Government propaganda posters found around Beijing. This one writes: “The Communist Party is good. Socialism is good. Opening up and reform is good.”
This week marked the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, when the Communist Party of China disembowelled the Democracy Movement and showed that it would willingly use guns and violence on its own people in order to stay in power. The day’s death toll counted hundreds, or possibly thousands of casualties – depending on whose estimate you believe. To this day, the Chinese are not allowed to honour the tragedy.
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This year, fearing that people would use the anniversary as an opportunity to rally dissent, the government started on its annual crackdown early. In the past few months, artists, lawyers, NGO workers, academics and other inconvenient people have been monitored, detained, told not to leave the house and some have been taken on forced holidays.
My brush with all this comes from helping to screen a documentary on gay rights last month. The LGBT movement has lately been tolerated by the government and even embraced as a partner in dealing with China’s growing HIV/AIDs problem – that doesn’t mean gay rights activists don’t get prosecuted still. Whilst we knew that civil society was under pressure, the support we garnered from foreign embassies meant that things would go as planned – or so we thought: Hours before the event was due to start, policemen visited our venue to intimidate the organisers and order them to cancel the event.
Some NGO workers were asked to “have tea” with the police. This is a common way of detaining and questioning people without having to worry about formalities like the law. The screening had nothing to do with the Tiananmen anniversary, which I guess shows the lengths the government’s paranoia can go to.
There are cracks of resistance of course, but that’s limited. Several Chinese friends of mine have posted various cryptic tribute messages on Wechat, (a kind of cross between Whatsapp and Facebook with nearly 400 million monthly active users). These include pictures of candles and fallen leaves, as well as references to censorship and Lego reconstructions of the Tank man.
Even private tributes are a bad idea. On the 3rd of May, a small group of lawyers, academics and mothers of students killed in the crackdown met in someone’s house to commemorate the incident. Five participants were detained, two of whom have been denied medical care for serious health problems.
Everyone knows this is all bullshit, but in reality, the Party’s strategy is working pretty well. For most people in China, the 4th of June was just as normal as any other day, and there is now a generation of adults who don’t know about the horrors of 1989 at all. It was only last week that I was chatting with a Chinese artist who used to teach at a prestigious university in Beijing. He told me that during one class, he wrote the numbers “64” and “89” on the board (The 4th of June is known as 6.4, kind of like how the 11th of September 2001 is 9/11). He asked his well-educated class what these numbers meant. No one answered, until eventually one girl asked if they were body measurements.
“China is Heading Up”
I wanted to see what normal people thought about Tiananmen, or at least see what they would reveal to a whitey-westerner like me. People are pretty friendly over here and often come up to offer their opinions on my country or ask me what I think of China. So, on the eve of the anniversary, I wandered around the area where my university is located, trying to butt into random people’s conversations and ask them about Tiananmen.
One student said she’d learnt about it from watching an online documentary, and said it was definitely wrong to kill unarmed students, but there is nothing she could do about it. She also said that all the history they’d learnt at school was biased – to which her friend replied by calling her “an unpatriotic extremist”.
One friendly tipsy man came up to me as I was eating some street food, and asked if I would join him and his friends for a beer. I asked if he knew what day tomorrow was and he said “Yes, if they’d been able to go through with it, China would be different. Don’t ask my friends – we’re eating and drinking, we don’t talk about that kind of thing. Chinese people don’t talk openly. But really, it was very bad – there are certain people who should die.”
Apart from these two, most people I spoke to were oblivious, indifferent or defensive. One student I chatted to said: “It’s in the past, I wasn’t born then”. I showed him the famous “tank man” photo on my phone. He looked pretty uncomfortable and said that China is “special”. I felt like a bit of a knob, as though I’d gone up to a random black guy in the USA and shown him a picture of someone being lynched by the KKK like – “What do you make of this, eh?”
This poster advertising Xi Jinping‘s “Chinese Dream” of everyone working hard for the good of China, can be found in a lot of subway stations at the moment. The Chinese on the right hand side of the poster, writes “The Chinese Dream, The Subway Dream”. On the left it is written: “High level development”, “Dream”, “Beijing subway”, and “Power”.
Others gave me vague explanations, saying I wouldn’t understand because of China’s special history and culture. An older guy who was actually in the square 25 years ago said: “At first I was on the side of the students, but now I think the government is right. There is no right and wrong, it’s not simple. Everyone has a different perspective. You don’t know enough, so you can’t really understand.”
Another woman said: “Oh I can’t talk to you about this.” She then talked for quite a bit about how she couldn’t talk, and closed with “You are too young to understand. You foreigners can talk openly, but we can’t. Chinese culture is different. ”
From my unscientific survey, I got that the impression that the Party’s censorship strategy is working. But perhaps more significantly, people accept the Party because of its massive economic reforms, which have transformed the social and physical landscape of the country since 1989. Even the Western media like to talk about how the Party has presided over the “lifting of millions out of poverty” in the last few decades. I don’t really think they were “lifted” – the Chinese people took advantage of the Party’s hands-off approach to the economy by dragging themselves out of poverty, through working long hours in shit conditions for low pay. But maybe that’s just me.
In any case, people in China are richer than ever. For the average Chinese person, it is easier to appreciate those vast material improvements instead of questioning the order of things. In a country where famine, extreme poverty and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution are still a living memory, that’s not very surprising. As the woman who works in the shop next to where I live tells me, “I’m not poor, I have an apartment. Why would I complain? China is stable. The students were right back then, but they had no brains. They got excited and didn’t think about the consequences. Think how disorderly China would be if they had succeeded.”
Like in most countries, the majority of people don’t spend their days pondering social injustices. They worry about normal things like exams, not getting fat and finding a good job.
More on China:
Meet the Chinese Parents Who Go on Dates for their Kids
Has China’s One-Child Policy Bred a Generation of Dog Lovers?
Why Police Brutality Won’t Stop Environmental Protests in China
