How the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989 shaped contemporary China

（寫於2019年年初，現在回看感覺觀點頗為幼稚，國安法和新冠疫情之後，再來更新修改）

1989 was a dramatic year for large parts of the world, a year in which we witnessed the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War and a dramatic change of the otherwise bi-polar international order. The Communist world gave way to capitalism, and the former totalitarian and authoritarian regimes began democratizing. In the Western world, Europe reunited, and people believed that “history ended”1. However, here in China, people fought with their own blood as authoritarian rule wasn’t easily shaken.

The post‘89 generation growing up in China barely even know anything about the Tiananmen Square Massacre. People who lived through that time do not talk about it, as if it had never happened. And those who died supporting the protest, their memory has vanished like they never existed.

Every spring, as the anniversary of the massacre approached, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) became nervous and mobilized to prevent any attempt to memorialize the victims. Commemorating the anniversary or publicly mourning those who died became forbidden in mainland China. To this day security tightens near the square each June and human-rights activists are removed from Beijing. On this year’s 30th anniversary, the CCP even closed the square for so-called “security reasons”. It wanted people to forget about the Tiananmen Massacre and move on. It spun the massacre into a “political disturbance” and then just an “incident”, and it hoped the truth of what happened would fade with time.

The unforgettable night

In 1989, more than a million Chinese civilians, mostly students, staged the biggest challenge to the Communist Party’s legitimacy since it came to power in 1949. The protest soon spread across China, and after two months’ protests, Beijing authorities declared martial law. At the midnight on June 4th, the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on unarmed civilians around Tiananmen Square.

On that night, as a group of students were singing in front of the Tiananmen monument, Liu Xiaobo, the future Nobel laureate, grabbed someone’s gun, and continuously knocked it on the ground, saying, “we don't want violence, we are peaceful.” Meanwhile, protesters were killed by their own people’s army, with weapons supplied by the people. Students and civilians were running around and getting shot, their entire bodies were covered in blood and dragged into ambulances.

Dr Jiang Yanyong, a Chinese physician who publicized a coverup of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome(SARS) epidemic in China in 2003, also wrote an open letter to Chinese government in 2004, asking for a re-examination of the responsibility borne by the Chinese government for the Tiananmen Square Massacre. “I am a surgeon at the PLA No. 301 Hospital, I was chief of the de- partment of general surgery on June 4, 1989.” he wrote...

“What I found was unimaginable--on the floor and the tables of the emergency room were seven young people, their faces and bodies covered with blood. Two of them were later confirmed dead by EKG. My head buzzed and I nearly passed out. I had been a surgeon for more than 30 years. I had treated wounded soldiers before, while on the medical team of the PLA railway corps that built the Chengdu-Kunming Railway. But their injuries resulted from unavoidable accidents during the construction process, while before my eyes, in Beijing, the magnificent capital of China, lying in front of me.”2

How many people died in this slaughter, we may never know. As after 30 years, there has never been an independent investigation into this. According to United Press International’s first report on June 14, 1989, the Chinese government initially stated that there were a total of 300 deaths, including 100 soldiers, which was then lowered to a total of 200.3 However, other medias’ figures were much higher than these “few hundred”, and at the end of 2017, the then-British ambassador of China estimated at least 10,000 were killed in the massacre.4

Without doubt, the Tiananmen Square Massacre gave the Chinese government an excuse to tighten its grip. The bloodshed in Tiananmen was “necessary” to restore order. China was too big, too poor, too uneducated for democracy, which was feared to lead to chaos and civil war. It was deemed that only a one-party rule could ensure stability in the world’s most populous nation, and only stability could guarantee the economic growth needed to make the country strong. For the next 30 years, this argument seemed to be accepted by everyone in China.

Political apathy and a history rewritten

Andrew J. Nathan explored this notion of the people’s political apathy amongst the Chinese population in The Tiananmen Papers:

“Chinese society fell into a deep anomie after June 4, numbed, people everywhere turned away from politics. The sensitive intellectual class, and especially the young students with their exuber- ant idealism, entered the 1990s with nothing like the admirable social engagement they had shown in the 1980s. ... They had lost the idealism of the 1980s and now concentrated only on their fates.”5

In addition to this, China has a long history outlining the terrible consequences brought upon those who get involved in politics. The omnipotent party is able to redefine and rewrite the history. It establishes a “correct” version of history, not only acquired through government controls but also by denying the Chinese people the possibility of exploring, debating, understanding and cam- paigning for democracy.

The government’s preferred method for dealing with the 1989 “incident” was to repress and forget it. The country was officially moving on, looking forward, and no one seemed interested in what had happened at that time. And until now the post‘89 generation has never been more politically apathetic. A clear victory for the CCP.

Notably, the number one value claimed by the CCP will always be patriotism. If you love your country, you must love the political system. You must love this party. And other values, some not dissimilar to Confucian visions of social harmony under autocratic yet benevolent leadership, are now taught to children starting from they enter kindergarten.

One primary school teacher from Shenzhen, a southeast China city, said, “Your politics teacher won’t tell you about Tiananmen Square Massacre, your history teacher won’t tell you, the adults won’t tell you, so there’s no way we’d know. If you ask the millennials, I guarantee you 90 percent of them don’t know about Tiananmen Square Massacre.”

As the astrophysicist and dissident Chinese intellectual Fang Lizhi wrote in 1990: “(The policy’s) aim is to force the whole of society to forget its history, and especially the true story of the Chinese Communist Party itself. ... In an effort to coerce all society into a continuing forgetfulness, the policy requires that any detail of history that is not in the interests of the Chinese Communists cannot be expressed in any speech, book, document, or other medium.”6

Guo Yuhua, a sociologist at Tsinghua University has stated that many young people in China today are more focused on the pursuit of prosperity, mainly due to government censorship. “People don’t realize that without the establishment of a constitutional democracy there’s no cage to contain power. Without judicial independence, without civil society, without freedom of speech, there’s no way for a normal and gradually improving life and there’s no harmonious society,” Guo added.7

Because of government censorship and how this has rewritten history, people in mainland China barely know what actually happened in the past or what is happening in present-day. For instance, as Hong Kong protests are continuing today, most people in mainland China can hardly identify or understand these protests or protesters. The big difference between the mainland and Hong Kong over nationality is a split of identity. The phenomenon of split identity showcases this oppositional experience of emotions and values.

The process of instilling patriotism and discipline in its members from top to bottom is an epitomic portrayal of how the party and the state successfully manipulate the notion of Chinese nationalism and its emotional structure. The emotional structure of the Chinese, is the personification of worship from the past, which has gradually transitioned to an impersonal worship of the symbol, such as the national flag, national anthem, as well as the National Day and its ritual behaviors.

Tiananmen legacy for the Party

The portrait of today’s China is supremely confident, much wealthier than it could have imagined 30 decades ago, and more convinced than ever of the legitimacy of its repressive model of authoritarian political control.

The Washington Post journalist Philip Pan once described his paradoxical experience of living and working in China, which he described as seeming to be changing at too fast a speed for anyone to understand, but yet another moment is being experienced, even without understanding. “Society is racing forward, emerging from decades of violence and turmoil, but the political system is stuck in the past, with party officials struggling to preserve their power and privileges. The party remains above the law.”8

The absolute leadership of the CCP embodies sovereignty and political subject, and this subject is the intermediary of its hegemonic operation; and the subjectivity of the people, no matter how much it stresses its position to serve the people, it has been falsified. The so-called socialist rule of law is synonymous with the bureaucratic system and governance through violence, without the protection of rights, constitutional implementation, independent judiciary, transparent procedures etc.

On June 2 2019, Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe defended the 1989 military crackdown at a security forum in Singapore. He said that China has adopted “decisive measures” to “settlement of turmoil”, thusly achieving 30 years of stability. He added, “due to this, China has enjoyed stability, and if you visit China you can understand that part of history.”9

In today’s China, Big Brother is everywhere, and this system is good at maintaining order. It has reduced the chances of any established civil society developing in contemporary China, let alone a political one. It has prompted the Communist Party to modernize its “safe country” over the years and expand it to include the monitoring of people’s online activity, as well as their behavior at home and in public, all designed to eliminate any chance of recurring large-scale protests. In aid of this, the official Chinese media continue to use nationalist rhetoric to promote the legitimacy of the Communist Party.

While the Chinese Internet Revolution promoted economic development, it did not shake the “dictatorship” of the CCP. On the contrary, when the CCP fully realized the dominance of internet companies in the economy and politics, it quickly absorbed the bounds of the Internet into the party's political control system, from social media (for example, Weibo, WeChat and other social- media companies), with state-owned enterprises infiltrating these and participating in shares, to the control on private internet companies. The CCP has extensively used advanced technologies such as satellite positioning, facial recognition, and big data to strengthen its control over the whole nation, until it eventually creates an unprecedented digital totalitarian empire.

There is a saying among the Chinese folk: “no reform is waiting for death, and carrying out reform is looking for death”. In history no country under the totalitarian rule of a Communist Party, whether reformed or not, have managed to escape the fate of the collapse of this type of oppressive regime. However, the CCP firmly believes that it will be able to avoid this.

Attitude from the West

30 years later, many critics have turned the attention to the rising eastern hegemony. As a huge country, China has developed into the world's second largest economy with a global power of 400 million middle-class consumers, and it has been able to leverage the “Belt and Road Initiative” infrastructure project to make a global impact. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, China’s emergence on the global stage has eliminated the widely accepted belief that the pace of democracy is synchronized with market capitalism and economic modernization. The Western world may have underestimated the importance of communism in China. They would not have imagined that a country could, like China, still have an amazing rise after the brutal crackdown in 1989.

Timothy Garton Ash described this extraordinary rise in an article on The New York Review of Books in October 2019, “To avoid Gorbachev’s fate, Xi Jinping and his fellow party leaders have systematically learned lessons from the collapse of communism in the Soviet bloc. Along the way, as much by improvisation as by design, they have created an unprecedented hybrid system that might be described as Leninist capitalism.”10

Former president of the United States, Barack Obama, clarified in 2016 before he ended his term: “I’ve been very explicit in saying that we have more to fear from a weakened, threatened China than a successful, rising China.”11 But what exactly is a successful, rising China, as the real image of China is quite hard to recognize.

National Public Radio reporter Rob Gifford once portrayed China as “a faceless state”12, for Westerners, China is an unrecognizable country that injects life into a nation which is often reduced to economic statistics. It is difficult to determine the real China, and most of the time the westerner may have imagined China in their own way. So why is China “a faceless state” to outsiders? My assumption is that there might be two reasons as to why; one is the Beijing regime, it has invested billions of money on building its own image with the use of the propaganda industry, trying to cover up the essence of totalitarian dictatorship by way of a consistent openness policy. The other reason I see is the Western political circles, as these have chosen to continuously ignore the ugly, but very real, side of China largely due to economic interests.

In fact, the leaders of the CCP have long realized that attracting Western financial powers, represented by Wall Street, to China and allowing them to work closely with Chinese financial companies ensuring that these interests remain inseparable, which in turn fundamentally guarantees the stability of the Chinese economy. The “China Model” has risen, and as has the confidence of the CCP which has “allowed” for them to reject a political reform. Without a reform, and as long as there is an “openness policy”, the Chinese economy will still have room for development, and thus the CCP will continue to survive. An “openness policy” ironically closed to the possibility of political reform, and with only the possibility of economic openness.

Some people said that the Tiananmen Protests of 1989 let the world see the best and most sincere side of the Chinese people. But unfortunately, it ended with such a huge tragedy. The CCP never apologized for the bloody crackdown. Instead, it found a new way to shape and manage contemporary China. Under the guise of governance modernization, those emergency measures and technical measures arising from the “keeping stable era” have been renamed and systematically expanded to encompass absolute sovereignty of its people.

Hanna Arendt wrote in 1950 that “The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses.”13 China’s success as proof that totalitarianism is “just as good” as democracy for promoting economic growth- if not better. For ordinary Chinese people, they have to believe that everything the party does is justified. It is quite possible that the future of many developing nations will be modeled upon the Chinese model of “capitalist socialism”, a socialism we never dreamt about, perhaps more like a real-world example of the state portrayed in Orwell’s 1984, leading to ultimate totalitarianism.

1 Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992.

2 Pan, Philip P. Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.

3 https://www.upi.com/Archives/1989/06/14/China-expels-two-American-journalists/6046143021168/

4 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-42465516

5 Zhang, Liang, Andrew J. Nathan, and E. Perry Link. The Tiananmen papers. New York: Public Affairs, 2001.

6 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1990/09/27/the-chinese-amnesia/?ref-@chinafile

7 https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3011892/generation-amnesia-why-chinas-youth-dont-talk-about-tiananmen

8 Pan, Philip P. Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.

9 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-asia-security-tiananmen/chinese-defense-minister-says-tiananmen-crackdown-was-justified- idUSKCN1T3034

10 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/10/24/time-for-new-liberation/

11 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/

12 Gifford, Rob. China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power. New York: Random House, 2007.

13 Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Meridian Books, 1958.