The Gate of Heavenly Peace

"It’s a very powerful film. I was one of the historical consultants on it. It needed to be very focused on Beijing, because that’s where the footage was and the power of the film largely comes from that. I love the fact that in trying to capture what was going on there are very powerful interviews with workers. Han Dongfang, the organizer of the independent labour union, who is still a labour activist in Hong Kong, comes off more eloquently and powerfully than perhaps anybody else in the film. There are also a variety of voices of intellectuals at different places on the political spectrum, with different life experiences, as well as discussions with students. It’s a very powerful film and I think the website was ahead of its time in being coupled with a film from a very early point. It gives you excerpts from the film and also brings in other kinds of audiovisual materials and written texts. So there are sections from some books I’ve mentioned. There are also links to important articles including the best article from the time specifically about the role of the workers in the movement, which often gets eclipsed by the student narrative. The fact that workers were turning out to support the students is a crucial part of what worried the government so much. This was partly because of its own experience, historically, of students taking to the streets first and workers following them. This was especially the case when it was felt that the people in power were not acting as worthy leaders. The intellectuals spoke out as the voice of the nation, the voice of conscience, and the workers would follow the clarion call of intellectuals out onto the street, which is something that does not usually happen in the United States. But it was also because the combination of students/intellectuals plus workers was something that was going on in Poland at the time, with Solidarity. China’s leaders were very aware of this so they saw this multiclass activity — both in 1989 and since — as the thing they need to guard against. Like the best books, there are people who disagree with parts of its emphasis, or parts of its interpretation, but it is a really significant interpretation of the events of 1989. It generates debate and discussion at a serious level about very big issues, such as the potential for popular struggles to lead to change quickly. It raises a lot of very important issues, so I think it should be taken seriously in the way that a serious work of interpretive scholarship should be taken. Another important thing about 1989 is that Chinese events take on different significance or resonance as history moves on. Immediately after the movement, it was hard to separate it out from the images that were coming out of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and so forth. Now, when you watch this film, or think back to Tiananmen, it’s the images of the Arab Spring that are on your mind. There’s a lot of things that resonate — for example the ongoing importance of taking control of a large public square, which we saw again with Tahrir Square. I do think the complicated way history has moved on in the last 25 years is part of the mix in thinking about how the Chinese Communist Party has managed to stay in control. One of the lucky breaks the Party has gotten in the last couple of decades is the many places they can point to around the world where a change away from authoritarianism has led to a very divisive and difficult period. I’m always on the side of people struggling against authoritarianism, but it’s easier than it should be for the Chinese Communist Party to point to places like the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and say — without ever saying it in so many words — to the people of China, “You may hate us, but are you positive that what could come after us would be better? Couldn’t it end up like the former Yugoslavia, that just descended into civil war and ethnic cleansing?” More recently, they were very nervous about the Arab Spring protests when they began, but they were quickly able to find places in the Arab world to point to and emphasize in the official media as object lessons in roads you probably wouldn’t want your country to go down…The fact that the world is so deficient at the moment in terms of positive models for change is something that makes it easier than it should be for the Chinese Communist Party to tell the kind cynical tale it likes to tell about the dangers of change, the ease with which change might lead to chaos and turmoil. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes, but even though they’re not having that discussion, the official media can still saturate life in China — down to the television programs playing in the subway. They’re continually playing up the difficulties being experienced by other places in the world, countries that are experiencing chaos and turmoil, as well as reminding people of a time when China was weaker than it is now, and bullied by other countries. So there are images from World War II, and they particularly play up Japanese aggression in China, as a continual reminder of where China once was. Implicitly they are trying to pave the way for a situation where even some knowledge of what really happened in 1989 won’t necessarily lead people to the conclusion that China would have gone down a positive route if the troops hadn’t been called in. It’s a complicated and sometimes convoluted logic, but what the Communist Party talks a lot about is important, as well as what they try to maintain silence over. They work together. I think this is precisely the way to push the Chinese government. They are putting so much emphasis on the need for other countries to come to terms with difficult periods in their own past — but they’ve also got a lot to answer for on that score. I’ve been thinking about that. There were plenty of things I grew up not knowing about that happened in my own country’s past. Every country has things they’re not good at coming to terms with, dark periods from their own past. For example, I don’t think I ever learned in school about the forced internment of American citizens of Japanese ancestry during World War II. There were a lot of things that were swept under the rug, at least in textbooks. But it wasn’t that you would be fired from your job as a teacher if you brought one of those up in a classroom. That’s what makes the Chinese effort to impose amnesia different. This interview was published on June 4th, 2014 Bullets and Opium by Liao Yiwu (w/ an introduction by Ian Johnson ) would definitely be a contender for inclusion if I did this now, but not sure what I cut off the list to make room for it."