that shattering Saturday morning

thoughts on 1989

Thirty-five years ago this morning, the world awoke to evidence the CCP ended the weeks of student occupation of Tian’anmen Square in central Beijing by sending tanks and PLA forces. While we don’t know for certain, military attachés out before and after the horror estimated more than three thousand students, then especially the elite of the nation, died on 3-4 June 1989.

Americans long believed we had a special bond with Chinese citizens. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, American missionaries joined Europeans in bringing Christianity to the distant, somewhat mysterious country with millions ripe for saving. Apparently those missionaries did not realise the Jesuits preceded them by three hundred years, actually converting few but used by the central government to learn a bit about the west. Missionaries from small towns in Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Alabama arrived with enthusiasm and burning desire to spread The Word, sending home years of letters about life in China. Gradually a bond, an assumption of how Chinese viewed us as we thought we knew them, developed. This involvement suffered a shock when Mao ousted the missionaries and anyone else threatening him in 1949 when the Civil War ended but Americans were optimistic about a redress should China become available to them.

Countless young Americans who embarked on teaching English in the New China after NIxon’s reopening, aimed at thwarting the Soviet Union far more than at changing China, in the 1970s and 80s actually continued efforts to Christianise, believing China needed our human rights, our technology, and our form of government once we could establish deep roots in the society. Businesses began investing in a cheaper labour market opened by the Four Modernisations Deng Xiaoping implemented to reverse China’s deteriorating global position.

The 1989 protests were not about freedoms, as so often portrayed in the press at the time. The students had fashioned a figure somewhat like the Statue of Liberty around which they encamped over several weeks. Their demands, however, centered on accountability for corruption and nepotism within the CCP, a common response to central governments in China regardless who was in power. Students original gathered following the death of Hu Yaobang, a putative reformist within the geriatric set of revolutionaries who marched with Mao to create the PRC. Student protests gradually evolved into wider demands but they never went so far as to demand western-style freedoms and government per se. They certainly pleaded for accountability, for jobs, and for what they thought the future needed be in the PRC.

Why did the Party, under Deng, mow down the students in their prime? Didn’t they realise they were perhaps sacrificing China’s future? While we will likely never know the specifics internal squabbling since any reports are suspect in a closed Leninist system, subsequent indications are that Deng and the Party elders believed the movement threatened their existence and their government. This was the same year the Soviet bloc was coming apart at the seams.

The CCP worries primarily about its survival as the governing entity in China, regardless of the source of the threats it faces. We must remember they may well act irrationally, to protect their survival.

Gorbachev played an indirect (to my knowledge) role in the saga by visiting Beijing in May. The student encampment at the Square, a vast public area across from the iconic entrance to the Forbidden City, attracted international attention the Party elders found embarrassing—and contributing to disrespect of their control in China. It’s tough to reconcile leaders so fragile over any sense of lacking control over their society with their harsh responses. The disrespect and the student activities evoked luan, the chaos motivating all Chinese leaders determined to prevent it.

The world had begun to equate Deng and the ‘modernisers’ (it was a relative idea) with a path towards lessening control over their public by 1989, though it’s hard in retrospect to see why. We saw what we wanted to see. The Party, however, responded to any and all popular actions in the 1970s and 80s with harsh tightening of societal reins to assure control. Far too many of us saw what we assumed would occur rather than what was unfolding. Always questions assumptions was a failure we had here, and actions create consequences.

We also ignored the pleas from the Party for the students both to end the hunger strikes and the assembly on the Square. Westerners did not recognise the Party had only limited patience because it felt broadening of these protests could continue threaten its power, engendering upheaval across the society. Finally, we did not recognise that the CCP we thought we had influenced was actually still determined to pulverise opposition in any form.

The Party maintained a fiction, when it engaged with critics abroad in the past, that no one died on Tian’anmen (I literally heard those words from a PLA general in the 1990s) but that is parsing words. The Party is well aware people died as they have spent the last thirty-five years working ever harder to eradicate any memory of the student protests among the Chinese people. Many of those who participated were imprisoned while others went into exile, now living in their fifties and sixties with no effect on politics within the PRC.

We once had a researcher from Harbin come to NWC. After posing the questions she intended, this youngish woman awkwardly asked if we had heard of ‘the supposed 1989 protests’. Back in 2001, she was asking if there had been a protest so we shared a video we had of the protests. I doubt she could or would have posed that question today as the Party vets those going abroad so carefully.

Protests in Hong Kong reminded us for years of the fury and frustration regarding this horrible incident. With Beijing’s increasing control over the Special Administrative Region, now into the second half of its agreed upon fifty-year reversion to Chinese control, protests no longer exist and would result in incarceration in Xi Jinping’s CCP-centric era.

I was in Beijing in December 1988, just under six months before the tenth anniversary of the horrible events. By that time, blue plexiglass barriers, ‘for maintenance’, already prevented entry into the Square on the crisp morning I first visited the Forbidden City. That solution to preventing protests seems so quaint compared with the police patrols, identification checks, and other activities to prevent protests or even discussions that I witnessed on subsequent visits. I cannot imagine how tight the control must be today to assure that Xi and his Party face no possibility of public dissent to commemorate this national humiliation.

Westerners imposed sanctions on China, some of which—many military—still exist, in the aftermath of Tian’anmen. Economic boycotts faded away much more easy as business in the 1990s and early 2000s saw China as the land of golden opportunity. Today, the picture of business links to China is mixed as some worry about intellectual espionage and repressive CCP policies while others still see a market of hundreds of millions of greater consumers.

Missionaries are less welcome under Xi than they were during the prior two decades. Xi is waging a war against any factors that could challenge the Party’s centrality to life in today’s China. I have no doubt that some proselytising continues but at great peril and never with nearly the success expected. China ironically seems to have roughly the same number of CCP members as it does Christians, a hair under a hundred mllion out of a population of 1.4 billion.

Our expectations, still so high on 3 June 1989, have never returned to the same heights. China today represents the ‘pacing threat’ or the regime voted most likely to alter our role as the superpower. Tensions grow daily over Taiwan, trade, tariffs and seemingly everything else. It appears that 3-4 June was a permanent shattering of our views of China but perhaps I overestimate.

The post-Tian’anmen protests in June 1989 are the only ones where I have ever participated, one of countless people in a crowd demanding that we do something. The problem, of course, was that we have virtually no ability to intervene in the domestic, sovereign affairs of another government. We have a record of ‘regime change’ which is pretty bloody poor, particularly recently, so we ought take that into consideration when critics bemoan Beijing’s activities, often against their own people. The deep dark dirty secret is that many Chinese want stability over chaos anyway. They cannot understand our current turbulence in the western democracies.

The event of 3-4 June when Beijing deployed the tanks shattered U.S. illusions about bilateral relations by showing that the Chinese leaders were not buying into our norms about behaviour. We are still reeling from that thirty-five years later. The CCP is more haunted by the event than we are as they continue preventing even the smallest amount of recognition of its actions among its people. All that self-protection, however, takes a lot of energy on the part of the Party while it continues engendering anxiety about their own people.

We are thirty-five years later the two biggest economies, two potent militaries, and two increasingly divergent sets of interests around the world. Where does this all lead?

I welcome any rebuttals, challenges, support, or questions on this or any column. I appreciate you reading ACC any day. Please feel free to circulate this column if you feel it of value. Thank you so much to the subscribers who provide financial support to this effort as you motivate me daily.

Be well and be safe. FIN