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Print This PageSo What Is the Legacy of Tiananmen, Twenty Years On?
I am not actually going to try and answer that question, but leave it to you. However, I did not want to let the occasion go by without marking it.
The day it happened in 1989, I was actually at a human rights retreat organized by Henry Steiner and Philip Alston, a remarkable private meeting of human rights organizations, from north and south, on the island of Crete. Remarkable in that it was one of the first times that anyone had tried to sit down a bunch of human rights NGOs and discuss a set of important and simultaneously practical and abstract themes. Not everyone attended – Human Rights Watch rather snootily said that it had better things to do than attend academic conferences. The horror! But it was the loser; the exchanges, particularly between north and south, were frank and pointed and one of the first such occasions within the human rights NGO movement.
I was there as the young conference administrator person, dealing with things like rooms and planes and meals and all that, seconded, I am pleased to say, as a pro bono gift of Sullivan & Cromwell. Tiananmen took place while all of us were there; it was discussed at length, but the conference declined to make a joint statement, if I recall correctly. I think that was the right decision – no one at the meeting was authorized to speak on behalf of their organizations, to start with. Somewhat more disturbing was that not everyone at the conference appeared to think that the Chinese protestors had a defensible cause. The fault lines of the human rights movement and its internal contradictions run deep, from its ideological development in the 1980s down to today. But I recall watching the protests on the small TV that was in the monastery on a remote stretch of beach on the island, hoping that it would turn out like the Soviet Union, but not very sure.
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For me the most disturbing part of the legacy of Tiananmen is the lack thereof. If you speak to young Chinese people (I make a point of it, I admit), they are anything but revolutionary.
This was particularly evident when there was the fracas around the Olympic torch. Although things weren’t exactly helped by the French protestors’ seeking to snatch the torch from a handicapped woman, the reaction of the well-educated foreign-based Chinese students was illustrative: almost to a boy and girl they were instinctively and strongly defensive of China, and contemptuous of the ignorance of the protestors. One proudly recounted how he would ask people who brought up Tibet to point to it on a map.
Others have calmly told how their grandparents were tortured in the cultural revolution, merely as family background with little angst and no perceptible antipathy towards the present regime.
Ironically, this seems to be in part because the human condition, if not human rights, has vastly improved for a great many Chinese. Progress (on one front) defeating progress (on another), at least for now.
OTOH, the most positive part is that very improvement in the human condition and what it indicates of the pragmatic and responsive side of the Chinese leadership. Faced with Tiananmen most dictatorships would have concluded that they needed to repress more. Chinese leaders seem to have seen that this generally only granted them a stay of execution and that the ‘root cause’ answer was material well-being.
And as much as one can deplore the state of Human Rights in China today, one has to applaud the massive improvement in human material well-being there.
I can understand your hope 20 years ago, but at the moment, I see very little sign that China will turn out like the USSR. And I can see no hope that the outside world will impose its views on human rights, at any more than glacial pace, without massive changes in popular opinion in China itself. The best hope I can see lies in the pragmatism that the Party has shown since Tiananmen: continued economic growth and trade may create the circumstances where the Party’s pragmatism leads it down the path of gradual but steady liberalisation.
at 8:29 am EST Patrick
Wow, has it really been 20 years already? I remember watching news coverage of it as a kid.
at 10:29 am EST Joe
at 1:16 pm EST Charles Gittings
I’m not sure being better at tyranny is really a positive thing, Charles…
I essentially second Patrick’s comment. The anniversary of Tiananman is rather disheartening, but democracy may have simply been delayed, not denied.
at 4:06 pm EST M. Gross
M. Gross,
Ya, well I’m no fan of tyranny in any form, but it seems clear that over the last eight years China’s tyrants did a better job of managing their economy than ours did with ours, while it’s completely obvious that our tyrants have murdered thousands more innocent people than China’s have over the same period.
And that’s a sad fact.
at 7:30 pm EST Charles Gittings