Neither Gods nor Emperors

"Yes, I like that about it. It’s sometimes forgotten that that was one of the songs that the students rallied to. Calhoun is now director of the London School of Economics. He was an outsider to Chinese studies, but he was in China at the time of the protests in 1989, teaching a course on social movements. He brought a freshness to thinking about what was going on that sometimes people who are specialists in a topic miss. One of the first things that caught my attention in a short piece he wrote was how the snowballing of the movement — the number of people joining it — had a lot to do with friendship circles and people being brought into the movement due to connections among classmates. There’s this interest in the nitty-gritty of what gave coherence to this rapidly growing mass movement. Once he became fascinated by the protests, he immersed himself in the literature on China , going deeper and deeper into Chinese history. He pays a lot of attention to the historical precedents for the movement and the links to student movements of China’s past. At the time, a lot of the commentary and press coverage focused on the protests going on in other parts of the socialist world. Sometimes the rootedness in China’s own specific traditions, and things that made these protests really quite different, were glossed over. Flagging the role of The Internationale gets at this. The movement was, in some ways, calling on a Communist Party to live up to its own professed ideals, as opposed to saying — as many protestors simultaneously on the streets in Poland or East Germany were saying — ‘We’re sick and tired of everything associated with Communist Party rule’ or ‘We think of the Communist Party as an external group that’s been imposed on us.’ In China, the Communist Party arose with the struggle for national liberation. The students really wanted Chinese leaders to be the kinds of people they claimed to want to be, and to lead a Party that stood for the things they claimed it should stand for. That was certainly part of it. I don’t think Calhoun says this, but in many ways the Tiananmen protests — if there was a parallel to an eastern or central European event — were more like the 1968 rising, the Prague Spring –a last effort to tie a popular movement around reformist figures within the Communist parties that were in control. The Chinese students didn’t want any particular reformist leader to take control, but they wanted the reformist strains within the party to come through, somehow. That’s venturing into alternative history or even science fiction – which is fascinating to speculate on, but…What I do know is that, while I wasn’t in China 25 years ago, I was there in 1986-7 when there were the warm-up protests to 1989. At the time, there was a real sense of open-endedness, of people wondering what kind of shape China would take. China seemed to be going into uncharted territory (as did the Soviet Union) with reformist experiments going on and who knew where they would go? After 1989, that sense of open-ended possibility was closed off. It became clear that the Party was not going to give up its monopoly of power. Something emerged quite quickly, this consumerist version of Communist Party rule. It was something new, it had not been seen before, but China was very much on a set trajectory. There would be a combination of consumerism, a mantra of stability being necessary, and an emphasis on nationalism. These kind of cohered and from the 1990s onwards there hasn’t again been that sense of ideas being in play that could take things in all different directions. Yes, though it’s important to mention there has been variation over the last 25 years. There have been moments of tightening and moments of loosening. One of the disturbing things right now is how frequent the periods of tightening are and how rare the moments of relaxation — that allow intellectuals to at least feel they can catch their breath — are. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Certainly there are people who make that argument — about the need for stability so people can lift themselves out of poverty, is the way I would put it, rather than anybody doing the lifting from above. There’s also been an ongoing debate about whether things could have turned out differently if there had been more compromise early on within the movement. A lot of the second-guessing by people who took part is about whether a willingness to accept small gains and retreat from the square would have made a difference. That whole debate is a central part of the film, The Gate of Heavenly Peace , that I mention as my final choice. That’s a real debate. At the time, there were voices within the movement calling for a more conciliatory approach. But the dynamic seemed to privilege the opposite. The more idealistic the voice was, the more magnified it became, and caution became seen as a lack of heroism."

"This is a rather interesting book by Craig Calhoun. He is a sociologist, not a China specialist. But he happened to be in Beijing at the time of the 1989 uprising and, unlike most China scholars, he was smart enough to stop other things he was doing and go out and study this remarkable movement that was unfolding around him. So he went out and conducted some guerrilla surveys among the students to find out what they were up to and what it was they wanted. He ended up writing a book that stresses the way the students saw themselves as part of a long historical tradition of intellectual protest in China. He also points out that, over time, protests really change their character. So Calhoun is in Beijing throughout the course of the movement. And he saw it beginning as a very modest movement, in which students are asking for things like better food in their cafeteria and so on. Then as the movement gains steam, and gains new followers from other parts of the country, it becomes increasingly radicalised and the leaders come to see themselves as martyrs in the Chinese heroic tradition of intellectual martyrs. One of the things that I find very interesting and important about that book, for the study not only of China but also of social movements more generally, is this appreciation that the things that actually may trigger protests at the beginning, are not necessarily the same things that explain how they unfold, and how they end. One really has to understand social protest as a process in which both the protesters themselves – and their relationship with the state – have a very important influence on how things change over time. So it’s a book that gives a very good understanding of what was on the mind of young democracy activists in 1989 in China and how diverse their concerns were. For example, he makes the important point that democracy, as many of these young Chinese students saw it, had very little to do with free competitive elections. He quotes one young student who says, ‘Oh we have a much more fundamental and radical understanding of democracy than you liberal Americans! We read Rousseau and we care about the general will.’ So Calhoun suggests that, although the West really embraced this as a democracy movement, these young students in China really saw themselves much more in the tradition of the May 4 movement, or the New Culture Movement in China: a movement of intellectuals who are speaking out as the conscience of the country, who are very concerned about corruption, and are very anxious to safeguard the sovereignty of China. The student protesters saw themselves as the latter-day incarnation of earlier Chinese intellectual protesters and were not necessarily trying to turn China into a kind of blueprint of the US or England or some other liberal democracy. Well, for one thing, it explains how the Chinese state was able to demobilise the 1989 movement so quickly and permanently. If what they were in fact pressing for was greater influence by intellectuals and a stronger state, China has seen those things happen since 1989. What hasn’t happened since 1989 is democratisation. There have certainly been some important political reforms – more village elections and so on and so forth. Those predated 1989 and some of them have gathered steam since then. But intellectuals these days do have considerable importance in Chinese society. There’s freedom for most of them to travel abroad, to come back and say all kinds of different things. And China has greatly enhanced its international status since 1989, in large part because of the success of the economic reforms. So these are the kinds of issues then that presumably might make another 1989 less likely, if 1989 really was about things other than creating a democracy in China. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I think it was Wuer Kaixi, one of the student leaders in 1989, who when he was interviewed, in response to a question about why he was out there on the streets protesting, says something like, ‘Because we young Chinese want to be able to wear Nike shoes and take our girlfriends out to bars at nights and have a good time.’ And students can easily do all that now. Calhoun’s book, by making it clear that there were a lot of different things on the minds of young Chinese protesters, quite aside from what Westerners might see as real democratisation, helps explain why it is that since 1989 the protests that have occurred have been less politicised and much more about local kinds of issues and economic concerns and interests."