Tian An Men Square

We talked about Tian An Men Square in my Rise of China class. It was pretty interesting.

Warning::Controversial

So there were about 100,000 students and other people protesting in Beijing for about one month. In fact, these protests were happening in many cities in China, and many students got free rides to Beijing, too, so that they could participate in the protests. The government was really ambiguous about supporting it or not supporting it. This is because there were some factions leveraging for power in the leadership. Then, some students decide to step it up a notch and make it a hunger strike. They hunger strike for 3 more weeks before the crackdown occurred.

First, the nature of the event. In the West, it was viewed as a major pro-democracy event or at least a human rights movement. Indeed, the students themselves pitched it this way to Western media because they knew that Western audiences would respond to those messages. However, the nature of the event is pretty complex and has a very Chinese twist. It was on the 80th anniversary of another historical protest event in 1919. That was a movement when Chinese people ostensibly were protesting the Treaty of Versaille where China got shafted after participating in WWI. It was a part of this treaty, too, that Taiwan didn't get returned to China from Germany and instead got passed to Japan but I'm not sure if that was really a key issue at that time. Anyway, this protest event was called the May 4 Movement, and it was a bunch of intellectuals who felt it was their duty to their nation to expose problems with the nation and offer solutions. So this was a patriotic movement, it was about the collective, it was about an elite leading the way so that China can stop being humiliated and stand up. It was also the birth of contemporary Chinese literature, ditching classical style writing and writing magazine and books in the vernacular. So in that way it was sort of like a democracy movement. It was about how Chinese need to unite and get proactive in kicking out foreigners and other people taking advantage of Chinese. The Treaty of Versaille's also discredited democracy and capitalism as a model since the foreign countries were democratic and capitalist. The lesson taken away by Chinese people, too, was that imperialism was an inevitable product of capitalism.

Anyway, fast forward to the 80s. The Cultural Revolution, generally considered a major disaster had ended by the end of the 70s. For once, the leadership did not have a direction or strong ideology for people, and things were kind of depressing for a lot of people. The 80s were a time when the leadership was basically like, ok, everyone calm down, let's do some practical reforms, be patient, and shut up. There were some leadership shuffles, too, which is why there wasn't any strong ideological direction provided. A new generation of students didn't really get to participate in the Cultural Revolution because they were too young, and actually they kind of feel like they missed out on all the Revolutionary movements. So, they seek to recreate a May 4 Movement, and felt it was their patriotic duty as intellectuals to speak up mostly about corruption issues. A main issue was also for students to be able to organize their own clubs. I'm not exactly sure why that was such a big deal, but apparently that was a big deal. But in general, the students were not trying to get individual rights and rights for other Chinese people.

Actually, most of the fighting was around the periphery of Tian An Men Square. The footage by the Spanish media shows no one was killed inside the square, and their personnel said no one was killed, but other people said they saw people being shot so the truth is probably somewhere in between.

Aftermath is that the collapse of the Soviet Union was actually very influential in the way Chinese people viewed this movement. Nobody, including those in the government, would say that the crackdown was justified. However, many people who participated felt like, wow, that could have been us. We were really naive to think these changes could come peacefully. Even today, the USSR is in the back of Chinese people's minds and as a result Chinese people are willing to put up with giving up a lot of things. From their view, even their province is better off as a part of a whole that is strong. Another major thing that happened was that the leadership shuffled and proponents of market reforms came to the forefront. It is unclear how this is linked to the Tian An Men Protest. And thus we have China today.