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How the Tiananmen Square
Massacre Changed China
Forever
By Laignee Barron / Hong Kong 8:07 AM
EDT
“[The Tiananmen massacre] changed
China and to a certain extent the world as it is linked with the ‘China
miracle,’” says Teng
Biao**.
“There is a lesson the world
could learn here,” he adds, “engagement as a policy is not wrong, but
engagement… that obscures human rights is morally and politically
wrong.”
The Goddess of Democracy smiled on China for
exactly five days. The papier-mâché likeness of the Statue of Liberty appeared
in Tiananmen Square as protests convulsed Beijing and other cities seeking to
unshackle the world’s most populous country from endemic corruption.
Their
calls for political reform were answered in the early hours of June 4, 1989,
with a bloody military crackdown that crushed the movement and toppled its
symbols.
The massacre at Tiananmen
killed hundreds, possibly thousands, of the students and laborers who joined
massive gatherings lasting more than a month. The
movement, favoring democracy and reformist policies that caused rifts within the
Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, had spread to hundreds of cities before the
government resolved to disperse it with brute force. Military tanks rolled into
Beijing, where soldiers opened fire with assault rifles on the unarmed
demonstrators who tried to stop their advance.
And yet in the
West, a certainty remained that China would eventually resurrect the dream of
democracy that was deferred that night. Thirty years later, many are still
waiting for the Middle Kingdom to liberalize, though the CCP’s grip on power has
arguably never been tighter.
To survive the upheaval, its leadership
rewrote their social contract; the post-Maoist effort of “reform and opening
up,” whereby China established its own brand of market-economy socialism, was
ultimately accelerated but at the expense of political freedoms. By some
measures the trade-off was tremendously successful. At the time of the Tiananmen
rallies, China’s GDP per capita compared unfavorably to Gambia’s; by 2030, if
not before, many indicators predict China’s economy will eclipse the
U.S.
“The Chinese government used economic benefits
to persuade people they can live a good life under the CCP’s control,” says
Joanne Ng, a Guangdong native who was nine years old at the time Tiananmen
crackdown and who now lives in Hong Kong. “[While] my classmates enjoy
these benefits, the truth is not necessarily so important to
them.”
 People's Liberation Army (PLA)
soldiers leap over a barrier on Tiananmen Square in central Beijing June 4,
1989. Catherine Henriette—AFP/Getty Images
Eventually the West acquiesced to China’s economic momentum on the premise
that economic and social liberalization would develop in tandem. In 2000, on the
verge of China joining the World Trade Organization, President George W. Bush
declared, “Trade freely with China, and time is on our side.”
“Many Western scholars and diplomats predicted that when China…
integrated into the global economy it would create a middle class that demanded
democracy,” says exiled human rights lawyer and China commentator
Teng Biao, a visiting scholar at the
U.S.-Asia Law Institute. “But that did not
happen.”
China several years ago leapfrogged the “political
transition zone,” levels of income that reflect when authoritarian states
typically undergo democratic transformation. Transition becomes more likely
above $1,000 per capita, and dramatically more likely above $4,000 per capita.
In 2018, China hit $9,608, according to the International Monetary
Fund.
Biao says the West’s forecast failed to
consider that China’s economic metamorphosis was built on the bloody legacy of
Tiananmen and relied on the “suppression of political rights and deprivation of
human rights.”
Engineering the greatest economic expansion in the world
was a matter of self-preservation for the Party, and was never intended to move
toward constitutional democracy, he says.
“[The Tiananmen massacre] changed China and to a
certain extent the world as it is linked with the ‘China
miracle,’” says Biao.
“There is a lesson the world could learn here,”
he adds, “engagement as a policy is not wrong, but engagement… that obscures
human rights is morally and politically wrong.”
Beyond simply eschewing democracy, Beijing increasingly poses as an
authoritarian foil to Western liberalism — acting as a lodestar for developing
nations that similarly seek to divorce economic reforms from political
concessions. China, President Xi Jinping announced in 2017, presents a “new
option for other countries and nations who want to speed up their development
while preserving their independence.”
For 30 years, the CCP has
maintained remarkable stability, escaping some fallout of the global financial
crisis and evading the tectonic uprisings that shook many other parts of the
world. Should the CCP slip, it warns that chaos would be unleashed on a
population comprising nearly one out of every five people on the planet. As one commentator in China’s state-controlled media put
it: “As crises and chaos swamp Western liberal
democracy,” China “maintains political stability and social
harmony.”
As foundational as the crackdown at Tiananmen may have
been to the CCP’s current strength, it remains largely invisible to the people.
Despite claiming the moral high ground against what it calls a
“counter-revolutionary” rebellion, the Party is still sensitive
to the fact that its slaughter of students and laborers put a stain on its
legitimacy.
Beijing has manufactured a cultural
amnesia around the June 4th massacre; it’s not taught in schools or mentioned in
newspapers, while high-tech censors detect and block any mention of it online.
So thoroughly has the memory of June 4th been expunged that the generation born
after the incident remains largely unaware of this historic
watershed.
“On the surface, Tiananmen seems to
be remote and irrelevant to the reality of the rising China, but it remains the
most sensitive and taboo subject in China today,” says Rowena He, author
of Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China, and member
of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
 People hold candles during a vigil
in Hong Kong on June 4, 2018, to mark the 29th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen
crackdown in Beijing. Anthony Wallace—AFP/Getty Images
Hong Kong is the only place on Chinese soil where the June 4th
massacre is openly commemorated. A former British colony, Hong
Kong was returned to Chinese sovereignty eight years after the Tiananmen
crackdown. Despite initial trepidations, the territory, like the West, had hoped
its engagement with mainland China would have a positive, democratizing effect.
But instead of introducing freedoms to China, Hong Kong has
ended up defending those it already exercised. Its convergence with Beijing has,
if anything, illustrated the gravitational force of China’s growing
influence.
Remembering Tiananmen in Hong Kong has been viewed as
an act of defiance for years, and it has become even more so now that the city’s
own democratic future has come under threat. In the run-up to the 30th
anniversary, demonstrators marched through the semi-autonomous enclave’s
financial district chanting, “justice will prevail” and toting “support freedom”
umbrellas.
“In China, [people] can’t say anything
against the government,” says Au Wai Sze, a nurse in Hong Kong who
marched along with her 15-year-old daughter. “So while we in
Hong Kong can still speak [out], we must represent the voice of the Chinese
people and remind the world of this injustice.”
For all its power, China’s government is still deeply paranoid. Today, the
regime is “stronger on the surface than at any time since
the height of Mao’s power, but also more brittle,” Andrew
Nathan, a professor of political science at Columbia University, wrote
in Foreign Affairs. The people’s loyalty is predicated on wealth accumulation,
which will be difficult to sustain. A sputtering economy, widespread
environmental pollution, rampant corruption and soaring inequality have all fed
public anxieties about Xi’s ability to continue fulfilling the
prosperity-for-loyalty bargain.
“Attitudes are
changing,” Nathan tells TIME. “It’s a close race
between the human desire for freedom and the state’s capacity for
control.” He predicts that the desire for freedom will eventually nudge
China toward a more open society, but such a change does not appear imminent
because much of the population still lives in fear. “And
when it does happen,” he adds, “it might not lead to
anything we would recognize as democracy.”
In the meantime, Xi has
steered the country in even more illiberal direction. Last year, he changed the
constitution to allow himself to rule for life. Faced with trends that could
tempt the middle class to seek greater freedoms — more Chinese studying and
working abroad, rising private sector employment, proliferation of internet
access (albeit heavily censored), and an explosion of religious conversions — Xi
has responded by producing the world’s largest surveillance state and amplifying
xenophobic nationalism.
“In general, the CCP has taken a diagnostic
approach to the problem of staying on top,” says Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a history
professor at UC Irvine and co-author of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone
Needs to Know. “Beijing has charged scholars and think tanks
with studying carefully the various ways that authoritarian systems have
democratized, and also how the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia broke apart, and
tried to use that information to the CCP’s advantage.”
 A dissident student asks soldiers
to go back home as crowds flooded into the central Beijing June 3,
1989. Catherine Henriette—AFP/Getty Images
One of the main lessons, Wasserstrom says, is to “move swiftly and
harshly” against any organizations or groups that could provide
competing centers of power or escape the party’s control. Beijing spends more on
domestic security than on military defense; crackdowns have escalated against
religious groups such as Falun Gong and underground “house churches” that
emerged in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. Human rights lawyers, Marxist students and feminists have all been
targeted by the state as potential threats to its power.
Such is
the heft of an economically ascendant China that few world leaders are willing
to offer full-throated criticisms, even in the face of Beijing’s most egregious
human rights abuses. In the country’s western province of Xinjiang, the world’s
largest incarceration of an ethnic minority population continues with little
recourse; between one and two million Uighur and
other Muslims are currently detained in concentration camps that the state
describes as “re-education” centers. When most nations refuse to
defy the world’s presumptive superpower, it would be naive to assume that
post-Tiananmen, the Chinese populace would inevitably adopt a more critical
stance against their own government, when doing so has already cost them so
much.
Thirty years after Beijing’s bloody showdown with democracy,
freedom seems both more precious and more fragile. No place is this more
apparent than in Hong Kong. That this precarious city continues to remember and
pay homage to the lives lost on June 4, 1989, shows that what drove protesters
to Tiananmen — the struggle for human rights, accountability and a political
voice — still exists in China. “Tiananmen may remind
of us repression, but it also symbolize[s] the indomitable force of the human
spirit,” says He, of Princeton. “As
the desire for freedom and our longing for basic rights is universal, history
will witness the Tiananmen spirit, as the power of the powerless, again and
again.”
Write to Laignee Barron at Laignee.Barron@time.com.
**Teng
Biao (born 2 August 1973) is a human rights activist and lawyer in
China. Teng is a lecturer at the University of Politics and Law in Beijing.
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