Week 13, November 30: “The Tiananmen Incident”: 1989 & the Fate of the Revolution
Readings
1. Selected posters (dazibao), documents, and interviews from 1989, from Cries for Democracy (Ed. Han Minzu) and Voices From Tiananmen Square (Eds. Mok Chiu Yu and J. Frank Harrison)
2. Sun Xiaogang’s poem “The Rites of Marx.” (In Chinese and English.)
3. http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1257295/independent-thinker-horace-chin-treads-bold-path << read this as a cross-text for HOng KOng and its recent debate on the meaning of Tiananmen and the annula vigil here.
3. Recommended : Vukovich, "Uncivil Society," from China and Orientalism. Read the first one-third of this—for a quick overview/history of the protests. You can skip the rest or plow through it if you want to read your teacher for fun and thrills. :-)
4. Recommended The Gate of Heavenly Peace, a documentary by Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon that reflects the dominant view of 1989 (outside of
China). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoqnKuBD5AI
1. We will look at some clips from this in class... The whole thing is long and deeply biased in at least two directions (weirdly anti stduent in some parts and extremely anti-Mao) but nonetheless worthwhile viewing.
Re-Cap of He Shang discussion/lecture:
1. As Marx once said : “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852).
A. Repeat of May 4th type of clamor for Westernization and laments and tirades against Chinese civilization but WITHOUT the critique of the West and imperialism that was there in the 1900s and 1920s. It’s also a more exclusive form of nationalism and is really not so cosmopolitan: peasants are excluded as is anyone not modern/urban/”blue”>>> i.e. “feudal.” It’s also gung-ho capitalist and gung-ho Deng/post-Mao turn in a propagandistic but anti-Maoist and anti-tradition way.
B. It also internalizes a whole lot of orientalist or colonial discourse about China/ the Orient (as backward, stagnant and irrational and etc.) [That China was willingly closed to the outside world and xenophobic] We can call this “Occidentalist” (fetish of the West) or orientalist (essentialist about the bad/Other East/Asia/Orient). But the take-away is just that the views of He Shang are just as ‘biased’ or ‘self-interested’ as those in Li Shuangshuang.
C. DOES call for more democracy and more political reform. BUT it doesn’t specify what this means. The CR and 1989 also used the word “democracy” a lot. It also says intellectuals are the key class now…. As well as entrepreneurs. So this may be a shallow/elite view of democracy
On to Tiananmen:
Recommended (optional) SCREENING: The Gate of Heavenly Peace, an “area studies film” by Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoqnKuBD5AI << in Chinese/mandarin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVvwA_34WB8 <<< English
I included above my 2009 article on Tiananmen and “orientalism.” We won’t have time to get into the latter term. But you can read the essay for a basic and detailed account of the protests and what people were saying. You can also read it to get some sense of the scholarship on Tiananmen and its meanings. Basically what I am trying to do is situate and critique the
‘Western” or global fascination with 1989 on the one hand; I find it not very thoughtful but more about what people want to see and what they already knew (about the oroent/China/Mao etc). ON the other hand,
As you will also tell from the other readings, one of the themes of my own reading of Tiananmen is that it was also a workers’’ movement—the emergence of those independent trade unions or more simply, those workers’ groups and their solidarity among themselves and with the students and ‘masses’ was highly significant. This was a lot of people with quite sharp and incisive criticism a and demands. The emergence of a workers movement also posed a major threat to the government. It is one thing to have a bunch of young students in the square and protesting and refusing to leave. It is quite another to have a lot of angry and politicized workers doing the same. There are much more of them, for one thing, and they are protesting the economy and making very substantial claims and criticisms.
Few people talk about workers participation and involvement in the 1989 event, so already it is significant to do so because this was indeed a major aspect of those months in Spring ’89.
and ideas were not that radical or threatening. It is thus all the more tragic that people were killed—I don’t think the students wanted to overthrow the Party at all, and in fact many said they did NOT want that but only to be recognized, to ask for more participation and so on. Anyway do read the article of you want more background info and an analysis of the meaning of
Tiananmen – of my interpretation of all of this. . The other main thrust of the article is about western understandings of it and a critique of Western scholarship and media on Tiananmen. I call it orientalist b/c it represents a mirror for Western understandings of China (and what it needs and desires) AND of Western understandings of themselves… the “West” wants to believe it is free, normal, democratic, and so on, and that this is what China wants, or should want, and what it is secretly becoming.
Coursepack/Documents:
1. Workers. A Workers Tiananmen. Worker’s perspective/standpoint.
This is a new perspective on the movement. Different than what 90 percent of people think of. But it is key. All those millions of people on the square: most of them were NOT students or intellectuals or foreign reporters. Most were workers of one type or another. Some of them (just a small portion) were forming “autonomous federations.” These were non-official, independent unions (there were already official unions from the Mao era, but these had been fully
disempowered and co-opted by the new Party by 1989).
We are going to walk through these documents in class. Read all of them and get a sense of:
One document even refers to the workers as the true vanguard of the nation who has every right to overthrow dictators. In the context of the PRC, esp in the still uncertain 1980s, that is a real threat.
BWAF doc’s have very specific demands. But also call for: general strike across the city. Contrast with the students’ demands/writings/speeches? But first let’s read some of the Workers’/BWAF documents.
So in sum: leftist rhetoric, sounding very Maoist or communist at times and espousing leftist politics. What are the implications of this? For one thing, it tells me that all those decades of leftism in China, especially among the urban workers, were very much real. Workers’ believed it and held on to it. Today, it is less strong but still there even 20 years after 1989, esp for workers in the official unions or who are the sons or daughters for former union/labor-identified workers or activists.
GENERAL STRIKE: This is what was emerging in Tiananmen, thanks in part to all the workers taking to the square and staying there, not going to work. This means the economy is on the verge of being shut down temporarily. This in turn is a huge threat to the Party (or to ANY government in charge…). If no one goes to work but stops until the government changes, or dissolves, then this is a massive power of ‘the people’ – who are primarily workers or ‘ordinary’ and not merchants, intellectuals, students -- to force change upon unwilling politicians.
Conversely this also means that the state has to concede power, or brutally crack down and remove the people.
Obviously the latter is what happened: my point here is that this was NOT the result of the students’ activities. The students were key in kicking off the protests and they were the focal point or ‘official’ leaders of the moment. The government ignored the workers federations, and did not address the workers/people as a whole but only the students. But it was the sheer
numbers of people (workers of various types) that made the 1989 movement/event such a big deal. And a big threat. They gave the students ‘face’ in some ways-- but in any case could basically ignore them.
Begin with brief re-look at the documents I gave out. You can see the range of expression and the emphasis on patriotism and the students desire for self-recognition by the government as both patriotic and deserving of a leadership role as the conscience and future of the nation.
You can also read this section of my article for more examples of students’speech/writing.
As compared to the workers’/BWAF’s texts: the students are much more mild. And much less political. Sometimes they invoke the word democracy but without defining it or expounding on it. They do NOT necessarily mean the American or Euro system of government—some may have and certainly some westernized intellectuals did, but we don’t really know what they meant by “democracy.” It can mean a bunch of things in theory. This is NOT necessarily criticism. My point is that we make a fetish out of the term, and don’t really know what we’re talking about when we use it.
Self-recognition: the students wanted to be recognized as patriotic and loyal to the nation, and sometimes to the Party. Many were NOT anti-Party at all, or even anti-‘reform,’ unlike a lot of the workers’ stuff we looked at. “Face politics”: same thing really (recognition/respect).
FAMILIALISM: What is this? Attachment to the family above all, having roles within groups akin to a family model. The family-model of seeing the state, nation, and society. Instead of a political society you have a family. The nation and “the people’ are like your family in some ways. You understand your relation to other people in these type of terms: loyal or unfilial, mother/daughter/son/etc. A lot of this is based on unstated rules and rituals. These relations are all about FEELINGS, emotions, harmony and the like. It is in some ways strongly feudal or
Confucian or just ‘traditional.’
What is wrong with familialism? Isn’t it perfectly Chinese or “Asian” in a way? (Or is it Confucian or feudal? ) I think it is all of these and none of them—it is a way of seeing other people, and can be bad or good. The question is: do you want to do this? Is it effective?
1. You can see it as infantile and immature: you treat others like a family but they are NOT your family. It is an illusion. Better to have public or impersonal relationships in political situations.
2. You can certainly see how this contradicts the previous decades emphasis on solidarity, Marxism/revolutionary youth identity, and so on. Also contradicts the gender-neutrality and women’s liberation aspects of previous revolutionary discourse. IN this sense familialism as anti-=political or politically conservative.
3. Politics and public life or public thinking: it should be impersonal by definition. It can be about passions and so on, but should always be impersonal and public in that sense.
3. How to sum up Tiananmen from the student-centered perspective?
If we look at what the kids/youth were actually saying, their thinking or ideology so to speak, then frankly it is not that impressive and somewhat shallow. But what else should we expect? This is not Wang Zheng et al.’s era—there was no leftist propaganda or identity to draw on so easily. There was also nothing that took its place much, aside from a DE-POLITICIZING and merely ‘patriotic’ call to support reform and opening up. They were reading and learning on their own and this always means a slow process of understanding, say, what democracy or politics or your own history is.
The fact that they did not really know or think hard about “democracy” is not such a bad thing. Maybe it means that “democracy” was not the main goal of the movement. Maybe it means that “democracy” is just an empty symbol or “floating signifier”. Also: I don’t think 1989 should be remembered as primarily a student movement or even a Democracy Movement. I’m not convinced that either was that important at the time. What was it then? I do not really know, but then neither does anyone else. It was a Protest Movement. It was about venting and protesting and asking for “reform.” Those are all good things and ppl have a right to do them. Even the workers were not really asking for that much-- better working conditions and autonomous unions of their own. Those are much more specific and helpful though and are democratic too, in a sense.
What is democracy? What did they want? What do you want? What do I want? Perhaps it makes sense to be specific and get down to ‘brass tacks’ when we protest or when we think about politics. Feelings need to be held in check and rationality needs to kick in. What is in your interest? What is in ‘theirs’? Remember how land reform worked…..
