Was just watching this video on YouTube on one of the channels I follow (China Uncensored), and thought I’d share it here for anyone interested. It doesn’t really go into what happened, and talks more about WHY the CCP has done it’s best to get people to forget about the massacre, and, interesting, forget about what the protests actually were (and weren’t…they weren’t what the CCP has said, which is violent protests against the communist party or a call for the party to be put down). Since yesterday was the anniversary of the massacre part, and since I was watching the video, I figured I’d go ahead and post it here, FWIW. Feel free to comment on the video, or thoughts on either the protests or the massacre or anything related.
Tiananmen Square has been a bit of a live issue here recently, coming up to the anniversary, because the CCP really doesn’t like to be reminded about it, and is busy leaning on people to try to minimise any talk of it. This is just one strand of the ‘exactly how much influence does China HAVE here, and how much influence do we WANT it to have?’ conversation, which is not as big as perhaps it ought to be.
At the time of the massacre, the then-PM shed tears in public over the dead protesters, and gave 40,000 Chinese students currently in this country leave to remain (I don’t think they stayed for ever, but certainly for a number of years)
My impression of the protests is that the protesters didn’t seem to mind autocracy - so long as it was *benign *autocracy, and as long as it was actually delivering them a decent standard of living. This guy’s recollections of the night go into a lot more detail about what the protesters were upset about - they disliked that they were being left behind by the new capitalists systems that were opening up China economically - while still being just as autocratic socially.
The descriptions of the activism in the Conversation piece actually remind me a lot of descriptions of life in the hard-core Communist China of the 60’s and 70’s (from biographies of people like Jung Chang etc). Going on marches and protesting about stuff was normal and accepted behaviour - it was encouraged by the Party. Because often the Party wanted to do something, or get rid of someone, but with a ‘for the people’ veneer, so they would tell people to protest against some official - even an official who was a Party member themselves. Then these ‘spontaneous’ astro-turfed events (“Denounce Comrade So-and-so!”) could be used as grounds to sack/beat up/disappear whoever was the latest target.
With that context, I wonder how many of the protesters even fully realised they were doing something the government really, really didn’t like.
Other random thoughts - I’m not sure to what extent by 1989 Chinese people could expect to have control over their education and employment, but certainly earlier in the 80’s they seem to still have been very much in the scheme where you did what you were told, and were employed where you were given employment. So all those academics getting upset at seeing their wages shrivel while newly-capitalist peasants started getting rich probably couldn’t even throw in the towel and go do something else - not without serious penalty, anyway.