On 89.64.30: What did the Massacre mean for Taiwan/China/Rest of the World?

So yesterday was the thirtieth anniversary of the massacre at the Tiananmen square. I read some posts and tweets, watched a few videos, doing stuff what most Chinese speaking people not living in mainland China could have done.

I realized that the narratives has become more and more polarized. Young Chinese patriots now troll around the web claiming not a single citizen was killed; Chinese nationalists in Taiwan find themselves in an awkward position of not wanting to provoke the CCP but still needing to say something; and for extreme Taiwanese nationalists this is simply a foreign affair, none of Taiwan’s business.

In the non-Chinese speaking world, some older eastern Germans seem to still be very grateful of how the Chinese students inspired them, and of course the Trump administration did not let go such good chance of attacking their authoritarian dictatorship rivalry in the trade war.

Since 2014 I have identified myself as left leaned and conditionally pro-independence. Thus naturally, none of the above stances represent what I agree totally with (I will talk about that in the very end of this article). But I would like to elaborate below how these stances gradually shape, due to the impacts of the massacre on different groups of people around the world.

(Note: I left out Hong Kong in this entire article, although it actually played more role than Taiwan during the spring of 1989, and the impacts of the movement’s failure is more relevant there right now.)

For Taiwan: The Chinese Dream Disillusioned

In the late 1980s, Taiwan was just about to begin its democratization process. This was the time people started to question the legitimacy of the governing Chinese nationalist party. Since anti-communism was always the core ideology of the party, there were actually many fantasized depictions of the CCP regime and a dream of people from both sides of the strait holding hands towards a unified and fully democratized China together.

The massacre broke that dream. Now the Taiwanese knew for the first time, not by propaganda of the Chinese nationalists but by real time radio broadcast, what kind of regime CCP really was. Many thus turned towards the position of seeking independence; even those who still dreamt of an ultimate unification knew that it would only be possible only after China was truly democratized. Nobody knew when that would happen then; nobody knows when that will happen still.

A year after the massacre, Taiwanese students would have their own movement that called for complete democratization. They succeeded in fulfilling the cause. The divergence between the two sides of the strait would thus continue to grow until this very day, when people in Taiwan discuss the massacre so much more than their counterparts across the strait, as if it were the Taiwanese who were being murdered then.

However, as the Chinese nationalists now emphasize more on the nationalist part of their ideology than the anti-communist part, it becomes more and more awkward for them to publicly denounce the CCP, as it would be interpreted as “anti-China” in the current political atmosphere on the island.

This provides the pro-independent Democratic Progressive Party and other pro-independent parties the opportunity to dominate related discussions and frame it as a proof of communism dictatorship and the threat of democracy in Taiwan being lost.

Apart from that that, most pro-independent Taiwanese would agree that a democratized China is a smaller threat to Taiwan, and that there is a moral obligation to speak out for basic human right violations on top of that. Some would still argue that putting too much effort on a foreign affair is not beneficial to the cause of Taiwanese independent, and the only lesson we should take from this massacre is that “China is an evil nation that no forms of opposition is allowed.”

For China: “A Dozen of Rioters’ Life in Exchange of 30 Years of Prosperity (and Silence)”

It is false to say that there has not been social movements in China after 1989. In fact, NGOs in Taiwan estimate that the number of protests in China is at the scale of a hundred thousand annually, many of which we probably would never have the chance to know before they were cracked down.

However, wiping out an entire generation of the brave and active people in a nation’s public memory, either by tanks or the Great Firewall, still had a long term impact on the nation’s political arena.

The first and most obvious is that, though there are still some local protests going around in the nation, none has ever evolved into a nationwide uprising against the central government again.

The second is that, since the government has successfully whitewashed all the memories and records of the massacre (along with many other undesired history of the republic), a younger generation of students with ignorance or even resentment of any past or existing social movements in China has emerged.

The official line for the CCP on the massacre is that the government decisively crashed down a counterrevolutionary riot at minimum possible cost, killing a dozen of rioters in exchange of the prosperity of the nation in the last three decades, as if the rioters were sacrifices of some necessary ritual for economic development.

Although not totally unexpected, it was still surprising to learn how deep this mindset of “necessity evil” had been enrooted into the Chinese I had met. In order for a greater good of the society/nation(/party?), they could accept some form of violations of basic human rights from the government.

It is very normal that in a society, there will always be some supporters of a more authoritative rule. But from my own experience, among the younger generation in current China, this type of mindset was disproportionately higher when compared with their peers in Europe, US, or Taiwan.

It is of course a fallacy to conclude that Chinese youths were always born this way, given the enlightenment (and disasters) they brought to the nation throughout the 20th century with rallies, protests, and revolutions.

Instead, let us imagine for once, that 1968 not only ended with the total victory of conservative powers across western Europe, but also all the activists killed, detained, or evicted. Let us imagine for once that, there has been no mention of that breathtaking year in the history textbooks afterwards, and no traces could be found in libraries, historical databases, or on the internet.

No pictures of May 1968, no events for the 50th anniversary, no rock and roll, no hippy style dressing.

All you were taught in your life was that, a small group of evil communists tried to overthrow the benevolent government, and luckily they were cracked down and dealt with. In exchange, you could live prosperously in this ever growing society.

Even if this sounded not that reasonable, there would be no voices from the other side. You might recall one of your middle school teacher accidentally mentioned that she was in some kind of movement once, but she suddenly changed the topic and it had never occurred to you to ask her more.

Ultimately you could have learnt more, you would tell yourself. But why brother into such trouble, when 10 million of your peers were studying so hard to get into a good university? That would be what really mattered, right? After all, you cannot eat democracy (note).
Note: “You cannot eat democracy.” is a famous quote from the Taiwanese tycoon Terry Guo, when he was commenting on the political system in China. He intended to run for president in 2020.

Later, you managed to go to a good university and then went abroad to, say, China. Whenever people meet you, they started to ask if you know anything about 1968. You were amused at first how ignorance these foreigners were, but later you got agitated. “How dare they assumed I am being brainwashed for all the time!” You thought. Ultimately, the government was right to some extent: there were always foreign powers with twisted version of ideology that wished to infiltrate the nation, including you.

I would argue that this is rather the reason why we witness a nation’s youth turned from totally idealistic to totally indifferent in just two generations. They are now convinced that the “western model”, be it democracy, human rights, or “white leftism”, will never be suitable in China; there, only the greater good for the nation’s economic development matters.

A socialism state turned into an ultimate utilitarian calculator. And this had had global implications.

For the World: The End of Any Hope for (Operable) Democratic Socialism

The editor’s column of the people’s daily claimed that the uprising of citizens around the nation in 1989 to be a “counterrevolutionary riot” and aimed to “destroy the socialism structure”. Ironically enough, in retrospect, it was the massacre itself that ended any hope of an operable democratic socialism system.

It wasn’t just the students who urged for democracy during the uprising. Workers and ordinary citizens also rallied and mobilized to support the cause. Democracy, however, did not mean just a representative voting system to some of them. The neo-liberalism oriented economic reforms in the 1980s meant workers were now being excluded from the decision making of factory operations, and as economic crisis emerged in the late 1980s, some workers were determined to reclaim their supposedly entitled rights in a socialism state.

Those people wanted democracy; not just the right to vote, but in a more empowered sense in their work field.

And I can think of nothing more socialism than ordinary people mobilizing and making decisions themselves in a daily routine. This was how an ideal Soviet system should look like, and many did anticipate that the communist party would adopt this view of democracy into the field of economy at the end of the day.

True, not all people shared this vision of “socialism with a human face”. Some student leaders did believe that total liberalization was the only key to China’s problem; and thus they also urged for a complete liberalization on the market. These differences on what democracy really meant was never trivial, and it is hard to believe that the dispute would have settled, should the movement be able to continue. Nevertheless, such discussion would be crucial for the nation and other socialism states alike, had it been done properly under a democratic reform.

But the massacre changed all of that, and not just in China. Seeing one communist party being so brutal and inhumane, now people from all over the socialism states realized that it was a naive thought to keep those parties in power; socialism or democracy, they had to choose.

If 1968 marked the end of any democratic socialism attempts in the capitalism bloc, then 1989 was the end for that in the socialism bloc. In this wave of democratization, most former socialism states would get a nominal representative democracy at a cost of introducing a liberalized market. The Chinese will get a liberalized market without a representative democracy.

Final Remarks

I knew this massacre and the spring of 1989 ever since I was at middle school, but yesterday was the very first time I looked deep into what really happened. That was not a pleasant journey.

But it was not the blood and the corpses that really haunted me. Instead, I had a hard time believing that there were really a million citizens gathering in the city of Beijing during that one and a half month. And when I did manage to do so, I found myself reluctant to acknowledge the fact that, despite all those people that once demonstrated on the street, everything only went into the opposite direction from what they had expected.

When that occurred to me, I could not help but remember another more recent and personally involved mass social movement, the spring of 2014 in Taiwan. Luckily there were no death tolls (though there was some bloodshed), but given the conservative politics going on right now against LGBTQ rights and energy transition, everything seemed to be also going into the opposite direction from what we have expected.

Ultimately, we will always find something awful in every movement. Perhaps it is a Sisyphus’ task to change anything with these movements, no matter how huge they seem to be at first. 1968, 1989, or 2014; we always saw a comeback of reactionary forces after all of them.

But occasionally something that happened during these small sparkles of hope caught our attention: the workers in Beijing voluntarily doing logistics and sending messages in a flock of motorbikes. The citizens holding hands and singing L’ Internationale in front of approaching soldiers. The taxi driver escorting an ARD reporter into a Korean city under martial law. The pickets who decided to stay with the brutally evicted crowds in the Executive Yuan, even when they were told to retreat.

And this is where my stance of the movement lies: I believe that ultimately, these are the stories in the movements we ought to remember. Not the student leaders. Not the political struggles within the CCP. Not the moral lessons based on today’s political needs. These are stories of ordinary goodness that will continue to inspire ordinary people into another Sisyphus’ task. These are the acts that will, in the long run, determine if a society is truly developed or not. But if we want more people to do something similar, then they must be remembered first.

There are still many activists, in Taiwan and in China, fighting for daily causes that is now going on. I sincerely hope this to continue in the future, and that both 1989 and 2014 will never become the last major progressive political movement in the two lands respectively.

Dawn, 05. Jun 2019
Freiburg im Breisgau