NYR Blog

China After Tiananmen:

Money, Yes; Ideas, No
Perry Link
David Turnley/Corbis
Soldiers and demonstrators at Tiananmen Square, May, 1989


The June Fourth Massacre in Beijing has had remarkable longevity. What happened in and
around Tiananmen Square twenty-five years ago this June not only haunts the memories
of people who witnessed the events and of friends and families of the victims, but also
persists in the minds of people who stood, and still stand, with the attacking side. Deng
Xiaoping, the man who said go for the final assault on thousands of Chinese citizens
protesting peacefully for democracy, has died. But people who today are inside or allied
with the political regime responsible for the killing remain acutely aware of it.
They seldom put their awareness into words; indeed, their policy toward massacre-
memory is repression. They assign plainclothes police to monitor and control people who
have a history of speaking publicly about the massacre. They hire hundreds of thousands
of Internet censors, one of whose tasks is to expunge any sign of the massacre from
websites and email. Each year, on the sensitive day of June 4, they send dozens of
police, in uniform as well as in plain clothes, to guard the periphery of Tiananmen Square
and prevent troublemakers from honoring anybodys memory. Their official rhetoric
holds that the Chinese people have long ago reached their correct historical verdict on
the counterrevolutionary riot. If the authorities truly believed that the Chinese people
approved of their killings, however, they would throw open Tiananmen Square every June
4 and watch the masses swarm in to denounce the counterrevolutionaries. That they do
the opposite is eloquent testimony of what they really know.
The Chinese governments use of lethal force was no accident. It was a choice, the result
of calculation, and moreover was, from the regimes point of viewnow as well as then
the correct choice. We know from The Tiananmen Papers that people at the top of the
Communist Party of China felt that they were facing an existential threat in Spring 1989.
Major protests in the streets not only of Beijing but of nearly every provincial capital in
China led Vice President Wang Zhen, Prime Minister Li Peng, and others in the ruling circle
to conclude that the survival of their regime was at stake.
Tiananmen Square could have been cleared using tear gas, water hoses, or wooden
batons. (Batons were the tools of choice when the same square was cleared of another
large demonstration, of people protesting Maoist extremism, on April 5, 1976. The clubs
were efficient in that case, and few if any lives were lost.) The reason the regime opted for
tanks and machine guns in 1989 was that a fearsome display of force could radiate well
beyond the time and the place of the immediate repression. Democracy demonstrators in
thirty provincial cities around the country could be frightened into retreat. This worked.
The Chinese people could be put on notice for years to come that you had better stay
within our bounds, or else! This, too, worked. The fundamental goal was to preserve and
extend the rule of the Communist Party of China. This was achieved.
The fateful decision to order a military crackdown against its own people, however,
severely damaged the public image of the regime. In the early 1950s, a large majority of
the Chinese people embraced the ideals that Communist language projected in slogans
like serve the people, and these ideals gave legitimacyto borrow a piece of political-
science jargonto the Party and the ruling elite. The disasters of late Maoism took a
heavy toll on that legitimacy, but after Mao died in 1976, and through the 1980s, many
Chinese remained hopeful that the Party might finally lead their country toward a better
future. (With no real alternative, how else could one hope?) But then the bullets of June
Fourth killed this hope once and for all. In the words of Yi Danxuan, a former student
leader and now exile who was arrested in Guangzhou in 1989 for organizing peaceful
protests there, the gunshots actually stripped away the lies and the veils that the
government had been wearing. Now Yi saw that the Partys own power had been its goal
all along.
With no more legitimacy to be drawn from claims about socialist ideals, where else
could the men at the top generate it? Within weeks of the killings, Deng Xiaoping declared
that what China needed was education. University students were forced to perform
rituals of confessing their errant thoughts and denouncing the counterrevolutionary
rioters at Tiananmen. These were superficial exercises. But Dengs longer-term project of
stimulating nationalism and educating the Chinese population turned out to be very
effective. In textbooks, museums, and all of the official media, Party and country were
fused and patriotism meant loving the hybrid result. Chinas hosting of the Olympics in
2008 was a great victory of the Party. Foreign criticism of Beijing was no longer anti-
Communist but now anti-Chinese. Historic and contemporary conflicts with Japan, the
US, and splittists in Taiwan and Tibet were exaggerated in order to demonstrate a need
for clear lines between hostile adversaries and the beloved Party-country. The success of
these and other efforts at education has allowed the regime to use nationalism as one
of the ways it can redefine its legitimacy.
The other way has been money: the pursuit, acquisition, and display of wealth have come
to dominate peoples motives. (The language of socialist idealism survives, but as a veneer
only.) For many people material living standards have risen considerably, and Western
analysts have correctly noted how this rise has bolstered the regimes post-1989
legitimacy. The same analysts err, though, when they repeat the Communist Partys claim
that it has lifted hundreds of millions from poverty.
Here is how the boom in Chinas economy actually came about: during the Mao era, the
Chinese people were unfree in all aspects of their lives except the most mundane. After
Maos death in 1976, and even more clearly after the massacre in 1989, Deng Xiaoping
relented and told the Chinese people, essentially, that they were still under wraps in the
areas of politics, religion, and other matters of thought, but in money-making were now
free to go all-out. So they didas would anyone when given only one channel for the
application of personal energies. They worked hardat low pay, for long hours, without
unions, without workmans compensation laws, without the protections of a free press or
independent courts, and without even legal status in the cities where they worked.
Moreover, there were hundreds of millions of them and they worked year after year. Is it
strange that they produced enormous wealth? The fine details of the picture are of course
more complex than this, but its overall shape is hardly a mystery or a miracle.
In 1985 Deng Xiaoping began using the phrase let one part of the population get rich
first. That happened, and, not surprisingly, the ones who got rich first were almost always
the politically well-connected. Access to political power meant better access to resources
as well as better positions from which to practice graft, and the wealth of the elite began
to skyrocket in the mid-1990s. Income inequality in China grew until it surpassed that of
countries in the capitalist West and was exceeded only by some underdeveloped
countries in Africa and South America. In popular oral culture, and later on the Internet,
jokes, ditties, and slippery jingles (shunkouliu) consistently reflected strong resentment
of the wealth of the elite as well as of the unjust means by which the wealth was
perceived to have been gained. But such views, like other free discussion of civic values,
did notand today still cannothappen in the official media, where references to
equality, democracy, constitutionalism, unauthorized religion, and many other topics that
are essential to such a discussion are monitored and often banned.
The Tiananmen massacre, as if having a will of its own, seems to come back to undermine
whatever the regime claims as its legitimacy. In 1989 it killed the socialist idealism claim
once and for all; then, when Deng shifted to nationalism, stressing that the Party and
people are one, it was impossible not to recall when the Party and the people were on
opposite ends of machine guns. So the regime still needs to list massacre-memory as one
of the kinds of thought that most needs to be erased. It uses both push and pull to do this.
Push includes warnings and threats, andfor the recalcitrantcomputer and cell-
phone confiscation, passport denial, employment loss, bank-account seizure, and the like,
andfor the truly stubbornhouse arrest or prison. Pull includes invitations to tea at
which one hears smiling reminders that a better life is available to people who stop talking
about massacres; advice that it is still not too late to make this kind of adjustment;
comparisons with others who are materially better off for having made just that decision;
offers of food, travel, employment, and other emoluments (larger if one cooperates by
reporting on others); and counsel that it is best not to reveal the content of all this friendly
tea-talk to anyone else.
Gianni Giansanti/Sygma/Corbis
Italian fashion designer Valentino at Tiananmen Square, May, 1992
The pull tactics have been especially effective in the culture of the money-making and
materialism that has pervaded Chinese society in recent times. The emphasis on money, in
combination with authoritarian limits on open discussion of other principles, has led to a
poverty in the societys public values. Vaclav Havel wrote about the post-totalitarian
condition as one in which a pervasive web of official lies comes to constitute a sort of
second version of daily life. Echoing Havel, the Tiananmen student leader Shen Tong
observes that the reality of living in a police state is that you live in a huge public lie.
The scholar and fellow Tiananmen leader Wang Dan, in explaining the behavior of people
who, from no real fault of their own, become inured to lies over time, finds that they lie
subconsciously. Chinas celebration of money-making does make it different from Havels
Czechoslovakia, but hardly better. Far from melting the artificiality (as the theories of
optimistic Western politicians have held that it would), the money craze in some ways has
worsened it.
The new moneyed classes in China behave as if they are groping to figure out how new
moneyed classes are supposed to behave. During the Mao years, there was a caricature
that helped everyone to understand what bourgeois profligacy looked likefood, drink,
sex, shiny shoes, spiffy watches, slick cars, and so on. All evil. After Mao, in the era of
getting rich is glorious, people have looked for guidelines about how to behave with
money, and the bourgeois caricature is ready at handshiny shoes, spiffy watches, slick
carsnow valued positively, not negatively. Wealthy Chinese cavort in Bali and Paris,
where they lead the world in purchases of luxury items like Chanel perfumes and Luis
Vuitton handbags.
Materialism may not be exactly the right word for this new elite subculture, because it
need not involve actual material. Appearance-ism might be a better term. The final aim
of a persons activity is not a Luis Vuitton bag but the display of a such a genuine bag (not
fake, like many back home). If the display works, the bag was but its vehicle. What counts
is the surface. Hope for China is visible in the fact that, as this subculture has spread, so
has satire of it. An effusion of oral and online jokes in recent years has focused on fakes:
fake milk, fake liquor, fake antiques, fake photos, fake history, fake singing at Olympics
ceremonies, and much moreeven a fake lion in a zoo (a big dog in disguise). The Chinese
fiction writer Yu Hua has quipped that the only thing you can know to be real is a fake
fake.
Nearly all the satire, though, is private or, if public, anonymous. Very few people risk
principled objection in public. The regime calls this dissidence, and the costs of
dissidence are high. People find it smarter to lie low, perhaps fulminating in private but
not rocking any boats in public. Dissidents are viewed, even sometimes by their own
families, as somewhat odd, and as poor calculators of their own best interests. Friends
and neighbors keep them at a distancefar less because they disagree with their ideas (as
the regime likes to claim), but out of fear of absorbing their taint. When Wang Dan went
to visit his fathers hometown after he became known as a dissident, people guarded the
entrances to their villages to make sure he didnt come too near.
Some Chinese accept the regimes lies while others only pretend to, but with passing time
this distinction becomes less and less important. In either case peoples self-interest is
protected and they fit into normal society. In the end, as Rowena He puts it
in Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China, China is left with a
generation that cannot even imagine a society whose youth would sacrifice themselves
for ideals.
At a deeper level, though, Chinese people (like any) do not feel secure in a system built on
lies. The wealthy send their money abroadand their children, too, for education. In 2013
several surveys and reports showed sharp increases in the plans of whole families,
especially among the wealthy, to emigrate, and there is no reason to think that poorer
people would not follow this trend if they had the means.
We cannot say that the ethical deterioration in China today is due to the 1989 massacre
alone. The cynicism generated by the artificiality of official language has its roots in the
1957 Anti-Rightist Movement and in the Great Leap famine years of 1959-62. Mao
Zedong, much more than Deng Xiaoping, is responsible for what the Chinese artist Ai
Weiwei has called the psychic disasters deep within us, that cause people to walk with
a quickened pace and to see with lifeless eyes, as if having nowhere to go, and nowhere
to hide. Still, the 1989 massacre was a turning point. Without it, Deng Xiaopings formula
for the Chinese people of money, yes; ideas, noa policy that laid the foundation for so
much of what we see in China todaywould not have wrought its effects. The massacre
also laid the foundation of feara deep, seldom explicitly mentioned, but accustomed
dreadon which the intimidation of the populace has rested ever since.
A few weeks ago, Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, wrotethat:
It is hard not to feel a great deal of sadness at the backwardness totalitarianism has
imposed on China, Russia and Cuba. Any social progress communism may have brought
these societies is dwarfed by the civic, cultural, and political retardation it caused, and the
remaining obstacles standing in the way of these countries taking full advantage of their
resources and reaching a modernity that encompasses democratic ideals, the rule of law,
and liberty. Its clear that the old communist model is dead and buried, but it is taking
these societies plenty of time and sacrifice to shake off its ghost.
When Deng Xiaoping announced after the 1989 massacre that the Chinese people needed
education, and when his government launched a systematic effort to extinguish their
political longings and to mold them into patriotic subjects focused on nationalism and
money, he could have tipped his cap to Bertolt Brecht, who wrote: The people have lost
the confidence of the government; the government has decided to dissolve the people
and to appoint another one. In the long run it seems doubtful that the regimes strategy
can succeed, although the mounting costs of trying, not only for China but for the world as
a whole, could be fearsome indeed.

Adapted from Perry Links foreword to Rowena Hes Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the
Struggle for Democracy in China, which will be published this week by Palgrave
Macmillan.
March 31, 2014, 4:12 p.m.