The People's Republic of Amnesia

"Yes, and a great book. It’s the most important book to deal with 1989 in a long time: to my mind at least in the past decade. It’s powerful in the way it revisits the events of 1989 through profiles of participants. For example, we hear from a soldier who was involved in the crackdown and has rethought his role in events since then. The book also has a new investigation of a massacre that took place outside of Beijing, a few days later, in Chengdu. It was known about in specialist circles so it wasn’t as if this was something she discovered out of nowhere, but she did some very determined and brave investigation of the details. So that is one contribution of the book. But the biggest contribution is its careful charting of the efforts by the government to suppress memory and discussion of 1989 over a long stretch of time, as well as the daring ways in which people have pushed back against that — figures like the Tiananmen Mothers, who she spent time interviewing. It’s a courageous book, it’s a well written book, and it’s an important one. We still don’t know that. There’s very little clarity, in part because there have been such limitations on the kind of investigations you can do. Through careful piecing together of the story of individual victims that the Tiananmen Mothers have done, we know that there were more than a couple of hundred who died. We just don’t know how high that goes. We know there was crowd violence against soldiers in which a small number were killed in quite gruesome ways. We know that a much larger number of ordinary civilians were killed. We know some of them were students but many were members of other social groups, some of them people who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, bystanders, people in neighbourhoods where shooting began. We know that many more deaths were caused by weapon fire than by tanks actually rolling over people. By the way if Louisa Lim’s book hadn’t come out, the book I would have put in this slot would have been Quelling the People by historian Timothy Brook. That remains the most detailed account we have of the massacre itself. It’s a very carefully researched work. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, what’s distinctive about it. First of all, this is not the only subject the government tries to hush up discussion of in China. What’s peculiar is the way discussion of 1989 is closed off so completely. There is discussion, in a very general sense, of the Cultural Revolution. You’re discouraged from investigating the details of who did what and where, but it’s not problematic to say casually in a setting, including even in university classrooms, that the Cultural Revolution was a very difficult time for the country and some very horrible things were done during it. In the case of 1989, this emphasis on absolutely no discussion is peculiar, especially because initially there was discussion of it. At the time, the government was encouraging discussion of it to gain adherence for its story: that this was just a chaotic riot that was going to plunge the country back into the bad old days of the Cultural Revolution, and that strong measures were needed. For months after the massacre, there was quite a lot of publication within China about it, trying to spin the story into a direction that would make the government’s actions look justified. Liu Xiaobo’s writings were even republished. He was described as one of the “blackhands” behind the movement. I’ve seen a copy of his collected writings published by the Party — to get people to read it and realize how misguided he was! Then there was a shift towards clamping down on all discussion of it. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I think there are a lot of events around the world that authorities would prefer people not to talk about or maybe even discourage people from talking about, and there are unpleasant parts of every country’s past that are left out of textbooks or don’t get the kind of attention they deserve. But the intensity of the Chinese government’s efforts to prevent discussion and this year – quite alarmingly — the move from cracking down on public commemoration to detaining and arresting people for a private commemorative activity is very, very worrisome. That would be one way to think about it. Or simply that if a full reckoning came out there would be no way to make it a look like a proportionate use of force. One thing that is going on now that is unexpected is that many people thought that over time the toxicity of the events for the Party would be diminished. The people in power would be less connected to the people who made the decision to use force. Maybe it was just a matter of waiting until more people with direct blood on their hands had disappeared from the scene. It would be easier once Deng Xiaoping had died, or people like Li Peng had faded from view. Part of the problem now is that Xi Jinping has identified very directly and intensely with Deng Xiaoping. So it’s getting harder rather than easier for the Chinese leadership to open the space for saying ‘This was a mistake,’ because it’s an action very much identified with Deng Xiaoping. That’s the biggest thing that hasn’t gone away. It’s important to always keep in mind how much the movement was as much anti-corruption as pro-democracy. Even though two of the books I chose have democracy in the title or subtitle I generally try to use other terms — to talk about it as a people’s movement, or a popular protest, because I do think that outrage at corruption, a real anger at unfairness, is what drove things — and still drives protests today."