June 07, 2009
a little souvenir of a terrible year (chapter five excerpt)
sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months
If the images of Berlin were best able to condense the experience of historical culmination into a symbolic unity for in the West — if “the Fall of the Wall” became the pop moment par excellance for the Anglobal narrative — the events have no greater claim on world-historical significance than those that unfolded in the vicinity of a quite different architecture. The events in Beijing might be distinguished from those in Europe in part because, more seemingly exotic from a physical and cultural distance, they availed themselves even more of ideological misrepresentation.
The foundations of the occupation and the massacre of the occupants in Tiananmen Square have been widely and conveniently misrecognized, with help from many sides. Predictably enough, Fukuyama requires that the drama follow the same script as every other: “The revolutionaries who battled with Ceaucescu’s Securitate in Romania, the brave Chinese students who stood up to tanks in Tiananmen Square, the Lithuanians who fought Moscow for their national independence, the Russians who defended their parliament and president, were the most free and therefore the most human of beings.” The leveling of these various confrontations is striking, and none moreso than the inclusion of the “brave Chinese students.”
Much is left unthought in this. Consider the occupation’s own iconic image, surely one of the most reproduced images ever; it provides a complex but signal formula for this reduction, this unthinkability. It does so in part by its very simplicity. A man stands before a Type 59 tank — a line of them, in fact. It is June 5, 1989; the bloody suppression has already begun. In the video footage we see him move repeatedly to block the cavalry line’s progress, waving his shopping bags to do so. This last gesture has a kind of total pathos. Man vs. tank, shopping vs. totalitarianism. It is too good to be true, but it is entirely true. Shortly he clambers onto the lead tank, has a word with the driver, and is eventually absorbed back into the crowd. But in the picture we do not see the crowd nor the driver; just the man in his work clothes posed against — importantly — multiple tanks.
It is easy enough to register this as a heroic moment of a single, fragile body against the amassed power of the state, literally faceless. This is very much the suggestion of Time magazine, which named the “Tank Man” as one of the “100 Most Important People of the Century” (a Hot 100 of humanism, as it were).
One lone Everyman standing up to machinery, to force, to all the massed weight of the People's Republic — the largest nation in the world, comprising more than 1 billion people — while its all powerful leaders remain, as ever, in hiding somewhere within the bowels of the Great Hall of the People.
The vision of the individual resisting totalitarian power is well-suited to the liberal promise that its own machinery is in fact nothing but individuals, increasingly free from the dictates of centralized power and ideology; the converse of this is that the individual asserting himself stands thereby always for liberal democracy, poised against the coercive state. Because this photograph and not another — say, of the thousands occupying the vast, open commons in the center of Beijing — comes to stand for the entirety of what happened, we are disallowed from seeing the events of Tiananmen Square, of China in 1989, as a conflict between groups. Simultaneously, we are asked to recognize this as a confrontation of one idea, liberal democracy, against another, totalitarian Communism. This is the received meaning of the picture — a meaning only reinforced by its capture within the matrix of worldwide democratic revolution proved in Berlin five months later. As an image of courage, the picture is inarguable. As a map of political antagonisms, it is something else altogether.
The scholar Wang Hui, who was one of those students in the occupation, argues in persuasive detail that the protests were not pro-democratic confrontations with a repressive Communist government — and moreover, that these categories simply don’t work in the Chinese context. The occupation was rather an attempt to pull Benjamin’s emergency brake on the government’s headlong race down the capitalist road and into the global market.
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.The social theorist Giorgio Agamben approaches this puzzle from the opposite direction; against Wang's enumerated specifics, he focuses on the lack of particulars.
What was most striking about the demonstrations of the Chinese May was the relative absence of determinate contents in their demands (democracy and freedom are notions too generic and broadly defined to constitute the real object of a conflict, and the only concrete demand, the rehabilitation of Hu Yao-Bang, was immediately granted). This makes the violence of the State's reaction seem even more inexplicable. It is likely, however, that the disproportion is only apparent and that the Chinese leaders acted, from their point of view, with greater lucidity than the Western observers who were exclusively concerned with advancing increasingly less plausible arguments about the opposition between democracy and communism.Whether Wang's variegated set of tendencies or Agamben's indeterminate "singularity," there is no position from which the Chinese events can be seen as a Manichaean political struggle.
Thus the surpassing strangeness of the annexing the Tiananmen Square resistance to the story that climaxes with “the Fall of the Wall.” However much such a consolidation is the inexorable logic of the image-event, it provides as well a sense of its vanishing internal contradictions, condensed into granules within the otherwise homogeneous texture of a unified meaning: the historic victory of capitalism over socialism. And exactly because China’s social movement of 1989 was suppressed with blood, this required (if illusory) meaning at the end of the story was confirmed. As Wang himself puts it, “The two most important events at the end of the twentieth century were the failure of Eastern European socialism and the reorientation of China toward the global market through its “socialist reforms.” They brought to a close the Cold War conflict between two opposing ideologies.”