By Ian Johnson, Read the original article here.
How people in China keep the memory of the massacre alive despite the government’s efforts to make them forget.
BEIJING — In China, the Tiananmen Square massacre is not taught in any textbook, aired on any television channel or marked by any monument. But 30 years on, it remains vivid in the subconscious of the People’s Republic. Why?
This is a question that has followed me since coming to China as a reporter in 1994, shortly after the fifth anniversary of what is known here simply by two numbers, 6/4, shorthand for the date of the crackdown on June 4, 1989. Late the night before and early that morning, government soldiers fought their way into downtown Beijing, using tanks, armored personnel carriers and live ammunition. Their target: Tiananmen Square, where peaceful protesters had been camped out for nearly two months, giving voice to many people’s hopes for a more open society.
Since then, the government has tried its best to make 6/4 a non-date. Every year, in the month or two leading up to the day, it rounds up dissidents, harasses victims’ relatives, silences journalists and stations soldiers on street corners. If pushed to explain its position in 1989, the government argues that the students were radicals who had to be cleared away and that any violence was initiated by them or their defenders, who attacked soldiers, burned tanks and created chaos.
That is, of course, a classic blame-the-victim argument — hardly credible and slightly repulsive. But on some level it has taken hold. As the journalist Louisa Lim describes in her 2014 book, “The People’s Republic of Amnesia,” most Chinese people are unaware of the massacre, and among those who know of it, some see it as a regrettable, embarrassing outlier — perhaps as some Americans might see the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam in 1968.
And yet the memory of that night in Beijing three decades ago hasn’t died away. Many people feel a sense of outrage: There was no justification for using armed soldiers, and decades of supercharged economic growth will not wash away the stain left by that reckless decision, not until there is some sort of apology or reckoning.
This view is not limited to a few dissidents or foreign scholars, people out to make China look bad or who just can’t let bygones be bygones. The memory of Tiananmen is also being kept alive by people in China who believe that a government that uses force to stay in power is illegitimate.
Many are expressing their views through a new trend: unofficial history. People who aren’t professional historians have taken it upon themselves to preserve the memories of the country’s many killings, famines, uprisings and government crackdowns — 6/4 is just one. These are writers, filmmakers, poets, artists, songwriters and public intellectuals. Some create on the margins of society, their works immediately banned and often only shown or published abroad. Others have one foot in the mainstream and try to spread their ideas in China, typically through social media.
In recent years, I’ve written about several of these people, such as the artist Hu Jie or the scholar Ai Xiaoming, who have made groundbreaking documentaries on political persecution. Others, like Guo Yuhua, a sociology professor at Tsinghua University, or Jiang Xue, an investigative journalist, write on social media about government expropriation of farmers’ land or the plight of China’s persecuted human rights lawyers. Many of their posts and accounts are blocked, but they often manage to start new ones and spread their message.
In his new book, “Minjian: The Rise of China’s Grassroots Intellectuals,” the French historian Sebastian Veg describes these 21st-century amateur activists. (“Minjian” means “among the people.”) Mr. Veg shows how Tiananmen caused a historic rift. In imperial China and during the first 40 years of Communist rule, intellectuals defined themselves in relation to the state, sometimes working heroically against it but always while remaining dependent on it in some way.
