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The Price of Heavenly Peace: Tiananmen Square Fifteen Years Later
- The University Press of Kentucky
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THE BURDEN OF HISTORY Anyone who has walked along Chang’an Boulevard in Beijing in the last fifteen years cannot help but be transported back to the spring of 1989. The ground still elicits the images of the tens of thousands of students and workers who gathered there to demand democratic reform of the communist state. Even today, it is as if the square itself still vibrates with political meaning. This often happens when politics, history, and location meet and intertwine. But whereas certain locales such as Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate have come to represent the victory of freedom and democracy over fascism and totalitarianism, Tiananmen Square has taken on the opposite meaning: of the crushing and inevitable collapse of the democratic impulse and the gradual erasure of its memory. Students of history know all too well that the pursuit of democracy usually has more powerful enemies than allies; in Beijing on June 4, 1989, this historical lesson was to prove harrowingly true. In the West, the crackdown was seen as the bloody result of the actions of a totalitarian government. But the realities of the situation are more complex. Even though the 1980s saw dramatic reforms in communist countries, Chinese reforms were more moderate and cautious. Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformist agenda was echoed in China by the liberalizing vision of major political figures such as Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, who saw China’s opening to the world as being more than merely economic in nature. The rigidity of the political systems that were formed and hardened during the cold war were beginning to show signs of thawing. The word reform became as dangerous in certain circles as the word revolution had been eighty years before—it was a threat to all that existed—and the encrusted, conservative elite that held power could smother the newborn impulse in its cradle. But even the most conservative of the ruling elder statesmen knew that economic reforms were needed. The political and economic disasters of the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s had brought the Chinese economy to the verge of collapse. Reform meant absorbing ideas and institutions from the West, but only in terms of economics, The Price of Heavenly Peace Tiananmen Square FifteenYears Later Michael J. Thompson 141 technology, and science; what was explicitly excluded were the political and moral ideas of the Western political tradition and its cultural products. In 1983, a political movement under the title Eliminate Spiritual Pollution was initiated to eradicate what the conservative elite saw as “decadent” and bourgeois elements in Chinese culture and art. But despite this, a “futurologist school” began to emerge. Through an analysis of Western thought and science, the reality of the gap between their “backward society” and the “modern world” was discovered , and the futurologists—led by figures such as Jin Guantao and Li Zehou—opened up a new horizon of consciousness for younger students and intellectuals. The centuries of Chinese isolationism had created not only a thirst and hunger for modernity but also a bitterness and anger at being held back from realizing it. Meanwhile, the realities of the newly reformed economy that Deng had created by allowing markets to be resurrected in the countryside and allowing international capital investment and joint enterprises between Chinese and international companies were extraordinary. As the new economy flourished and reform deepened, the calls for democracy were once again, after decades of silence, beginning to be heard. The 1980s saw the emergence of a “market fever” (shichang re) that gave birth to a “cultural fever” (wenhua re). The rise of living standards and the yearning for a “true” modernity rekindled the old yearnings from the radical movements of the 1920s. The slogan “Democracy and Science” had been the perceived solution to Chinese backwardness back then, and it was only logical that it was seen as the solution to the same problem in the 1980s. In literature, with novelists such as Gu Hua and Can Xue, and in films, with directors such as Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, and Tian Zhuangzhuang, Chinese culture was preoccupied with a project of self-critique that fed desires for political reform. It was only a matter of time before social and political crisis would shake China to its foundations. Throughout the twentieth century, democracy was never a foreign idea to Chinese intellectuals or activists. It is common for conservatives in the West to see the 1989 protests as the outgrowth...