[BRIEF NOTE] On the 20th anniversary of the suppression of the Tiannamen Square protest

[rfmcdonald]

I've four memories of events in the outside world before I turned 10 in 1990 that stand out in my mind. The first was the failure of the 1986 US-Soviet Reykjavik summit. The second was the news that Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson cheated at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. The third was the fall of the Berlin Wall. The fourth, and final, was the Tiannamen Square protest and their suppression.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the crushing of the Tiannamen Square protests. The Chinese government is keeping a close eye on any commemorations of the protests and their suppression. Such commemorations as are happening are taking place elsewhere, in Hong Kong, among the Tibetan exile community, and elsewhere.

Dan Twining at Foreign Policy argues that, in any number of uchronias, the protests could have ended quite differently.

We should start from the premise that the crackdown, and China's subsequent rise as an authoritarian rather than a democratic superpower, was not inevitable. We know from both The Tiananmen Papers and Zhao Ziyang's memoirs that the Communist Party leadership was split on whether to use force against the protesters. There is little question that China's regime was under threat -- mass protests had erupted not only in Beijing but in more than 180 cities across China, endangering the regime's survival. We also know that popular uprisings in the 1980s and 1990s, in some cases of a smaller relative scale than those across China in 1989, led to democratic transitions from authoritarian rule in Sinic and other societies across Asia -- including in the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Mongolia, and Indonesia.

Moreover, China itself had a history of democratic thought and practice. Sun Yat-sen founded the first Chinese republic in 1912. The student- and intelligentsia-led May 4 movement of 1919 featured protectors, angry at the terms of the Versailles settlement in Asia, who maintained that China, to protect its integrity and interests against stronger powers in the West and Japan, needed to embrace a "new culture" grounded in Western notions of democracy and equality. The Democracy Wall movement of 1979 called for China to pursue a "Fifth Modernization": political freedom. In the liberal political climate of the 1980s, Chinese intellectuals and civic activists openly discussed agendas for democracy and reform, leading many Westerners -- and many Chinese -- to presume that China would be part of the global wave of democratization that accompanied the end of the Cold War.

The Tiananmen crackdown changed the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese economy, and Chinese foreign policy. As Minxin Pei argues, liberals like Zhao Ziyang were purged from the Party's leadership, transforming it from a broader coalition that included liberals, conservatives, and technocrats to a narrower and more cohesive one led by a conservative/technocratic elite. Not only did the Party change, but so did its relationship with society, as it pursued an aggressive new policy of coopting China's rising middle class into its ranks (which, in an inversion of Marxist class-consciousness, became a ticket to material success for the country's Party-card-carrying bourgeoisie).

Twining suggestions that as China moves from a producer-driven economy towards a consumer-driven economy, advancing up the ranks of developing countries and becoming a stable middle-income country, democracy in the Western sense could come to China. Curiously enough, this is also the opinion of a former protester whose 2003 interview was Far Outliers linked to by Far Outliers.

For so many years China had a stringently controlled educational system. From kindergarten to college, we all read the exact same books and took the exact same exams. We always believed everything that the government told us, and they told us it was an honor for ‘the people without property’ to shed their blood and sacrifice their lives for the cause of communism, fighting against the two great enemies, the Nationalists [KMT] and the Capitalists. We were brainwashed....

You have to realize that Deng changed my life - everybody’s life. He opened new doors for all of us. In 1982, my mother was among the first batch of scholars who were sent abroad to study, and she went to Harvard. She returned to become the director of a major Shanghai hospital. So we are grateful. And soon so many other changes happened.

I feel a great respect for our leaders. There are some, like Li Peng, who I still have no respect for. But Deng - soon we felt as though he had torn down the Berlin Wall. I wondered, if Deng had not handled the demonstrations the way he did would China be the country it is today? The whole nation is changing and people are more affluent, and I feel proud of being Chinese. People once looked down at us, and now they have respect for us....