Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Tiananmen, Forgotten - New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/opinion/tiananmen-forgotten.html?emc=edit_ty_20140603&nl=opinion&nlid=18615288&_r=1

Tiananmen, Forgotten

By HELEN GAOJUNE 3, 2014

    BEIJING — I don’t remember the first time I heard the term liu si — June 4 — which is how the Tiananmen protests, the widespread demonstrations in 1989 that ended in bloodshed, are referred to in China. It was perhaps sometime around 2003, when I was 15 or 16. The word was probably uttered at the dinner table by one of my parents, both of whom were on the Avenue of Eternal Peace, the street in front of Tiananmen Square, on that night. They bore witness to the senseless killing, a memory that has haunted them ever since.
    I do remember the first time the topic came up in conversation with my Chinese peers. On June 4, 2009, the 20th anniversary of the crackdown, I was shopping with a friend at a convenience store near Tsinghua University, when she, a junior at the university, turned to me, next to a shelf of colorful shampoos and conditioners. “Some people have been talking about this incident, liu si,” she said. “What was it all about?”

    Twenty-five years after the massacre, the topic remains taboo here. I try to piece together the events of that spring through underground documentaries, foreign reports and conversations with my parents. Yet the more facts and anecdotes I gather, the more those crowds and gunshots seem unreal, like tragic scenes from an old foreign film.

    To my generation, people born in the late 1980s and 1990s, the widespread patriotic liberalism that bonded the students in the early 1980s at the start of the economic reform period feels as distant as the political fanaticism that defined the preceding decades. Chinese leaders, having learned their lesson during the Tiananmen protests, have kept politics out of our lives, while channeling our energies to other, state-sanctioned pursuits, primarily economic advancement.

    Growing up in the post-Tiananmen years, life was like a cruise on a smooth highway lined with beautiful scenery. We studied hard and crammed for exams. On weekends, we roamed shopping malls to try on jeans and sneakers, or hit karaoke parlors, bellowing out Chinese and Western hits.

    This alternation between exertion and ennui slowly becomes a habit and, later, an attitude. Both, if well-endured, are rewarded by a series of concrete symbols of success: a college diploma, a prestigious job, a car, an apartment. The rules are simple, though the competition never gets easier; therefore we look ahead, focusing on our personal well-being, rather than the larger issues that bedevil the society.

    Many of my Chinese peers, for example, are unfamiliar with the stories ofChen Guangcheng and Ai Weiwei, whose courageous struggles against the state are better known among my Western friends. Topics such as the religious repression in Tibet and military crackdowns in Xinjiang barely make a dent on the collective consciousness of my generation. The few times that I’ve spoken to my Chinese friends about the self-immolations among Tibetan monks, I’ve been met with looks of surprise. A few seconds later, some have asked, “Why?”
    Perhaps nowhere is this indifference toward politics and civil rights more pronounced than in the insouciance of young people about the Communist Party’s attempts to expunge historical truths from public memory.

    The majority of my generation still believes, for instance, that the war against Japanese invasion in the 1930s and ’40s was fought primarily by Communist soldiers, while the Nationalist army “passively resisted the Japanese and actively combated the Communists,” as told in my high school history textbook. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution mean little more than the scanty facts we had to memorize for the national college entrance exam.

    The massacre of 1989, the most recent tragedy of all, is also the most forgotten: One of the first victims of the massacre, Jiang Jielian, was a junior at my high school. While his mother, Ding Zilin, and other mothers of the victims, are still seeking justice for the death of their sons and daughters, Jiang’s name is known to few of my classmates.

    The party is responsible for distorting my generation’s understanding of history through state education and blocking our access to sensitive information. Yet even those who are well-aware of the state’s meddling make little effort to seek truth and push for change.
    When I returned to China after finishing college in the United States in 2012, I was shocked to discover how few of my friends use VPN, software that allows one to scale China’s Great Firewall and access blocked sites like Twitter and other media platforms. Well-educated and worldly, they nonetheless see censorship more as a nuisance of daily life, something to be begrudgingly endured, rather than an infringement on their freedom of speech.

    “I have to keep an eye on my watch when I browse foreign websites,” a friend at Peking University told me. Contrary to academic institutions worldwide that aim to make information available to students and scholars, Peking University charges an hourly fee for on-campus access to foreign websites. “It’s a little annoying, but I don’t browse them often anyway,” my friend explained. “Except when I check my email.”

    If the previous generations learned the cost of political transgression through persecutions and crackdowns, today’s youth, especially those from elite backgrounds, instinctively understand the futility of challenging the system. After all, most of the time, power interferes with our personal lives only in the form of nettlesome restrictions. These inconveniences — from censorship to the vehicle license lottery, a system that distributes a limited number of license plates to a huge number of new drivers who apply each month — feel not unlike the dogmatic words of Marxist philosophy in our school textbooks, which we mock in private but dutifully memorize and copy onto exams.
    Rebelling against these hurdles seems both naïve and unproductive — an understanding that the system has inculcated into us early on — as it would likely achieve little. Circumvention and compromise help us move forward, in a society where the price of falling behind is surely greater than the minor harms in our daily lives caused by state power.

    Over time, such an approach is rationalized, and even defended by the very group of young elites who in previous generations have been the most passionate advocates for change.

    Last October, Xia Yeliang, an economics professor at Peking University, was dismissed from his job after making bold demands for political change. The school insisted that Mr. Xia was fired for poor teaching skills. When the news broke, scores of university students rushed to defend the school’s claim on social media from what one called “Western media’s typical tactic to smear the image of China.”
    “Outsiders may pay more attention to freedom of speech, but students here care more about academics and teaching,” a friend who was a student at the university said to me at the time. “Neither side should impose its opinion on the other.”

    Today, most of my high school friends, having graduated from top Chinese universities, are working at state banks and government-owned enterprises. Several have passed the competitive civil-service exam and landed cushy positions in government. Nationwide, China’s best and brightest are chasing the stability and prestige offered by the state system: A survey conducted by Tsinghua University reveals that state-owned enterprises and government organs rank as the two most desirable destinations for university graduates.
    Outsiders, as my Peking University friend might say, may lament the contrast between the conservative outlook of today’s Chinese youth and the unbounded liberalism of the Tiananmen generation. But among the minority of my peers who are familiar with liu si, the rosy romanticism on the square in 1989 takes on a different hue today, when viewed in the fluorescent light of a government office cubicle.
    In a recent conversation with a high school friend, who is now an editor at People’s Daily, the flagship of the state-run media, he brought up the subject of Tiananmen. An avid follower of Western news and user of Facebook, he shrugs off the urgency for Chinese society to revisit the event. “What do you think it can bring us, to resurrect liu si?” he asked. “Nothing is going to change. We have to move forward.”

    Helen Gao is a journalist based in Beijing.

    11 comments:

    1. If we simply forget crimes out of convenience and political correctness because the perpetrators are still in power we would become slaves by our own choice. Let me ask this question of my friends. Why remember the Holocaust , WWII war crimes like the Nanking Massacre of 1937 committed by the Japanese Militarist government ? It is because we must learn our lessons from history lest the tragedies will happen again in our time and in future. As Albert Einstein correctly said :- " Our society will be destroyed not by the bad guys but by those who remain silent in the face of injustice." That was what happened during the brutal rule of the Nazis led by Adolf Hitler in WWII Germany.

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    2. My above argument is borne out by the above article. I quote :- "The party is responsible for distorting my generation’s understanding of history through state education and blocking our access to sensitive information. Yet even those who are well-aware of the state’s meddling make little effort to seek truth and push for change. "

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    3. 以我的愚見,歷來的中國政府都辜負了老百姓,國民黨的抗共先抗日,宋家王朝的貪污舞弊,共產黨的三反五反,大躍進,文化大革命,以致現時的太子黨無法無天,六四天安門慘案,都是血的指控,老百姓只能自求多福,革命先烈在天之靈,豈能安息. 共產主義的唯物理論,是一切不人道罪行的來源。資本主義的致命傷,是以貪婪為動機,要改變為相對更憐憫的態度和價值,才合人性及天道。以我個人而言,不需要太深道理,不需要什麼複雜政治理論,也可了解,以武力屠殺老百姓的政權,天地不容。為什麼不以拘捕和比較合人道的手法去處理呢?明顯是殺雞警猴,藐視人權和生命價值,用一切手段維持獨裁高壓統治。令人髮指,亦令人望而生畏,迫使我和家人,變作民族叛徒,移民他方。可笑地,更以必須壓止動亂為藉口,更加不准許任何型式的提及。對歷史不負責,結果是繼續無法無天,毒奶粉,蔗渣工程,繼續害及無辜生命,抗議者一律拘捕,這樣政權,有何面目見江東父老?

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    4. https://www.facebook.com/notes/joseph-k-h-cheng/六四感懷/177455922312346

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    5. 這叫官迫民反。獨裁政權原本便是一種,自毀性的制度。專政便無 反對派,但是權力卻是最腐化的東西。沒有別人能推倒獨裁者之下,這些壞東西便以權謀私,目中無人。久而久之,他們便以為自己是超人,無止境地加強迫害老百 姓,最終便釀成法國大革命一類的全民反抗,最終獨裁者必定滅亡。這是永恆不變的歷史定律。

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    6. 革命不必一定要扔頭顱,灑熱血。革命也可以是一種生活態度,長期不斷的改進自己和社會。就有如民主是一種處事態度, 互相尊重每個人的表達議見權,放棄以暴力﹝行動或言語上的暴力﹞解決問題。必要時以合理行動,維護平等公義。最重要的是不斷改進自己,勇敢承擔應有責任。這便是一種延續辛亥革命的好途徑。就有如國父所言:「革命尚未成功,同志仍須努力!」

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    7. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-27679364

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    8. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-27682899

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    9. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-27685055

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    10. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-27670781

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    11. http://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-27410482

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