A few hours before the actual anniversary began, Isaac Mao, one of China's best-known bloggers, tweeted: "Tienanmen Square is the world's most clean Plaza." He wasn't talking street sweepers. He was talking about the near-total erasure from official history of a massacre that occurred in Beijing's largest and best-know square.
Twenty years earlier, Chinese people gathered in that square. First it was a handful of students, then more joined in. It went beyond students and everyday people joined in, peasants, workers, professionals even Marxists, people who lived different lives and held different views. The crowd built over up over several days. No one is sure but it is said more than a million people gathered in all. There were no organizers, no leaders, no agenda, no list of demands to be negotiated.
The people in that square were diverse in an extremely diverse country. They shared a common thread. They felt it was time that China's government allow the Chinese people greater freedom's. The oppression of Mao was gone. The ruling Chinese Politburo seemed to e kinder and gentler. The country had walked away from Communism. It was moving rapidly toward a market economy, which in most places of the world had always resulted in a free market and a free people.
The government had already promised the people would have greater freedoms. But they would be given by the Politburo at a pace that the Politburo decided, a pace that would ensure the social stability of a nation that was then nearly a billion people. Many of those billion people felt the pace was to slow and the people, not the government, should set it--particularly in a country that called itself a "People's Republic."
So in early June 1989, they gathered in Tienanmen Square.
The government responded by sending in soldiers and tanks and machine guns mounted on the backs of trucks. They didn't come in like storm troopers, slashing and shooting. They came in slowly, methodically and in a most non-confrontational way. When one man, Wang Weilin of Hong Kong, stood blocking a column of tanks, there was hope that the people would prevail against those who governed them.
It did not turn out that way. On June 4, 1989, the soldiers suddenly opened fire, spraying masses with bullets, killing at least 1400 and wounding an additional 7,000 or more of its peacefully assembled, unarmed citizens.
The poet TS Eliot wrote, "Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." The Chinese Government had decided that the Chinese people had gone too far and it responded with great harshness. It did so in the name of social stability. Many of us saw it as having acted in the name of suppression.
What has happened subsequently in my view is not all as bad as what we in the West sometimes assume. I visited China in November 2008. I talked about Tienanmen and freedom and the Politburo with some well-informed people. Each observed that in the past 20 years, the people have been doled larger doses of new freedom, more freedom than their parents or grandparents ever dreamed of having. Many seemed to tolerate--but not endorse--censorship. "We're happy with the Internet we have," I was told. "Everyone in our generation is wealthier than their parents," I heard. The smart social media users, like Isaac Mao can easily bypass China's often clumsy censorship attempts with mime servers and overlooked 3rd-party apps [like Tweetie to get to Twitter] in part because there are simply too many voices online being surveiled by too few governmental ears.
This was relevant in the past 30 days, when China started blocking social media sites. Silicon Dragon Author Rebecca A. Fannin complained she could not get to any social media sites during a recent China visit. Then Chinese bloggers started using workaround technology to complain that blogs, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube had been blocked. My Chinese friends are telling me they're sure that their abilities to have online conversations will be restored, so long as they do not talk much about topics on a short list of government-culled taboo topics.
Some, like Isaac Mao use "cleansed" methods to make their point, to circumnavigate a government whose continuing policy has been to cleanse the national memory of what happened 20 years ago in Tienanmen Square. NPR ran a piece this week that talked about how an entire generation of Chinese has been born and raised, not knowing what happened there. Even if they did know, their perspectives were different than you might think.
NPR interviewed a school girl who said, that if such a massacre actually happened, the government must have had good reason.
So, I have to wonder. Can a government over time, actually erase a major incident from the nation's memory as China apparently wishes to do? I hope not. I hope that China's citizens will learn what happened in quiet conversations with older family members and in the vast wealth of information that they can sometimes access on the Internet.
I hope that as China's people continues to have conversations with people in the West they will understand what happened and remember what happened. Mostly, I hope that that the people of China continue on their paths of acquiring more freedoms as time goes by.
Perhaps some day that freedom will empower them to choose who governs them. I wish I could predict that this will happen. Perhaps it will and perhaps not.
At Tienanmen, both government and people discovered what happens in an oligopic society when people try to go too far and too fast. It's as though both side stepped back and for 20 years have tried a slower, steadier approach.
