Fahrenheit 1989: China Erases Memories of Tiananmen
By Bernhard Zand in Beijing
Twenty-five
years ago, the Chinese army violently suppressed protests on Tiananmen
Square. To this day, Beijing uses pressure, censorship and money to
stifle all attempts to commemorate the seminal incident in an
up-and-coming China.
Hu Yaobang, 73, a reformer and one
of the few politicians the Chinese have ever genuinely worshiped, died
on April 15, 1989. As the party leaders who had toppled him from his
position as general secretary two years earlier carried him to his
grave, some 100,000 students gathered on Tiananmen Square and demanded
Hu's rehabilitation. The incident marked the beginning of the
revolutionary events of 1989 in faraway Beijing.
On the
evening after Hu's death, his son asked his friend Zhang Lifan, a
historian, to document the coming days and weeks. He told Zhang that
members of the Hu family were too exhausted to do it themselves.
Today
Zhang, who was 38 at the time, is one of China's leading intellectuals.
He had 300,000 followers until last November, when censors shut down
his blog. Zhang is a tall, kind and playful, 63-year-old man. When he is
searching for a word or a memory, he tilts his head to one side and
presses his left hand to his forehead. He wears a silver skull ring, a
memento mori given to him by a Buddhist monk.
In the weeks
following April 15, 1989, Zhang would become far more deeply involved in
the events that were unfolding than he might have suspected on the
evening after Hu Yaobang's death. He has waited almost a quarter of a
century to publish part of his memoirs and talk about his experiences
publicly.
"I felt cold on the morning of the funeral," he
says. "There were thousands of demonstrators outside, while inside the
building supreme leader Deng Xiaoping, that 84-year-old who had had his
hair dyed once again, was stomping around like some angry young man. I
was standing right next to him. He was determined and ready for a
fight."
In the spring of 1989 Deng, who had fallen out of
favor twice during the Cultural Revolution, saw his life's work being
threatened: the economic opening of China under party dominance. "He
knew that he would not experience a third comeback," says Zhang. "That
fear led to the suppression of the unrest on Tiananmen."
'Enforced Amnesia'
During
the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, tens of thousands of
academics, artists and writers were banished or even beaten to death. "I
knew what sort of trouble words could get me into," says Zhang, "and I
had stopped keeping a diary years earlier." Nevertheless, he agreed to
accept the request from Hu's family. "Historians rarely have the
opportunity to witness an event that shapes history."
It was
indeed an event that made history. Europe is marking the 25th
anniversary of an important turning point in 2014. While Germany
commemorates the fall of the Berlin Wall, the countries of the former
Eastern bloc are celebrating their liberation from communism. But
China's leaders see no reason to commemorate the protests that began at
their palace gates and swept into the streets for the first time in
1989. The country's name still identifies China as a people's republic
today, and according to its history books, nothing of any significance
happened there 25 years ago. When the number "1989" is typed into Baidu
Baike, a Chinese version of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, one of
the responses reads: "1989 is the number between 1988 and 1990."
The
leadership isn't just ignoring an anniversary. In fact, it has erased
the incident from the collective memory, despite its profound impact on
China's current intellectual elite. Sinologist Frank Dikötter describes
the government's policy as "enforced amnesia". Authoritarian countries,
of course, have a habit of dismissing historic facts.
Ironically,
though, China's Communist Party takes its version of history very
seriously. Party officials constantly invoke history in their speeches,
and since 1989 dozens of professorships in history have been
established, days of remembrance have been introduced and countless
conferences have been held. "To forget history is treachery," states an
anthology of contributions to one of these conferences.
Nevertheless,
the party quashes any attempt to force it to face up to its own
history, one that includes the hundreds killed in the Tiananmen massacre
and the millions who died in mass campaigns during the years under
former leader Mao Zedong through the land reform, the "Giant Leap
Forward" and the Cultural Revolution.
Unparalleled Negation
Even
among authoritarian countries, China's negation of its own contemporary
history is historically unparalleled. In the 25 years since Tiananmen,
the country has not only taken off economically, but has also
experienced a cultural explosion. And yet China's publishing houses and
film studios, along with its universities, think tanks, museums and
Internet companies, are producing culture devoid of much of its own
history. China's version of Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel "Fahrenheit
451" could very well be called Fahrenheit 1989, a society in which the
regime has deleted all unpleasant memories, so that millions of young
Chinese today have no idea what happened on Tiananmen Square.
A
week after the memorial service for Hu Yaobang, Zhang Lifan received a
second request, this time from the government. Then Soviet President
Mikhail Gorbachev had been invited to visit Beijing, but the regime
didn't want his reception to be tainted by thousands of people
protesting outside. Men like Zhang, a lecturer at the Beijing Academy of
Social Sciences at the time, knew the students. The government asked
him to serve as an intermediary.
"Weeks earlier, I had met
and debated with students in a student apartment in Dasuzhou Alley,"
says Zhang. On a day in May, 25 years later, he and his wife are
searching for the apartment near Tiananmen where he met with the
students. But their search is unsuccessful. Like most buildings near the
Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen Gate), those in Dasuzhou Alley are
now occupied by party officials and their families. There are high
walls, imposing portals and security cameras everywhere. When Zhang
stops walking for a moment and points to where the apartment was, a
couple emerges from a crowd of tourists and photographs him. It's
obvious that they are plainclothes agents.
Zhang, undeterred,
continues his account: "I spent days rushing back and forth between
Tiananmen Square and the office of the United Work Front, which was
supposed to communicate with the students. I didn't get much sleep."
Division in Both Camps
He
noticed signs of divisions in both camps from the very beginning, says
Zhang. In the government, he explains, the reformers were losing ground
to the hawks. Among the students, the thousands of new demonstrators
arriving every day were applying growing pressure on the core group,
which had persevered on Tiananmen Square from the beginning and was
willing to negotiate a withdrawal.
Shortly before martial law
was imposed, Zhang guided one of the government's chief negotiators
through the checkpoints to the demonstrators' main tent.
"We
all sat on the ground, and one of the student leaders introduced the
chief of the delegation to his people. 'This here is Yan Mingfu of the
Workers' Front,' he said, 'a good man from the system. Listen to what he
has to say, and give the reformers a chance.' But then Yan Mingfu
kicked him. It was already dangerous at the time to be called a
'reformer'."
On the next day, May 19, the demonstrators voted
on a bus whether to clear the square. The outcome was negative. "I ran
over to the official in charge. He was surprised, because he thought the
government had been given different signals," says Zhang. That evening,
the students requested another meeting with the government, and Zhang
took them to see the official. "The tone had changed radically within a
few hours. Now the official asked: 'What else is there to discuss? Go
back and see what's on TV."
Premier Li Peng had gone on
television to declare martial law. "That put an end to my mission," says
Zhang. "I was disappointed by both sides, because I knew what a
historic opportunity had now been lost."
Immediate Efforts to Obfuscate the Massacre
On
the night of June 3, 1989, the army advanced on Tiananmen Square.
Hundreds of protestors who couldn't have imagined that the soldiers
would obey orders to open fire died in Beijing, and hundreds more were
killed outside the capital. The exact death toll is unknown to this day.
Efforts to obfuscate the massacre began immediately after it had
occurred.
Many of the prominent student leaders managed to
flee abroad. Those demonstrators who were arrested disappeared into
prisons for months or even years, and many were sentenced to death.
Those who publicly declared their solidarity with the protestors, like a
few prominent journalists, were demoted or fired. Party leader Zhao
Ziyang who, as Zhang later discovered, had requested his and other
academics' assistance, was deposed and placed under house arrest. He
died in 2005.
But the determining factor in the disappearance
of the Tiananmen massacre from China's public memory was the way the
regime dealt with the hundreds of thousands of sympathizers in Chinese
schools and universities the 1989 generation, which now forms the core
of China as a cultural nation.
"Sometime that fall, we were
summoned by the academy," says Zhang. "We were told to sit in a circle
and deliver our reports. When it was my turn, they said: 'Comrade Zhang
Lifan! What have you done?' In response, I asked: 'Is that a question or
an order?' It was an order, and of course I had done more than anyone
else."
Life after Tiananmen
He says he
received daily visits from the police after that. The interrogations
became increasingly harsh, and Zhang feared that he would be arrested
any day. "Instead, the mood suddenly shifted. University grants and
conference and research budgets increased, and academia blossomed," he
recalls.
Throughout the country, historians began writing
entire libraries full of essays and books about China's humiliation in
the opium wars, the history of Marxism and the rise of the Chinese
nation under the Communist Party. "Most of its was completely worthless
from an academic standpoint, and it didn't hold up as a historical
narrative, either."
Zhang continued to work for a period of
time. "I still remember what I said in parting: You and I, we no longer
belong in the same wok. We no longer fit together." Since then, he has
been writing his blog and occasionally publishing a book or an essay,
such as his memories of the funeral of Hu Yaobang published last year in
the magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu, which prompted complaints to the editors
by government censors. "Those who do not participate in writing the
official account of this country's history have to think very carefully
about what they are writing and how much of a risk they are taking,"
says Zhang.
Since the suppression of the Tiananmen uprising,
the power of the Communist Party has relied on four pillars, writes
China expert Minxin Pei: robust growth, sophisticated repression,
state-sponsored nationalism and co-opting of social elites.
China's
intellectuals play a key role in this power structure, voluntarily or
involuntarily. They benefit from the economic boom more than most
Chinese, and they are both victims of the censorship and surveillance
state and authors of a powerful account of the greatness of the nation,
the rise of the party and victory over China's enemies an account that
excludes all mention of the disasters and mountains of bodies littering
the country's history.
Oliver Stone: Deal with Your History
In
mid-April, on the 25th anniversary of the death of reformer Hu Yaobang,
Beijing's cultural establishment listened to what one of the biggest
fans of China among the West's creative classes, the history-obsessed US
director Oliver Stone, had to say. He had been invited to speak about
cooperation between Hollywood and the Chinese film industry at the
Beijing International Film Festival.
Stone's message was
unheard of, at least publicly. Before any meaningful cooperation between
Hollywood and China's studios could take place, he said, the country
would have to finally come to terms with its historical material. "Mao
Zedong has been lionized in dozens and dozens of Chinese films, but
never criticized," he told them. "It's about time. You got to make a
movie about Mao, about the Cultural Revolution. You do that, you open
up, you stir the waters and you allow true creativity to emerge in this
country."
He could understand Beijing's studio heads avoiding
subjects like Tibet or unrest in the Xinjiang region, he said. "But not
your history, for Christ's sake."
The audience applauded.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-china-is-erasing-memories-of-tianenmen-a-973885.html
