In April 1989, university students in Beijing used the funeral of Hu Yaobang, a general secretary of China’s Communist Party (CCP), as a rallying point for protests against the government’s obsessive control of their lives. Few could have imagined the political tumult that would result. A handful of students began demonstrations on April 15, the date of Hu’s death, in Tiananmen Square. Within a week their numbers had swollen to 100,000 and similar protests had arisen in 400 other Chinese cities. Rattled, the CCP leadership considered their options and then, on June 4, chose repression.
Many dissidents who went on to lead the Charter 08 movement, most notably the Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, learned from the Tiananmen massacre that democracy could only succeed if there was a fundamental shift in China’s political culture. In its Foreword, the Charter stresses that “The Chinese people, who have endured human rights disasters and uncountable struggles [in the hundred years since China adopted its constitution], now include many who see clearly that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal values of humankind and that democracy and constitutional government are the fundamental framework for protecting these values.”
Deng Xiaoping, and his successors, saw the danger of those ideas in June 1989. Five days after the killings – there is no agreed death toll but it may have been as high as 10,000 – Deng told army officers who had enforced the crackdown that: “during the last ten years our biggest mistake was made in the field of education, primarily in ideological and political education – not just of students but of the people in general … That was a serious error on our part.”
Since then, Beijing has addressed the error with unrelenting censorship and propaganda. Five years ago the author Louisa Lim found that only 15 out of 100 students at four elite Chinese universities could identify the Tank Man photo which , in Western media, remains an enduring symbol of the protests. While researching “The People’s Republic of Amnesia” – a chilling account of the CCP’s erasure of the protests from public memory, Lim found that China had also gone to great lengths to suppress foreign media coverage. This week she told the Washington Post that apart from the Tank man image, “other narratives — that of the seven-week movement that preceded the suppression, of popular mobilization, of a nationwide movement and of deaths outside Beijing — are slowly being written out of the collective memory as authorities deny access to memory carriers who can describe those moments.”
Deng warned his military that the “handful of bad people” who had driven the protests wanted “to establish a bourgeois republic, an out-and-out vassal of the West.” To prevent this, he launched a Patriotic Education Campaign which has ensured that pro-Western and pro-democracy attitudes and opinions have been kept away from China’s public sphere. Instead, Beijing has assiduously cultivated what the former Washington bureau chief John Pomfret aptly describes as “the resentful nationalism that holds sway today.”
“Who controls the past controls the future,” warns George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, adding that: “Who controls the present controls the past.” The heroic resistance of China’s dissidents has proven that Beijing’s control of the present, though impressive, is not absolute and its sensitivity to memories of Tiananmen betray the CCP’s fear that China’s political future is not yet a settled question. Or, in the language, of Charter 08: “Where is China headed in the twenty-first century? Will it continue with “modernization” under authoritarian rule, or will it embrace universal human values, join the mainstream of civilized nations, and build a democratic system? There can be no avoiding these questions.”
