness is only one of several special effects that a traumatic or politically charged event can bring to human memory. In the case of June Fourth, families of victims have felt special needs to preserve memory and to memorialise the dead; survivors have hoped to use memory in pursuit of their continuing political ideals; government authorities have tried to repress memory and even to annihilate it if possible. And problems such as these are all in addition to normal problems of human memory. In this essay I look first at some general problems of memory and of how events are retold from memory. Then I focus on memory of June Fourth and organise the analysis by asking how three categories of people – perpetrators, victims, and bystanders – have remembered, have failed to remember, or have altered memory, whether willingly or not. The tripartite division of ‘perpetrators, victims, and bystanders’ is not analytically perfect, but it opens important and illuminating questions. Nearly all the questions that I raise have moral implications, so I call the essay ‘memory and ethics.’²

Memory

Human memory is a complicated topic and only partly understood. University departments of psychology offer entire courses on it, and yet the mysteries of how (and how well) memory works remain largely unsolved. Even more radically, professional philosophers ask a range of questions about memory, including whether ‘the past’ is an illusion, essentially nothing more than a collage of memories and other sense impressions (from relics, books, etc.) that, rigorously speaking, are impressions that exist only in the present. Questions like this are beyond my scope here. But it is worth reminding ourselves how, in several ways, the phrase ‘simple memory’ is a gentle fraud. Memory is hardly as simple as, in daily life, we normally take it to be.

From ordinary life we generally become aware of two systematic weaknesses in memory: first, that memories tend to fade with time, and second, that memory as a whole gets weaker as a person ages. These and other problems raise the classic question of ‘How reliable is memory?’, and one of those ‘other problems’ is that a person’s interests and values can introduce distortion. (Did she really see clearly that her son was fouled as he was trying to kick the winning goal? – Or is that only what her memory is telling her?) It is important to distinguish this question from the related one of whether we consciously use our values and interests to construct memories. Of course we do the latter. We build monuments, museums, and dedicated libraries, and in many other ways purposefully tell each other stories about the past. One can fairly ask of any of these activities, ‘How reliably do they represent the past that they claim to represent?’ But the point that I am raising here is different; it is that we also need to ask, ‘How much is memory affected unconsciously by our values and interests? How much do our values and interests shape our memories even before, as it were, they are delivered into our conscious minds?’

The question is brilliantly presented in a 1988 essay called ‘Wenge jikui’ (Remembering Cultural Revolution guilt) by the Chinese writer Shi Tiesheng.³ Shi recalls the late 1960s, when, as a favour to a friend, he copied out a piece of unauthorised fiction for a group of friends to pass around and enjoy. His copy later fell into the hands of Public Security, who declared the story to be ‘counterrevolutionary’ and went looking for the person in whose handwriting the copy had been made. The police found Shi, who then faced the terrible dilemma of whether to divulge the name of the person who had given him the original of the offending manuscript. Shi remembers, with regret, that he did eventually reveal the name of that person, but on one crucial point memory fails him: he cannot remember whether his divulging of the name came before or after he learned that the police had already discovered the crucial facts from a third party. This point made all the difference, morally speaking. He concludes his essay with two alternate endings for the whole episode – ‘version one,’ which exculpates himself, and ‘version two,’ which does not. He confesses that reliance on memory alone does not allow him to decide which version is true. Then he writes:

I hope it was version one [that was true], but this very hope is strong evidence that it was probably version two, because the sieve that is memory not only allows inconvenient details to leak out, but also lets self-protecting details to seep in.

Shi’s suggestion that memory can actually be creative – that it can invent details that provide comfort to the rememberer – recalls Mark Twain’s whimsical observation that what most astonishes him about his memory in his senior years is ‘the number of things I can remember that aren’t so.’⁴ Neither Shi Tiesheng nor Mark Twain would want us to abandon memory. In many cases, it’s all we’ve got. But we need to be aware of the possibility of unconscious distortion.

Telling from memory

After memory serves up its offerings, whatever they may be, an additional set of problems impinges when the owner of the memories seeks to put them into words or pictures for others. Subjective memory impressions are not the same as the stories we tell about what we remember. (Here I mean ‘stories’ very broadly, to include not only casual re-tellings but also film, artwork, museums, and any other media that we use to communicate our impressions of the past.) Original memory impressions are always more ragged and unorganised than the stories that we tell. Putting things into words or pictures, or into rows in museums, inevitably simplifies them, smooths them out, and allows us to order them according to our interests and values. Can this streamlining be avoided? It is hard to see how. Occasionally someone tries, though – for example the Chinese writer Can Xue when she writes (as she tells us she sometimes does) from a trance-like state, straight from-cerebellum-through-cerebrum-down-arm-nerves-into-hands-onto-paper, where strings of images emerge: ‘The sunshine made me dizzy … I hear wolves howling … some of the things in my desk drawers were missing … lots of big rats were running wildly in the wind,’ and so on.⁵ Can Xue’s experiment is fascinating, but even in this kind of writing, words, which are public things, are not the same as subjective impressions. Both Can Xue’s own subjective impressions, which help to produce her words, and the subjective impressions of her reader, which her words in turn help to produce, are fundamentally different things from the words themselves.

The problem of how a story like June Fourth gets ‘smoothed out’ in the re-telling showed itself to me personally during the years after the massacre. I was living in Beijing when it happened. I did not see any killing, but I did see, when I went out onto the streets on the morning of 4 June 1989, young people carrying bloody clothing on bicycle racks, banners bearing inscriptions such as ‘blood debts must be paid in blood,’ an angry crowd surrounding a military jeep, another military vehicle in flames, and articulated buses jerked sideways to block broad avenues, where they lay like great dead caterpillars. I heard people wailing. I heard student speakers, at a makeshift broadcasting platform at the gate of People’s University, taking turns telling about the killing that they had witnessed in various parts of the city. Some of the speakers were shaking with rage as they spoke, some spoke with an icy calm. From time to time someone in the crowd screamed. Later that day I went to visit a number of Chinese friends, both to learn from them what had happened and to offer my help if needed. The government had named the physicists Fang Lizhi and Li Shuxian as numbers one and two on their list of criminals to be apprehended, and, from 4 June to 6 June I assisted the couple in leaving their apartment and reaching the US Embassy, where they took ‘temporary refuge.’⁶

I left Beijing on 9 June and went to Hong Kong for two months and then to California for one month before landing in Princeton, New Jersey, where I began teaching in September 1989. At each stop, people asked me what I had seen, had heard, and had felt in Beijing on 4 June. They asked and they asked and they asked. The first time I answered, and probably the second and the third, too, my recourse was to consult the store of my memory images – multifarious, dramatic, unorganized – and to pick from these. But after doing this several times, my task began to seem easier. I had done it before, after all, so now I knew ‘where to go’ in memory. But that very ease in knowing where to go tended to simplify the story I produced. I was no longer confronting the jumble in memory’s warehouse, but recalling the pathways that I had already established. What’s worse, I fear, is that I began to notice which aspects of my stories were getting good receptions from listeners. Being a congenial sort who wants happy listeners, what I began to recall, after countless encounters with the same questions, was not my original memory data but ‘how well I had told the story last time.’ My ‘set stories’ – which were my own creation, even though I had never set out consciously to create them – began to take over in memory space. That compartment of my memory became like a cupboard: stories A, B, and C rested there, ready to take off the shelf when needed. Over the years, I’m afraid, most of my original memory impressions have drifted away and are lost. But the stories survive.

I am sure that I am not unusual in this problem. It must affect others, including direct eyewitnesses of the June Fourth Massacre. The original scenes were of a kind that any web of words can only suggest, never adequately represent. Eyewitnesses have had to simplify from the outset, and many of their accounts, under the wear of repetition, must have been reduced to boilerplate. There remains a distinction, of course, between boilerplate that results from direct experience and boilerplate that results from second-hand impressions or from parallels to other situations. And all of these can be distinguished from set stories that result from the lies of a ruling authority that wants to establish an essentially false account, as well as from versions produced by various bystanders, both inside China and around the world, whose values and interests have contributed to shaping what they remember. Let us now divide these cases by considering perpetrators, victims, and bystanders, asking for each what the uses of June Fourth memory have been and what ethical issues have arisen.

June Fourth memory: perpetrators

First, whom do we mean by ‘the perpetrators’? The most direct perpetrators of the massacre were the 27th and 38th Divisions of the People’s Liberation Army. But the soldiers in these units were following the orders of higher-ups. Moreover, in the days immediately before the massacre, at camps outside Beijing, the soldiers had become objects – victims, one might say – of intensive ‘thoughtwork’ that had trained them in a radically false version of what was happening inside China’s capital.⁷ Hence it is hard to call the soldiers ‘perpetrators’ in any but a superficial sense. Of the ultimate perpetrators of the massacre, the most prominent were Deng Xiaoping, who gave the order for the attack, and Li Peng, the highest-ranking advocate for this course of action. In a related sense, all in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership who favoured the massacre, including those who fashioned and advertised false accounts of ‘rampage’ by ‘hooligans’ engaging in ‘counterrevolutionary rebellion,’ can be viewed as perpetrators.

What should we say about perpetrators and memory? It is often observed that the perpetrators of June Fourth have wanted the world to forget what happened that day. But this answer is too simple. Inside China, at the time of the massacre and for several ensuing years, the perpetrators wanted exactly the opposite. They wanted both the Chinese people and the defeated group inside the CCP (Zhao Ziyang and other associates of the recently deceased Hu Yaobang) to notice the bloodshed and to heed it well. Intimidation depends crucially upon memory. A crackdown cannot induce self-censorship if people are forgetful.

The decision to clear Tiananmen Square on the morning of June Fourth by using tanks and machine guns – instead of billy clubs, tear gas, or water hoses – was not made because more benign equipment was unavailable. It is true that a few days after the massacre Li Peng told foreign reporters that bull...

Table of contents

• China Policy Series
• Contents
• Figures
• Abbreviations
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 June Fourth
• 2 The Chinese Communist Party and 4 June 1989
• 3 The Impact of the June 4th Massacre on the Pro-Democracy Movement
• 4 The Chinese Liberal Camp in Post-4 June China
• 5 Wang Xiaobo and the no longer silent majority
• 6 The seeds of Tiananmen
• 7 The practice of law as conscientious resistance
• 8 The politicisation of China’s law-enforcement and judicial apparatus
• 9 The enduring importance of police repression
• 10 The Impact of the Tiananmen Crisis on China’s economic transition
• 11 The Tiananmen incident and the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong
• 12 How China managed to de-isolate itself on the international stage and re-engage the world after Tiananmen
• 13 China and international human rights
• 14 A shadow over Western democracies
• Bibliography
• Index