On the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, Louisa Lim, author and journalist, has chronicled stories from 1989 based on interviews with those involved directly in the protests, from former soldiers and student leaders to parents who lost their children, also bringing to light forgotten protests that took place that summer in cities far from Beijing underlining the scale of the movement. Her book, The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited is out on June 4, available on Kindle and Amazon. Excerpts from an interview.
The amnesia on Tiananmen 25 years on, you argue, is something that was not just 'enforced from above' but also involved collusion from Chinese society at large. What was behind this collusion —was just fear and a question of survival, or were there other factors at play too?
Fear and survival all play a part, but I think it’s also a very pragmatic choice. For the vast majority of people, the clear calculation is that there is nothing to be gained from remembering, in fact there is a price to pay for any overt acts of remembrance. So even those who became caught up in the events of 1989 have chosen to stay silent. The most poignant cases include those wounded by the army on June 4th 1989, like Qi Zhiyong, a worker who lost a leg after being shot, who for many years did not tell his own daughter how he lost his leg. He, like others, came to believe that their children needed protection from the truth since that it could end up harming their children’s prospects. Ignorance is safer, even if that means colluding in amnesia.
When we look at recent traumatic events in Chinese history, whether the Cultural Revolution or 1989, the abiding attitude of most people here in China, besides a few on the margins, seems to be the past is the past;no good can come from confronting it and coming to terms with. There's a generation growing up today that will have little or no understanding of what really happened in the 1970s or even in 1989. Do you think there is anything problematic with such an approach to history?
It’s very problematic since the history that is taught provides no context and thus no understanding of the historical patterns. One of the Chinese writers who tackled this the best was the astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, who wrote in a piece about amnesia in 1990, “According to one incomplete survey of students who participated in the Tiananmen democracy movement, more than half of them had no precise knowledge of what happened in the spring of 1979 when young activists posted independent views on the Democracy Wall in Beijing and were soon arrested for doing so…Events of a mere ten years earlier, for this new generation, were already unknown history.In this manner, about once each decade, the true face of history is thoroughly erased from the memory of Chinese society. This is the objective of the Chinese Communist policy of ‘Forgetting History.’”
Historically those who have launched student movements have not necessarily known the precedents, be they the killings in Tiananmen square in 1926, the violent repression of mourning protests after Zhou Enlai’s death in 1976 or the failed student movement of 1986-1987. That means Chinese history loops endlessly in on itself in a Mobius strip of crushed aspirations, propelled by the propensity to embrace amnesia.
China has changed so much in the 25 years since, but it seems the Communist Party is still not prepared to allow any discussion or reflection when it comes to 1989. In recent weeks, we have seen dozens of people being detained and threatened for attempting to organize events to remember 1989. What do you think drives the Party's response to this anniversary?
Fear drives the Party’s response to the anniversary. This is the first year that we have seen people being detained for acts of remembrance behind closed doors in private homes. This shows us that twenty-five years on, despite being the world’s second largest economy, the Chinese government appears to be more terrified than ever of its own past. China’s leaders know that the demands made by students in 1989 — for more democracy, for action against corruption, abuse of power and official profiteering — are more pressing than ever.
One of the most moving stories in your book — which really brings out how conflicted and complicated this legacy is — is that of Chen Guang, the former PLA soldier turned artist who is, in some sense, still coming to terms with the trauma of 1989. Why do you think someone like him is an exception, on the fringe, in his quest to confront this history? And do you think that will change?
I think he is an exception because deep historical introspection is not encouraged in China, and few have the time or the intellectual energy to engage in it. Any army trains its troops to obey orders unquestioningly, and Chen Guang repeatedly spoke about the intense ideological training he received before being deployed to clear Tiananmen Square. The troops were then rewarded for their loyalty, as well as being celebrated in big rallies and given special commemorative souvenirs – a medal and a watch each – for their role in the suppression. Afterwards, Chen’s army comrades’ careers were boosted by their glorious part in “quelling the counter-revolutionary riots”, so they could see clearly that there was no advantage to be gained from confronting their past. His attempt to question his part through his art means that his pictures cannot be shown or sold inside China. So Chen’s attempt to confront his own history has cost him economically, socially and professionally. As he himself remarked, “Of course you pay a price. You can’t survive in China’s mainstream. You find that world is no longer yours.”
