On June 4, 1989, the Chinese military, under orders from the highest levels of government, violently crushed peaceful civilian demonstrations in Beijing, most symbolically in and around Tiananmen Square. In the end, the Chinese government claimed that the death toll was approximately 200, but the Chinese Red Cross reported 2,000 to 3,000 deaths. The true number of casualties remains unknown.
The days that followed June 4 rang with cries of shocked outrage from around the world, but two decades later those calls for justice and change are but a whisper, thanks in large part to China’s dominant global influence. This fact was most succinctly expressed during Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s visit to China in February, when she said that human rights cannot interfere with economic and security concerns.
I experienced a similar conflict of priorities when I reached out to more than 60 professors from various departments across the City University of New York’s 23 institutions, in an attempt to organize an event marking the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. I invited faculty members and other interested colleagues to participate in an event that might include discussion panels, position papers, and the presentation of fiction, poetry, photography, artwork, and performance pieces, in hopes of creating a dynamic and multifaceted academic retrospective.
The first response I received was a reply-all e-mail message from a professor of Asian history: “The way this is framed is too political. I would advise … not to participate in this event unless it has some scholarly merit. As it stands now, it seems the aim of this project is to make people aware of the ‘massacre’ and nothing else.”
I understood that some would not want to participate in an event of this nature, but I did not foresee such openly hostile opposition. I would later discover that this professor is of Asian descent and had lived for many years in China and had been educated there, which made his response even more confusing.
Not surprisingly, given this opening salvo, there would be no event —to my great disappointment, for scholars have produced important work regarding Tiananmen since the massacre. Books by Orville Schell and Maurice J. Meisner are particularly rich and accessible, while The Tiananmen Papers (Public Affairs, 2001), compiled by Zhang Liang and edited by Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link, provides remarkable insight into the inner workings of the Chinese Communist Party during that critical period. The theme of this year’s MAYDAY! Peace Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College was “Tiananmen + 20 Years” and featured Nathan, a professor of political science at Columbia University, as keynote speaker. Nathan’s own three-part course on Tiananmen Square is readily available on the Web.
Searches for “Tiananmen Square Incident” in Ebsco and “Tiananmen Square Massacre” in JSTOR databases result in nearly 185 articles (and keep in mind that JSTOR generally covers only up to five preceding years). Although not every piece is focused on the massacre, the volume of articles is evidence of Tiananmen’s continuing and reverberating effect on China’s social, foreign, and economic policies. The body of work around Tiananmen also, and vitally, includes interviews with and published works by former student leaders, journalists, and others who were eyewitness to the brutal oppression.
It is all there for any student, scholar, or interested individual, but part of the problem is that scholarly work has a minimal reach at best when juxtaposed with the pervasiveness of today’s mass media. Further, coverage of Tiananmen bubbles up only during major symbolic anniversaries, as yet another minor footnote of contemporary history.
In response to my commemoration invitation, I also received an e-mail message from a professor who had worked with three Chinese students: One student was a doctor whose Beijing emergency room received a long, steady string of gunshot victims the night the massacre began; the other two, once employed by China’s Ministry of Finance, assured the professor that the whole incident had been blown out of proportion, and that any video of violence was produced in and by the United States for propaganda purposes.
This is why Tiananmen Square is still important: Because what really happened remains unreconciled.
Despite efforts by academics, activists, writers, and filmmakers to properly document those fateful days in 1989, the impact of Tiananmen has been diminished by the Chinese government’s control of what is said about the massacre. It is widely known that inside China many young people know very little, if anything, about “the June Fourth Incident,” as it is known, and those who dare to speak about it are swiftly silenced. As a result, the fading concern over Tiananmen, in China and around the world, has devolved into indifference in the face of economic and other priorities.
With the awesome ceremonial displays of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, it became obvious to me that China’s government had won the public-relations battle it had been waging for the past 20 years. The world’s vision had been reset on a new face of China: past and present Olympic champions; a pretty little girl who floated with majestic grace as she sang above the crowd; and a little boy who had dug classmates from the rubble of the Sichuan earthquake, holding hands with Yao Ming, China’s most famous athlete, the two of them striding proudly together while waving Chinese flags.
A show of artistic beauty and collective strength no doubt, but we must recognize that this new face is an illusion meant to replace the image of one man standing down a line of tanks.
So what does Tiananmen Square mean today? In microcosm it means that some historians see no “scholarly merit” in the shadows of a tragedy. But on the world’s stage, Tiananmen ultimately symbolizes how China’s government continues to control the history and knowledge of its people. But regardless of the size or scale of the obfuscation —whether it is committed by a single academic or the world’s most influential superpower —historical sabotage is historical sabotage. If allowed to continue, it will result in Tiananmen being completely forgotten, which is what the Chinese government undoubtedly wants.
Over the last two decades, if China’s government had at least recognized that a massacre had taken place and taken responsibility for it, then China —both its government and its people —could have begun to heal the open wound that is Tiananmen and move toward a more politically open society respectful of civil and human rights, which was part of the goal of the 1989 Democracy Movement. Instead, we have witnessed the steadfast renouncement of culpability amid blatant attempts to rewrite history. China’s recently announced human-rights action plan is at best the most transparent kind of political chicanery, and even then it is 20 years too late.
In the end, we may never know the truth: who officially gave the order for the crackdown, or how many died, or what it’s like for those who lost loved ones and who cannot publicly grieve without risking persecution, or the identity of that young man who stood down the tanks.
So if we cannot know, is it not even more important to remember?
We do know that the pretty little girl who sang during the opening Olympic ceremony wasn’t actually singing: that the girl whose voice we heard was “deemed lacking in beauty and stage presence,” and so she was, at least visually, replaced. We also know that a change was made “for theatrical effect” when digitally enhanced footage was used during the fireworks extravaganza.
And so it has been for at least the past 20 years: With the Chinese government, there is always something more than meets the eye. What a perfect metaphor. If only the legacy of Tiananmen were as innocuous as the lilt of a little girl’s voice or a few pretty sparkles in the sky.