EPOCH WEEKEND
June 5–11, 2015 | W3
www.TheEpochTimes.com
COURTESY OF 64MEMO.COM
It is a kind of dead
zone of thought
and speech.
A student from a college radio station
reads comments of pro-democracy
supporters on Tiananmen Square in
Beijing in May 1989.
Students sing as they hold a prodemocracy protest on Tiananmen
Square in Beijing in May 1989.
CATHERINE HENRIETTE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
For Chinese,
the Tiananmen Square
Massacre Is Still
Too Taboo to Talk About
By Matthew Robertson
Epoch Times Staff
When I asked my wife, who is Chinese, to see whether some of her
friends would be willing to speak
with a Western reporter about the
1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, she snapped her head around
and blurted out: “Are you nuts?!”
A question like that, she said,
would be the fastest way to put a
friendship on ice.
The regime-ordered slaughter of
hundreds, or perhaps thousands,
of Chinese people 26 years ago is
not really a topic of conversation
among Chinese youth today. In
private, one approaches it with the
utmost circumspection; in public, not at all.
Even getting Chinese to talk
about how they talk about the
massacre—not what they think
happened, or who was right and
who was wrong—has its peculiarities. None of those I spoke with
permitted their names to be used,
for instance.
Others would not speak directly
to me, but only through a friend
already known to them. One even
agreed with the idea that there
should be restrictions of speech
on the topic.
Until traveling to the United
States and Googling the topic, my
wife was one of the truly ignorant.
Once, in response to an inquiry
about the massacre by a traveling foreign tourist, she asserted
that the government was merely
restoring stability after violent
unrest by radical students—and
anyway, it was none of your business. It was “like a mother smacking her unruly child.”
A young man who works in
the international department of
a major state-run company, when
asked for his view on the incident,
said the kind of thing that one
would say if there was a political
commissar on the other side of
the mirror glass.
“I’m a Party member, and I side
with the Party. Those extreme
young people were instigated by
hostile foreign forces in an attempt
to split China,” he wrote on
WeChat, a popular social media
app, before dialing it up a notch.
“My Party took the correct action
at the correct time and strangled
those evil forces in their crib.”
Then he added the Chinese
phrase that equates to a wink and
a nudge: “You know.”
The phrase, “ni dongde” in
Mandarin, was first popularized
by Lu Xinhua, representative
for the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress, when
asked in March 2014 whether
Zhou Yongkang, the Party’s former security czar, was indeed
under disciplinary investigation. Lu’s response equated to an
admission that Zhou was, without actually providing the admission. Everyone was in on the joke.
And it is precisely this form of
political discourse that is so exemplified by the place of the Tiananmen Square massacre in the
public sphere: you don’t say it,
but everyone knows it. Except it’s
no joke.
Saying the wrong thing about
the Tiananmen Square massacre
has landed people in jail, while
others who call for accountability around the massacre are harassed, put under house arrest, or
forced to go on “vacations” in the
weeks and days leading up to the
June 4 anniversary.
This is a dilemma for both the
Party and for the public. The
regime in some ways wants the
youth to forget about the massacre—but it also wants them to
know that something terrifying
happened, and that they shouldn’t
talk about it. A kind of dead zone
of thought and speech.
“The Communist Party doesn’t
really want people to completely
forget about it, like it didn’t happen, like it was before June 4. How
would that do?!” said Hu Ping, a
veteran democracy activist, at an
event commemorating the massacre held in Flushing, New York,
recently.
His point is that before 1989,
the young generation was fearless, generally unaware of the Party’s capacity for extreme political
violence, and had grown up in the
relatively liberal post-Mao milieu
of reform and progress. “Now,
they’re unhappy with the Party,
but they won’t protest. Their terror hasn’t faded.”
For some, it has a little. A group
of Chinese exchange students
recently penned a letter to the
regime, demanding transparency
around the events of June 3 and 4,
when thousands of People’s Liberation Army soldiers marched on
Beijing and gunned down protesters. “This piece of history has been
so meticulously manipulated and
blocked for so long that many people know little of it,” the letter said.
The regime in
some ways wants
the youth to
forget about the
massacre—but
it also wants
them to know
that something
terrifying
happened, and
that they shouldn’t
talk about it.
The official response was telling.
Global Times, a nationalist tabloid
run by the official Party mouthpiece People’s Daily, published an
editorial that accused the signatories of having been “brainwashed”
during their sojourns overseas. A
few days later, an urgent notice
was sent out ordering the piece
be deleted from all official websites, according to China Digital
Times, which tracks such propaganda notices.
Chen Chuangchuang, one of
the signatories of the letter, at the
democracy event on Tuesday, June
2, said, “The authorities claim that
a consensus has been reached on
the June 4 question. This is really
shameless. How did they get the
consensus? They used violence
and media control. You can’t criticize them or you get thrown in
jail. But if you want to praise them,
they won’t let you either. They just
don’t want you to discuss it.”
Hu Ping said that ideally for the
regime, the issue will remain a forbidden topic, yet not forgotten.
“They want people to remember the terror, but they want
them to forget their righteous
indignation.”
The absence of “righteous
indignation,” as Hu Ping put it,
seems indeed evident among
many young people.
A thoughtful Chinese undergraduate, studying statistics at
a prestigious university in the
United States, said it was important that those of his generation gain an objective and balanced view about “June 4th,” as
it is usually called in Chinese.
He agreed to speak as long as
his name was not used. We will
call him John.
John is of the view that “we
need to give the public and the
government time to reflect.”
He believes that 10 to 20 years
from now, the Party will start
allowing discussion on the matter, a version of it will appear in
textbooks, and a revised official verdict will emerge. “We
have to give the Party time and
patience to accept mistakes, or
poorly made decisions.” He is
OK with that.
John has actually taken the
time to find out about what happened, having spent hours reading material and watching documentaries about the protests
and the massacre, including the
three hour epic “Gate of Heavenly Peace,” directed by film-
maker Carma Hinton and Australian sinologist Geremie Barmé.
His view is that essentially the
students attempted to “taste an
unripe fruit,” as famously put by
student leader Han Dongfang.
In China, he has only ever spoken to people he was very close
with—for example, a former Chinese teacher whom he had known
for years, and who was subject to
the brainwashing classes held for
months in the wake of the massacre. Such caution is due to the fact
that he cannot otherwise be sure
that the people he is talking to are
not spies sent by the Party, he said.
Despite the obvious frustrations of these restrictions, John
in fact supports them. He said
that the recent letter by overseas
students was “concerning” and
“extreme.” “If we suddenly opened
up or revealed the so-called truth
about historical events, there’s a
kind of risk that people will go to
the other extreme.”
What’s that? Anti-Party speech,
of course. As our conversation
progressed, it became clear that
the freedom to discuss the June 4
massacre is coequal with the freedom to discuss the legitimacy of
the Chinese Communist Party
itself. And as long as the Party
is the only game in town, speech
that calls the Party into question,
John said, should not be allowed.
He made the point not out of any
particular allegiance to the Party
itself, it seems, but simply as a
result of having internalized its
own self-justifying narratives.
When the irony was noted to
him that even this argument—
ultimately the most considered
kind of support one can give
the regime—would not even be
allowed to be made in China, he
readily agreed. “If you say you
support the students, then that’s
dangerous. And if you say you
completely support the Party on
its decision, then that’s also dangerous. In China, I am very cautious about this type of debate.”
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