Article in the Grey Goose yesterday concerning the upcoming anniversary of what is in China mostly referred to as "June 4th," and here as the Tiananmen Square massacre. The main themes:
• the relative success of the state propaganda machine at suppressing the history and impulse ("government corruption and censorship"; "China’s government has made it abundantly clear that students and professors should stick to the books and stay out of the streets");
• the fact that most today support the Communist Party for cynical reasons ("flocking to the Communist Party, but seldom driven by ideology")
• and how in general that moment of political insurgency has passed in China ("a historical blip, a moment too extreme and traumatic ever to repeat"; "But a majority of students seek party membership not as an ideological statement but rather as a means to a better job")
The most pervasive sense of the essay isn't even presented as a claim, since it is one of the article's presuppositions: that the events of 1989 were a "pro-democracy protest" ("in 1989, students from Peking University were again massing in the center of Beijing, demanding democracy"; "And if a student today proposed a pro-democracy protest?"; "But whether democracy still inspires them is a more complex question"; "many students supported democracy in theory but did not want to risk their futures to fight for it"; and on and on.
But this is a curious thing. Versions of the word "democracy" come up twelve times in the mid-length article. Versions of the world "capitalism": none. Well, perhaps we are meant to think that the events of 1989 and since are truly about political philosophy. Except that the issue of economic distress is ubiquitous: "the economic grievances that helped ignite protests in 1989," "student discontent could rise if the current economic crisis clouds their futures"; "competition for good jobs is fierce." Indeed, the word "job" comes up five times.
The article, that is to say, presents a bunch of students who are motivated to political action against a repressive Communist state (or not) because of factors directly pertinent not to communism nor to democracy but to capitalism. This is a perfectly clear code: neither "Communism" nor "democracy" can be understood in this context as "political" or "ideological" positions, but as economic forms, and "democracy" is substantively a substitute term for capitalism.
This gets us to the contradiction: the students and professors supposedly yearn for democracy, or would if they could get away with it — and yet it is the ills of capitalism that are proposed as the catalyst for this yearning. And this should remind us of the truth of June 4th, which is that it was in part a rebellion against a nominally Communist state (convenient for conservative ideologues, and New York Times writers) that was racing down the "capitalist road" — in short, it was a rebellion against the devastating and inequal leap toward the "democracy" of capital.
But there is no reason to take our word for it. Here is a passage from one of the student participants in the June 4th movement, now a leading international scholar:
The 1989 social movement originated out of a general protest against the unequal devolution of political and economic power, out of dissatisfaction of local and Beijing-based interest groups with the central government’s policies of readjustment, out of internal splits within the state, and out of the conflictual relations between the state apparatus and various social groups.
— Wang Hui, China’s New Order (Cambridge: Harvard, 2006), 63.
As we approach the anniversary of an event, let us not memorialize but actually remember it, with some attempt at clarity, accuracy, and honesty as to the goals and occasions for that particular form of collective life.
Posted by jane at May 23, 2009 07:48 AM | TrackBack