Jeffrey Wasserstrom: evaluation

Transcript context

…down. And for the students in Shanghai, this would’ve symbolized what was a feint toward openness that really didn’t have follow-through; we’re going to give you rock concerts, but not let you dance. And so the protests went on for a little while in ’86, and posters went up. The officials at universities said, “Now this is out of hand. We had chaos on the streets during the Culture Revolution. We can’t go back to that.” And nobody wanted to go back to that. So there were posters I saw that said, this is new Red Guardism. And the students didn’t want to be associated with that. So it wound down pretty quickly, and they thought, we’re not like the Red Guards. We don’t want to make chaos. We also are not fervent loyalists of anybody in power. The Red Guards had been passionate about Mao. The analogy partly sort of scared them, and also it meant that the government was really serious about dealing with them. So then in 1989, the protest restart, and there are a variety of reasons why they can restart. The space for them… Students are thinking about doing something in 1989. It’s a very resonant year, 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. People are thinking about that. But more importantly, it’s the 70th anniversary of the biggest student movement in Chinese history, the May Fourth Movement of 1919. And the May Fourth Movement had helped lay the groundwork for the Chinese Communist Party. Some member leading founders of it had been student activists then, it was an anti-imperialist movement, but it was also a movement against bad government. And so the students thought the anniversary of that movement was always marked, commemorated in China, and people took the history seriously. People were reminded of what students did in the past, and so there were a lot of reasons why people were itching to do something. And then a leader, Hu Yaobang, who was associated with the more kind of reformist, more liberalizing group within the Chinese Communist Party, he had been stripped of a very high office, demoted after partly taking a fairly light stance toward the ’86, ’87 protests. And so he was still a member of the government, but he was not as high up in power. He had been very high up. He had been sort of Deng Xiaoping’s potential successor, and he dies unexpectedly. And there has to be a funeral for him because he dies still as an official. And the students take advantage of the opening of there having to be commemorations of his death. And they put up posters that basically say the wrong people are dying. Hu Yaobang was younger than some of the more conservative members. They said, “So some people are dying too young, some people don’t seem like they’re ever going to die.” y the wrong people are dying. Hu Yaobang was younger than some of the more conservative members. They said, “So some people are dying too young, some people don’t seem like they’re ever going to die.” So they begin these sorts of protests. This is in April of ’89. And the government tries to sort of get the protest to stop quickly, and they use the sort of same technique of they issue an editorial in People’s Daily that says, “This is creating chaos,” which is a code term for take us back to the Culture Revolution. And this time the students say, “No, we’re just trying to show our patriotism. We believe that there’s too much corruption and nepotism. There’s not enough support for the more liberalizing wing within the party.” And so they keep up the protests. And there’s a lot of frustration at this point. There are also economic frustrations at this point. The economy is improving because of the reforms, but it seems that people with good government connections are getting rich too easily. And so there’s sort of a sense of unfairness. The students are also really frustrated by the kind of macro-managing of their private lives on campuses. So the protests at Tiananmen Square and in plazas all around the country and other cities as well become this mix of things. It’s an anti-corruption movement, it’s a call for more democracy movement, it’s a call for more freedom of speech movement, but it’s also a kind of… has some counterculture elements that are like, there are rock concerts on the square, the most popular rock musician, Cui Jian, comes to the square and is celebrated when he’s there. There’s a sense of kind of a variety of things rolled into one. And I brought up how it sort of gets conflated with the movements to overthrow communism in the Eastern Bloc. It was actually, in many ways, I think more like something that happened in the Eastern Bloc 20 years earlier. It was more like Prague Spring and other 1968 protests in the Communist Bloc, which was about moving toward socialism with a human face, more like trying to get the parties empowered to reform rather than necessarily doing away with them. So there was a kind of disjuncture, happened at the same time as moves to end communism. But of course, so there was a possibility when all the protesters were on the square. It seemed that for a time that this might be seen as an acceptable kind of movement to just have a kind of course correction. But then there’s also an internal struggle within the Communist Party leadership. And clearly the people who are more political conservatives, even if they believe in economic reform, are clearly getting the upper hand. And this is not going to be tolerated. And the students stay on the square when signals are given to try to get them out. Students from around the country are pouring in to Beijing to join this movement. They don’t want to end the movement when they’ve just arrived. So it’s actually one thing that keeps it going is new participants are coming from the provinces. And even if some moderates want to leave the square, people want to stay. t when they’ve just arrived. So it’s actually one thing that keeps it going is new participants are coming from the provinces. And even if some moderates want to leave the square, people want to stay. And then workers start joining in the movement as well and form a independent labor union. And that really, the Chinese Communist Party, to a certain extent, they might put up with student protesters, but they know from past experience that sometimes student protests lead to members of other social classes joining them because they look up to students as sort of potential intellectual leaders of the country. And admiration for scholars is part of this that people turn out when students protest, something very different from the American case where there’s a kind of often suspicious of student activists being necessarily on the same side as everybody else. But in China, there had been, from the history of the 20th century, a sense of students as potentially a vanguard. So once there are labor activists joining the movement, then troops are called in. And there’s a massacre near Tiananmen Square on the middle of the night of June 3rd and early on June 4th. And the army just moves in and begins behaving very much like an army of occupation, which is something that People’s Liberation Army is supposed to be the one that saves China from foreign aggression, and they’re acting like an invading force.…

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