On 4th June 1989, many of my fellow students at Beijing University had already left the campus to join the thousands of peaceful protestors who had been gathering for several weeks in Tiananmen Square. Messengers on bicycles and students with loudhailers kept those of us still on the campus up to date with what was happening. We were young, naive, and fighting for democracy and a better China. When we heard that tanks had rolled down the Boulevard of Eternal Peace, crushing a freedom movement that was only seven weeks old, we were traumatised. When the soldiers opened fire, killing hundreds of students, our main concern was to track down friends who had joined the protest.
In the weeks afterwards Beijing was a dangerous place. Martial law was introduced and the borders were closed. Fearful of arrest, I fled to the countryside. Fortunately, I already had a scholarship to study abroad and was given permission to leave. On 2nd August I left for the US to build a new life outside China.
Tiananmen took place in full view of the international media and the world has refused to forget it—with as much determination, it seems, as China has refused to remember it. If anything, the political significance of Tiananmen outside China has grown over the years, and it is almost universally assumed that China will never be whole as a modern country until it faces up to the truth of these events. I believed this myself for years.
My students had grown up after Tiananmen, and knew only the official version of events: the protestors were anarchists who wanted to overthrow the government, and the crackdown had been necessary. Economic progress was so great that even in the late 1990s, my students wanted to talk not about democracy but about achieving success and wealth. Diary of a Harvard MBA, written by a Chinese graduate on the famed programme, was a bestseller. To them Tiananmen was irrelevant.
I have visited China every year since. The further it has lifted the living standards of its citizens, the more remote the memory of Tiananmen has become. The generation born since the protest are not only unaware of what really happened in 1989, they are not interested. They live in a new China. They have the freedom to speak their minds, if not in print, certainly in private. They can travel anywhere and get jobs without having to wait for government quotas. They no longer have to live with secret files, or hukou, the tight system of residence permits that made it easier for the authorities to control movement.
Their China is in many ways the China that we wanted at Tiananmen: people living freer and happier lives. Since its defeat by the west in the opium wars during the mid-19th century, China has been trying to restore its self-confidence by importing western ideas. Communism was one of them, but it failed completely, promising dignity but producing collective misery. By the 1980s it was on its deathbed, fatally wounded by Mao's successor Deng Xiaoping—the man who gave the order to crush the students at Tiananmen. By abandoning communism, China has managed to remove the greatest restriction to the liberty of its citizens: lack of money.
The Tiananmen movement was my generation's quest for a solution to the China problem: an ancient power that had lost its dignity. The country was moving towards a free market without political freedom. We wanted to change this for the better and democracy, borrowed from translated books, was our solution.
China has made such great progress since 1989, both in economic terms and in the liberty of its citizens, that the world we were protesting against 20 years ago is hard for many young Chinese today to recognise or understand. Today China continues its search for national identity, but the mood has shifted away from western ideals. Traditional Chinese teachings, such as Confucianism, are being revived in the quest for a more authentic answer.
Tiananmen should not be forgotten. We must commemorate it for the sake of those who died and for a generation who gave their best years to the pursuit of a better China. And we should remember it as a marker of Chinese people's desire for liberty and freedom. But we should also recognise that expecting China to collectively atone for the sins of Tiananmen Square is neither realistic, desirable, nor necessary. Above all, we in the west should not use Tiananmen as a stick with which to beat China. We should instead help the country to move forward, improve its human rights, protect its environment, further eliminate poverty and create wealth for its people and, in time, for the world. That is what will truly honour the ideals of the young protestors of 20 years ago.
Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect's blog
