A cursory web search on Google Scholar turns up 2,070 books and journal articles with “Tiananmen Massacre” in the title or abstract. And that's just in English. Search the Chinese-language version of Google Scholar for “June 4 Movement,” and over 300,000 references pop up. Given such a vast quantity of reference materials, Sinologues could easily be forgiven for greeting with a colossal yawn the arrival of yet another volume on the events of spring 1989. What unlit corners of this saga remain to be illuminated? What stones remain unturned?
In this new volume, under the editorship of Jean-Philippe Béja, 15 well-known and respected scholars address two important but under-examined aspects of the Tiananmen story: the ongoing struggle for control over the historical memory of the traumatic events of 1989, and the omnipresent shadow cast by the these events over China's subsequent foreign and domestic politics and policies.
Several of the contributions to the volume were commissioned for a special issue of the French journal Perspectives Chinoises (and its English-language sister publication China Perspectives) commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Beijing crackdown. In his editorial introduction, Béja sets the overall tone for the book, observing that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has remained essentially silent on the question of June 4 for more than two decades. “Why,” he asks, semi-rhetorically, “[is] a government that is so proud of its economic and diplomatic achievements … so worried by an event that took place more than 20 years ago?” (p. 3).
The answer, of course, is fear. More precisely, fear of losing control. And in the essays that follow, Béja and his fellow contributors examine various dimensions of that fear, revealing its continued potency in virtually all aspects of Chinese governmental conduct at home and abroad, from the Communist Party's obsessive vice-like grip on domestic political power and media content to Beijing's curiously prickly brand of international diplomacy. Clearly, this is not a regime that is comfortable in its own skin.
Some of the essays are particularly thought-provoking. Perry Link, for example, examines the issue of historical memory, and the Party's struggle to erase the events surrounding the June 4 debacle from popular memory – by prohibiting public commemoration, or even discussion, of the events in question; by blocking all domestic internet content containing terms such as “June 4” or “Tiananmen massacre”; and by using “newspeak” to redefine what actually happened, substituting words like “hooligan” for “demonstrator.” And he reflects on the high psychic costs of repressed memory paid by those survivors – victims, bystanders and Party members alike – who have been prevented from bearing witness to the events of 1989.
The costs of repressed historical memory also inform the thoughtful essay by Sebastian Veg, who focuses on the late novelist-essayist Wang Xiaobo. For several years after the Beijing Spring Wang chose to remain mute on the events of that period, only to break free from his self-imposed writerly silence in the mid-1990s with a series of books and articles focusing on the role of intellectuals in society. In his most famous essay, “The Silent Majority,” published just a year before his untimely death in 1997 at the age of 45, Wang wrote about the plight of China's intellectuals, who, if they wrote about recent history at all, had to conform to the linguistic artifices of the ruling party, thereby tacitly becoming tools of the regime. For Wang, and by extension for many Chinese intellectuals, the only honourable alternative was silence.
Barry Naughton offers an authoritative overview of the liberal, reform-oriented economic regime that was introduced, piecemeal, by Zhao Ziyang in the 1980s. When the reforms – and Zhao himself – came under concerted attack from Party conservatives in the aftermath of June 4 the economy began to stall. Deng Xiaoping took matters into his own hands with his fabled “Southern Tour” in January 1992, initiating a dramatic shift to a high-investment, high-input, high-growth development strategy. When Deng's full-throttle approach generated severe inflationary imbalances, Zhu Rongji intervened to initiate necessary reforms in banking, tax structure, and SOE administration, inter alia. Naughton tells this story clearly and well.
Other notable essays in this collection deal with the splintering of the Chinese pro-democracy movement after June 4 (Jean-Philippe Béja and Merle Goldman); the role of the Tiananmen crackdown in fostering the subsequent rise of China's celebrated “rights-defense movement” (Xiaorong Li and Eva Pils); and the CCP's seemingly desperate struggle to hold onto power while offering up a series of liberal scapegoats – Zhao Ziyang, Mikhail Gorbachev – on whom to pin the blame for the “counterrevolutionary turmoil” of 1989 (Michel Bonnin).
Willy Lam chronicles the rollback of previous political reforms after June 4, along with the attendant politicization of law enforcement and judicial administration. Jerome Cohen and Margaret Lewis examine the controversial institution of “re-education through labour,” widely used to dispense extra-judicial punishment in China. And Chongyi Feng sensitively analyses the attempt by liberal intellectuals to reframe the discourse of Chinese liberalism in the aftermath of the Tiananmen trauma.
Still other chapters deal with external consequences of the events of 1989. Joseph Cheng explores the links between the Beijing student movement and the rise of pro-democracy activism in Hong Kong. Jean-Pierre Cabestan examines Beijing's urgent efforts to limit the damage inflicted by the June 4 crackdown on China's image abroad. Guoguang Wu looks at China's growing commercial clout in the West since 1989, and at Beijing's efforts to use its newfound economic leverage to soften foreign criticism of China's human rights abuses. In a similar vein, Andrew Nathan notes that as the initial storm of post-Tiananmen human rights criticism from abroad abated over the years, the influence of the international rights community correspondingly waned; but he nonetheless suggests that the current Chinese regime remains vulnerable to its own increasingly vocal citizens, whose patience with authoritarian governance may be wearing thin.
This is certainly a stimulating collection of essays, written by a group of world-class scholars. Unfortunately, the book's impact will be limited by the fact that its publisher, Routledge, elected to put it on offer with a retail price tag of $148.00. It's hard to find a better word than “outrageous” to describe such pricing. It is all the more objectionable insofar as fully half the essays in the book are available online to subscribers of Perspectives Chinoises and China Perspectives, as published in that journal in Summer 2009.
