There have been many books on the June Fourth massacre. Rightly, as this event is essential to understand the evolution of contemporary China. Jeremy Brown's work intends to be different from the ones that have been published to this day. More than bringing to light new material on the movement that shook China 32 years ago, it revisits its history by throwing new light on the huge amount of material that has already been published on the subject. Whereas a great number of actors and analysts have cast a critical glance on the events that the Communist Party has tried to erase for three decades, Brown attempts to show that the students and ordinary citizens behaved in a highly responsible manner, and clearly expressed a set of claims that, if they had been taken into account by the government, could have resulted in a very different China. He deplores the fact that most analysts have emphasized the students’ role and have concentrated on the events in Beijing. He tries to show that the movement was multifaceted, and that it affected the whole of urban China. He also goes against the common wisdom that its failure was inevitable as Chinese society was insufficiently mature to practise democracy, because the state's grip on the economy and society had not left room for the development of a vibrant civil society. He also wants to reverse the tide which tends to blame the students for the movement's failure: “I have wanted to push back against narratives that dwell on mistakes and failure and that blame activists, participants and bystanders for things that were not their fault” (p. 40).
His description of the day-to-day developments, of the emergence of all sorts of organizations among workers as well as among students, show that Chinese society had deeply changed during the 1980s. And not only in the capital: Brown shows that, for instance, the sexual revolution was more than just a Beijing phenomenon, as shown by Chai Ling's many abortions, but had reached small towns in Hunan, where Lu Decheng lived with his girlfriend without being married – behaviour that, a decade earlier, would have sent the couple to jail. The author shows that while workers and peasants had seen their standards of living improve, anger against official corruption was running high at the end of the decade.
Society had changed, as ordinary citizens enjoyed much more freedom than they had under Mao, but the political system remained archaic, and a gerontocracy headed by Deng Xiaoping continued to impose their ideas on the younger generation of leaders. Hu Yaobang, who had tried to relax the Party's grip on society, was forced to resign, and Deng and the elders were strictly controlling his successor, Zhao Ziyang.
But Brown insists that the elders’ victory was not inevitable, and that alternative paths could have been taken. This is indeed a fact, but the reader regrets that he does not really explore in detail what these paths could have been. Of course, one can't write a book based only on “what if…,” but it would have been interesting to explore what could have happened if, for example, Zhao Ziyang had decided not to go to North Korea when the situation was tense in Beijing. Might it have been possible for him to challenge Deng Xiaoping's decisions?
The book analyses the development of the movement in detail. The author rightly dwells on its multiple aspects and shows that it has involved the participation of most members of the urban classes, changing their attitude towards the government, ushering a new political culture.
So why title his book June Fourth? This title puts an emphasis on the massacre and tends to overlook the huge social upheaval that is at the centre of the book. I know that most Chinese actors refer to this period as liu.si (June Fourth), but it would have been much more suitable to title it “The 1989 pro-democracy movement” (or “urban upheaval”).
Jeremy Brown also rehabilitates Chai Ling, who has become some sort of villain since the film Gate of Heavenly Peace, and he justifies Lu Decheng's gesture of defiance – throwing ink at Mao's portrait on Tian'anmen Square –, which at the time had led student leaders to take him to the police and request that he be arrested. Brown rightly remarks that this shows that they were still influenced by the official ideology.
He also shows that the movement shook the whole country. He describes the events in Chengdu, Xi'an and Wuhan, to name just a few, but also reminds the reader that in Ningxia, Gansu, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, Hui and Uyghur people seized this opportunity to express their outrage against denunciations of Islam by a Han author (p. 165) and obtained the condemnation of the book. He also reminds us that in many provincial towns, such as Changsha, there were dialogue sessions between the students and provincial leaders who did not call in the army. All this shows that the massacre was not inevitable but was due to what the author calls “a failure of imagination” (p. 140). He rightly questions the sense of urgency felt by the leaders, which led to the massacre. Why require that the army “clean” the square before the morning of June 4th? What if all the officers had behaved like the 28th Group Army, whose APCs “stopped and made no effort to advance,” despite the fact that a helicopter's loudspeaker “ordered the troops ‘Advance, advance! Advance no matter what’” (p. 150)? Brown's detailed analysis based on the incredibly precise work of Wu Renhua, describes in detail the way in which the massacre was enacted.
In conclusion, the author's original analyses of the existing material, which he has exhaustively read, are very stimulating and deserve to be read by anyone who has an interest in the movement that shook China.
