Lessons from Tiananmen

Tiananmen Square Revisited

This is Tiananmen Square.

But this is Tiananmen Square.

In front of you, you can see Tiananmen Square.

a) The bloody denouement of the protests on Tiananmen Square.

If you go to Beijing, definitely have a look at Tiananmen Square.

The Chinese government controlled the internet to prevent the people from knowing the truth of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

NEW YORK It is a chilling thought that exactly twenty years after the Tiananmen Massacre few young citizens of the People s Republic of China have much idea of what happened on that occasion. Many unarmed Chinese citizens were killed by People s Liberation Army troops on June 4, 1989, not only in the vicinity of Tiananmen Square, but in cities all over China.

When Liu learned that he had been awarded this year s Nobel Peace Prize, his first reaction was telling This prize is given to the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

On the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen they just, two days ago, announced that they were simply shutting down access to Twitter, because there was no way to filter it other than that.

I know that stirrings of democracy have been crushed before in Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968, and in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Yet something about the last few months feels new and irreversible.

Over the past 20 years, laid off workers, dispossessed farmers, Falun Gong practitioners, and angry Tibetans have organized protests. No student led, urban protests like those of Tiananmen Square of 1989, however, have occurred.

Soon after the bloody crackdown on Tiananmen, a new orthodoxy replaced Chinese Marxism Chinese nationalism. Only one party rule would guarantee the continuing rise of China and put an end to centuries of national humiliation.

The violent repression in Tiananmen Square set back China s move toward democracy by at least 20 years. Let s hope that Business Roundtable et al. v. SEC does not mean the same thing for shareholder democracy.

The CCP, they insist, has proved its resilience since the Tiananmen crisis in 1989 and the collapse of Soviet communism in 1991. Why should predictions of the collapse of CCP rule be taken seriously now?

Whether Zhao s supporters will express themselves in a similar fashion is uncertain. The events of 1989 remain so sensitive, and Tiananmen Square so securely guarded, that it is hard to imagine a protest happening there soon.

The legacy of 1989 echoes even in Iran, whose leaders seem clearly to have learned from Tiananmen Square and the collapse of the Iron Curtain that a committed government can, indeed, demobilize a public demanding reform.

Then comes the 20th anniversary of the June 4 crackdown on the Tiananmen Square student demonstrations. Calls to re evaluate the official response began when President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao came to power seven years ago.

According to the previous experience, the places with massive human traffic, including the public transit hubs, bus and subway lines, and even the crowd watching the flag raising ceremony in Tiananmen Square, are the key areas in their work.

There is no room for Stalin s mass murders in the kind of patriotic education favored by Russian President Vladimir Putin. And the Tiananmen Square Massacre, to name but one bloody event in China s recent past, has been officially forgotten.

All of these abuses are raised repeatedly at EU China summits, to little or no avail. So is this the time to end the arms ban imposed by both Europe and America after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989?

This strategy of pre emptive political decapitation has produced enormous dividends for the Party. In the 1980 s, its principal adversaries were the urban intelligentsia, who constituted the backbone of the pro democracy movement that culminated in Tiananmen Square.

Consider Deng Xiaoping, China s most successful reformer (the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 notwithstanding). The grand coalition that he forged, against all odds, upon his return to power in 1979 was essential to bringing about the economic transformation that followed.

When describing shareholders struggle to make board members accountable, the right analogy is not the Arab Spring, but the protests at Beijing s Tiananmen Square two decades ago. In 1989, the Chinese Government sent troops to repress the country s pro democracy movement.

For example, rather than sustain trade sanctions against China after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the US decided instead to integrate the country into global institutions. But US foreign policy had been notable for a China friendly approach long before that.

The toxic mix of mutual mistrust and tit for tat behavior has brought Sino American ties to their lowest point since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. There is now widespread concern that the US and China may be headed for a new cold war.

That is no excuse for paranoia and repression, but just because the Party has outlasted predictions of its demise does not mean that it has no Achilles heel. Most notably, the anger over corruption and nepotism that fueled the Tiananmen protests has never gone away.

In 1989, large numbers of Chinese students took over Tiananmen Square to demand more rights, adopting a symbol resembling the Statue of Liberty. Today, too, it is not America s military strength that threatens or challenges China, but rather the enduring attraction of the American dream.

Deng, in effect, personally designated Hu as successor to President Jiang Zemin. As Deng had crushed the protestors in Tiananmen Square in June of 1989, Hu had proven himself to be firm and resolute in quelling anti Beijing riots in Lhasa, Tibet, two months earlier.

Nearly all the major institutional reforms, such as strengthening the legislature, holding village elections, and building a modern legal system, were launched in the 1980 s. Since the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989, however, not a single major democratic reform initiative has been implemented.

Military doctor Jiang Yanyong was detained in 2003 after he publicly rebutted the Party s assertion that the SARS epidemic had been brought under control. In 2004, he was placed under surveillance when he called on the Party to revise its judgment of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstration.

In 1989, large numbers of Chinese students took over Tiananmen Square to demand more rights, adopting a symbol resembling the Statue of Liberty. Today, too, it is not America s military strength that threatens or challenges China, but rather the enduring attraction of the 160 American dream.

French diplomats have of course informed China about the reluctance of other European countries about lifting the arms embargo, which was imposed after the massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989. China then simply threatened to abandon or never to conclude trade deals with these EU members.

Many of China s leading environmentalists are former students and intellectual leaders from the Tiananmen protests of 1989 who believe that environmental activism offers an avenue for advancing broader political reform. Others began apolitically, but have come to believe that there can be no environmental protection without political change.

Beyond undertaking dark deeds as one of Mao s lieutenants, Deng played a decisive role in ordering the massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989. But Deng also unleashed the market, setting the country on the path toward unprecedented growth and prosperity that ultimately lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty.

When the Chinese student movement broke out in 1989, I was pursuing a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of California Berkeley. I traveled to Beijing to participate as an activist in Tiananmen Square, where I narrowly escaped the massacre and was able to make my way back to the US.

China turns away from a reappraisal of Mao or an honest account of what happened at Tiananmen in 1989. Some Japanese still want to write or believe fairy tales about their pre war and wartime history, which has hugely complicated Japan s efforts to find a confident and lasting reconciliation with China.

So, at last former Chinese Premier and Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang has died. But the political agenda that he espoused while in office passed away long ago, on May 19, 1989, when he appeared in Tiananmen Square just before dawn to beg tearfully for the forgiveness of protesters.

With the end of the Cold War, the containment of the Soviet Union ushered in by Kissinger s visit could no longer serve as the basis for US China relations. Moreover, relations with China cooled after the Tiananmen Square shootings in 1989, and the Clinton administration had to devise a new approach.

The divisions are no less marked in another transatlantic quarrel, this one over whether to lift the European Union s embargo on arms exports to China, imposed following the Tiananmen Square massacre 15 years ago. Schroeder has been pushing the EU to lift the embargo, a move that now appears imminent.

The decaying Soviet regime was unable to crush Russia s growing democratic movement it would take Vladimir Putin to do that a decade later. By opting for the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the Chinese Communist leadership set their country on a road starkly different from the one on which Russia subsequently embarked.

Consider Akihito s 1992 visit to China the first such visit by any Japanese emperor. Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping s government grateful for Japan s reluctance to maintain punitive sanctions over the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and eager for international recognition, not to mention Japanese capital and commercial technologies had extended seven invitations over two years.

Legitimacy and stability are inseparable in practice, because maintaining stability in the absence of legitimacy would ultimately require Tiananmen style repression. But this can be ruled out in today s Russia, because the instruments to implement it notably an army that would obey orders to mow people down in the streets are lacking.

A former adviser to Deng Xiaoping and confidante of former President Jiang Zemin (whose political influence is now waning), Li was among the first to invest in China after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. He long touted the motto, I don t do anything against China s interest, and I don t say anything that may hurt China s reputation.