I don’t quite know how we managed to get onto the subject of smashing up houses the other day, but something one of my flatmates said sparked my memory of an entirely embarrassing incident about 14 years ago when in a fit of very drunken high spirited hilarity we trashed the living room of the student house we were living in. There was a lot of bizarre behaviour involving a great deal of screeching as plants, books, any furniture to hand and a fair amount of messy food got repeatedly danced into the carpet. A surprising amount of destruction was carried out, considering there were only three of us. The following day I was woken up around ten by the sound of someone I surmised to be our fellow house dweller, someone who was by chance not himself a student (which may explain why this long-forgotten event suddenly turned up in my brain so very recently), bumping the hoover down the stairs. I must have conked back out, because the next thing I remember hearing was the sound of him dragging the hoover back up the stairs about six pm. He never spoke to us of that which he had seen.
My current flatmate, oddly enough himself a student, responded with a tale of a party he’d held where the Police were called out five times to try and calm down a very small terraced house packed to bursting with around 200 extremely excitable young people. After repeated attempts to find out from people who a) may genuinely have had no idea who the host was and b) were being very very friendly and not making any sense whatsoever, the Police just went back to the station and presumably waited for their shift to end.
Because what could they really do, in that situation? They could try and batter their way into the house while trying their hardest not to actually kill anyone, or they could, I dunno, just burn the fucking house down. Both of which would, without prior clearance from above, result in a fuck of a lot of paperwork and, in that worst of all possible nightmare scenarios for police persons the world over, an early retirement on a hefty pension.
Sometimes of course that’s exactly what they do do. And when they have special permission or instructions from above, things can get really messy and bloody. Not just when young people are enjoying themselves and potentially upsetting their neighbour’s plant pots and sleep patterns, but particularly when their very objective is to cause trouble and draw attention to themselves. There are countless examples of unrestrained police riots in recent British, European and world history – Orgreave, the Poll Tax riots, the Criminal Justice Bill protests, Genoa, the Candelaria and Carandiru massacres etc, etc, etc – not to mention of course very high-profile episodes like, well, the Tiananmen Square massacre springs strangely to mind. Somebody high up obviously decides that the maintenance of public order is worth a few cracked heads, broken bodies, piles of burning juvenile corpses and all that tiresome paperwork.
In the same way that parties and demonstrations can get catastrophically out of hand, of course, countries can too. Brazil became a significantly less fun place to be after the CIA decided to juntar-se à festa, and although I don't know much about the nightlife in Indonesia, the British and Americans brought more than a bottle of wine and a big bag of honey-roasted peanuts to the party. There are of course countless depressing examples, and it's not like they've suddenly decided that it's wrong and they need to stop poking their noses into other countries' affairs or anything - stai attento, Romano Prodi.
The US saves time and effort on paperwork by simply not filling in the requisite forms and posting them off to the appropriate international bodies, either before or after an invasion, unlawful bombing campaign, coup attempt etc, etc, etc. Now, there is an unyielding amount of paperwork to be completed in the relatively simple task of helping foreigners – many ironically enough displaced by ongoing imperial intervention in their countries of birth – learn the language and settle in a new country, so I can’t imagine the quantity of sheer bureaucracy involved in getting approval for a death squad to go around and slaughter peasant women in a bound-to-succeed strategy of installing a climate of insecurity and fear among the local population of some godforsaken central American country. All politicians claim to abhor red tape these days, don’t they?
Speaking of Latin America, what are the chances of another of the world’s Most Dastardly Oil-producing Countries (Venezuela) becoming the focus of a campaign of global media opprobrium, scare mongering and mass misinformation? I have a sneaking suspicion that after whatever disastrous Armageddon-unleashing campaign Bush & Co are planning for Iran has ended in, er, disaster for everyone but its somewhat opinionated new leader and anyone else who actually likes wars, the US might revert to its more traditional post-Vietnam policy of covertly making it very clear just what the consequences of choosing a different path from other compliant nations might be, through their time-honoured strategy of training and paying the country’s most criminally insane thugs to go on a unrestrained superviolent frenzy of causing pain and death to the poor.
Ahem. I may have rambled a bit from my original point but actually, now I come to think of it, if the burghers of our global village get anything like as much glee and fulfilment from their wholesale pillaging, slashing and burning of our planet and our common future as we did when we were ripping our own house to shreds all those years ago, we’d better hope that there’s some kind selfless non-student type to hoover it all up in the morning. Do you think they might be pissed?!?
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It's a truism about certain people that they would have been 'the greatest leader we never had'. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head, but then I'd probably disagree with most of them anyway. It's obvious to most people who don't think that evolution is 'the stupidest thing I ever heard' that Al Gore would have been a preferable President to George W. Bush, but that's partly because more people voted for him. In British terms, it's clear to me that instead of that succession of toddlers, nobodies and ghouls who have fronted the Conservative Party in the last few years, Michael Portillo would make a much more charismatic and convincing leader, but for obvious reasons I'm not about to write to the Daily Mail and tell them so - besides which, something tells me that I wouldn't get much of a hearing. I just hope that his sexual orientation causes him just as much pleasure and relief as it causes us.
It’s unlikely that if Michael Portillo had ever met Zhao Ziyang that they would have found they had very much in common. As far as I know, the reason for Zhao no longer being the Chinese leader by June 1989 had nothing to do with being gay, although of course he might have been, in which case spending the last fifteen or so years of his life under house arrest can't have done wonders for his sex life. I don’t know what Zhao’s English was like, and I’d be very surprised if Michael Portillo could communicate in Chinese; Zhao was also a dedicated leading member of the Communist Party. Why, then, did he spend the last fifteen years of his life under lock and key? According to Wikipedia:
Zhao was a solid believer in the party, but he defined socialism much differently than party conservatives. Zhao called political reform "the biggest test facing socialism." He believed economic progress was inextricably linked to democratisation. As early as 1986, Zhao became the first high-ranking Chinese leader to call for change, by offering a choice of election candidates from the village level all the way up to membership in the Central Committee.
He was known in the west for two things, one of which was when in May 1989 he went down to Tiananmen Square to talk to the students, listen to their demands and try to persuade them to leave peacefully. During the subsequent crackdown he was at first sidetracked and then purged, disappearing suddenly and completely from public life. Think of it as kidnapping, if you like. The other major event was in February this year, when his death sparked panic in the Chinese authorities. They tried to control every aspect of his funeral and of every word of the coverage of his death in the media, and only just a few weeks ago arrested a Strait Times journalist who was trying to get his hands on a copy of his memoirs.
What is it about his memoirs and his memory that the Government is so nervous about? A recent article shed some light on the issue:
Crackdown on China's little-read book
3 June 2005
A SECRET manuscript Beijing is desperately trying to stop from being published outlines purged leader Zhao Ziyang's plea for China to abandon one-party rule and follow the path of democracy.
It also airs Mr Zhao's opinion the government blundered in its crackdown on the 1989 democracy protests that led to hundreds, if not thousands, of citizens being killed, the author says.
The sensitive manuscript is now at the centre of the arrest of Hong Kong-based Singapore Straits Times reporter Ching Cheong. He was detained while trying to obtain a copy of the manuscript that has yet to make its way out of mainland China. China on Tuesday said Mr Ching was arrested for spying and had confessed.
Its authorities have pressured author Zong Fengming, an old friend of Mr Zhao's, not to publish the book.
The 85-year-old, who compiled the manuscript from conversations he had with Mr Zhao while he was under house arrest, said what makes it so threatening to Beijing is the late Mr Zhao's belief China must have democracy in order to prosper, and economic reforms are simply not enough.
"He said China's development must be on the path of democracy and rule of law. If not, China will be a corrupt society," Mr Zong said.
Reporting of Zhao's death was limited to a terse few paragraphs in the state-controlled media as part of an official campaign to erase his memory.
Mr Zong believes the government fears if a book about Mr Zhao's views is published overseas and copies find their way to China, it could have a detrimental effect on the communist regime, making Mr Zhao a hero even in death.
Mr Zhao's views run contrary to the path China's leaders are taking. The Chinese leadership is intent on maintaining one-party rule and quashing dissent or freedom of expression.
It seems to me that if, following the death of Hu Yaobang, there was a candidate for China's Gorbachev it was Zhao. Maybe if he had stepped into that hypothetical power vacuum in mid-1989, there would have been no crackdown, no unleashing of all the forces of political repression, no increase in political indoctrination for the young, no attempt to rehabilitate that monster Chairman Mao, and maybe the Chinese would have been allowed to freely use the internet to develop deeper and more open relationships with the rest of the world. Maybe China would have seen the flowering of a free press, and maybe there would have been some form of development of alternative political parties and perhaps even multi-party elections. Of course it is also possible that a China suddenly impatient for change would have pushed him aside in favour of an outsider, someone more radical and not connected with the Party machine.
Obviously there is a possibility that the hardliners would have fought back and tried to regain power. It happened in 1991 with Gorbachev. But maybe, just like in 1991, the world would have seen this old guard for what they really were - old men whose time had passed, isolated and powerless, railing against a world that had left them behind.
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Although I am by nature a lazy thinker, I do try and bear in mind when thinking about things like the events of 1989 that oversimplistic analysis will lead me straight to the wrong conclusions. Furthermore, comparisons, says the old adage, are odious, especially, as the Chinese Government is always so keen to point out, when they concern China and the West. I am also no expert on recent Chinese history. There are almost certainly people reading this who know a thousand times more about these things than I do, and I would be grateful if they would step in and correct me if I get too carried away.
China and Eastern Europe are a long way away from one another, and the prevailing circumstances in 1989 were different in all sorts of ways. This is why the Chinese Communist Party survived not just the turn of the decade but also into the new millennium, while the Communist Parties of Eastern Europe simply disappeared. Here I want to concentrate on those different circumstances:
1. The economy. Although China was still in the process of recovering from complete devastation, the economy was growing, and on the whole people were enjoying an improving standard of living. There were problems with inflation, huge disparities of wealth and low wages throughout the country, but the country was not on its last legs like the countries of the soon-to-be-former Eastern Bloc.
2. The political situation. I think generally people were happy that their leaders were heading in the right direction, albeit perhaps too slowly. People were enjoying more freedom than they had experienced within living memory, given that most of the adult population had experienced at least part of the Cultural Revolution.
As far as I can see, the demonstrations in 1987 and 1989 expressed a growing political confidence which derived from ten years of liberalisation. People were making demands of the system - greater freedom of speech, an end to corruption, better and more responsible government - but I don't think they wanted to see an end to Party rule. The demonstrations were quite different from the ones we don't see reported in the state media today, which tend to be localised reactions to individual cases of corruption and injustice. This is one of the things that I'm completely happy to admit being mistaken about.
3. Lack of political leadership. Jung Chang refers in her new book to the Cultural Revolution as the 'Great Purge'. Successive generations of potential dissidents had been massacred, driven to suicide, locked away or forced to leave the country. The person who was perhaps China's best hope of a Václav Havel, Wei Jingsheng, was part of the Beijing Wall group of dissidents and was locked up in 1979 for 14 years. There was, therefore, no previous generation of rebels from whose mistakes the protestors could learn.
Students groups obviously played a role in the building of the demonstrations, but they certainly didn't constitute a 'government-in-waiting'.
The leader who most resembled a Chinese Gorbachev, Hu Yaobang, had been sacked by Deng Xiaoping in 1987 for being too liberal, and it was his death two years later that was the initial pretext for the build-up of protestors around the square in April 1989. They were of course other reformists high up in the party, but it seems that around this time they did not have the upper hand.
4. Lack of foreign media influence. The state media was very tightly controlled, and the only alternative, the broadcasts of the BBC and other media news organisations, could only be listened to by the tiny proportion of the population who could understand English.
These were I think some of the most important differences between the situation in China and in the countries of Eastern Europe in 1989. However, this set of circumstances did not have to inevitably lead to the events that followed - the Massacre and the unleashing of political repression. It might be interesting, just now we're here, to speculate about how, given the circumstances above, things might have turned out differently.
Let's just say that, instead of giving the order to physically clear the square at all costs, the leadership had dithered. Maybe nobody wanted to be responsible for taking such a momentous decision. Or maybe, having received the order to attack, the army chiefs had not felt comfortable with the situation, and refused to do so. Or even if, and this is probably stretching it quite a bit, the soldiers of the 27th Army had refused to open fire. The leadership would have faced a crisis, and maybe, sensing that the Government didn't know what to do, the protests would have kept on growing throughout the country. The eyes of the world would have been focussed on Beijing, through the lenses of the new global 24-hour news gathering organisations. Protests were growing throughout Eastern Europe too; could the line of dominos reach China? Maybe heads would have rolled in Beijing, people resigning and being forced to resign, nobody sure what to do in this unique situation, nobody wanting to be remembered as the leader who stood in Beijing 40 years on and told the growing mass of Chinese people to sit down again. Maybe the drama would have unfolded with a gradual hollowing-out of the centre of power as the leadership tossed the poisoned chalice of leadership back and forth.
In many accounts written by people who defend the use of force to clear the square, one factor is all important. With the approach of that 40 year anniversary, a special guest was expected, and the Chinese could not be seen to lose face in such a dramatic fashion. Mikhail Gorbachev had recently stood with the East German leadership at their 40th anniversary parade. He had told them what they least wanted to hear, that 'die Wende' had passed:
Mikhail Gorbachev stood next to Honecker, but he looked uncomfortable among the much older Germans. He had come to tell them it was over, to convince the leadership to adopt his reformist policies. He had spoken openly about the danger of not ‘responding to reality’. He pointedly told the Politbüro that ‘life punishes those who come too late’. Honecker and Mielke ignored him, just as they ignored the crowds when they chanted, ‘Gorby, help us! Gorby, help us!’
If Gorbachev had arrived in Beijing in the midst of this crisis armed with the same advice, how would he have been received? Perhaps the hardliners like Li Peng would have chosen to ignore him, in the same way that Honecker and Mielke chose to take no notice. But maybe at this stage he wouldn't have been dealing with the hardliners. Would there have been anyone among the leadership of the Communist Party who might have been prepared to listen, who might have seen a potential way out of the deadlock? Another Chinese Gorbachev, if you like?
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Obviously it's a mistake to see the post-war pre-1989 Eastern European countries as one huge homogenous monolith governed by Moscow, but each of the Eastern Bloc states did either collapse or rapidly wither away during the historically brief period from 1989 onwards. The events in each country had certain basic things in common.
1. The economies were in tatters. Call it soviet-style communism, state capitalism or whatever you like, but by the late 1980s it had ruined the economic life of the countries.
2. The Communist Party leadership was ideologically bankrupt. They could no longer claim to be marching towards freedom, equality and prosperity for all. The 40 years of spying on each other and political repression was enough proof for the citizens that they were not really marching in any direction at all.
3. People could see and hear for themselves, on foreign TV stations and on radio drifting in from abroad, that things in neither the west nor their own countries were as the leaders told them they were. Furthermore, they could keep up to date with events in Russia and in their comrade nations, and know that changes were taking place and that their own leaders were starting to panic.
4. In most countries, there was an organised opposition. It may have been in prison or in exile, but it existed and it was clear that its ambition was to take power away from the Party.
5. In a lot of countries, the organised oppostion was led by a very clear figurehead. Probably ten years before, neither the leader of Solidarity Lech Walesa nor the intellectual dissident Vaclav Havel would have imagined that they would one day become President. But as events moved on it must have become clear that the people flooding into the streets and squares saw them as leaders. Hence it is very easy to look back now and see them as Presidents-in-Waiting.
6. According to one account I once heard (repeated here), the KGB had a decisive influence on events. They had allegedly decided to oversee the removal from power of the first generation of Eastern Bloc leaders, and settled on street demonstrations as a means of achieving this. Things subsequently got out of hand - I'd imagine that Vladimir Putin was not well pleased.
Then there was the domino effect, and the most significant factor here must have been the USSR itself. Change in Russia, as we all know, was not led from below but from above. Mikhail Gorbachev was, like De Klerk in apartheid South Africa, an insider who wanted to essentially preserve the system, but realised that it would have to change if it was to survive:
The Party, which I had joined, itself badly needed to be reformed and reoriented toward democracy. And through this, the country could begin to gain some freedom. That came later, but it all started with the desire to do something and show initiative. That was what led many good people to join the Komsomol (Communist Youth League) and the Party.
At a certain point, though, the momentum for fundamental change had built up to such an extent that 'die Wende' was reached. There was no turning back.
So when in August 1991 some Communist Party hardliners briefly kidnapped Gorbachev in an abortive coup attempt, the world saw them for what they really were: desperate old men whose time had passed. Not only were they no longer at the wheel of the ship of state - they had been thrown overboard.
Incidentally, the fact that the ex-head of the KGB is firmly entrenched as leader of the Great Bear tells us a lot, I think, about the difference between overthrowing a totalitarian state through popular uprising, and waiting on the leadership to quietly reform it and their own positions, powers and privileges out of existence.
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I've noticed an increasing and worrying tendency to refer to the Massacre, even in the international press, as the 'Tiananmen Square Incident'. In fact, a friend's Chinese teacher referred to it once as the Tiananmen Square Accident, and then tried to defend her choice of word! The actual 'Tiananmen Incident' took place in 1976. What took place was also a massacre, and certainly not an 'incident', whatever that means:
Things became rowdy, and inside the Great Hall of the People China's rulers were alarmed. After consultation with Mao, it was decided to use force to clear the square. Mao authorized the use of force but not guns.
That evening when only a few thousand protesters remained they were driven from the square by militia armed with clubs. Four thousand were arrested. Sixty were dragged into the Great Hall of the People, beheaded and later shipped to Shanghai and secretly cremated.
It's at best misleading to use this phrase to refer to the events of 1989, and at worst it plays right into the hands of the Chinese authorities in their attempts to have the massacre recorded in the history books of the world as something much more neutral and ambiguous than pure cold-blooded butchery of their own people.
I think this may have something to do with increasing Chinese Government influence in debates concerning human rights in China, and when it occurs I think it needs to be confronted and the fact that it was a massacre must be insisted on at all costs.
The saddest thing about all this is that the average Chinese student, despite seeming to spend every available minute online, probably has about as much awareness of the Tiananmen Square Massacre as the average British student has of the Tiananmen Incident. How foreigners can choose to go on living here year after year in the full knowledge of the extent of their students' ignorance is truly beyond my understanding.
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It seems to me that if you seriously want to understand the mentality of Chinese people today, you have to consider the impact of the events of June 1989. The protests were not isolated but were part of a general push for democracy in the late nineteen-eighties. This is abundantly clear if you read any books which cover the period - at the moment I'm reading 'Riding the Iron Rooster' by Paul Theroux, his account of a year spent travelling around the country. It was published in 1988, and in the book in conversation after conversation people express their shame and disgust at the Cultural Revolution, their rejection of Mao as someone who made nothing but mistakes and as someone who they recognise to have been essentially cracked after 1956, and their wish for more political freedom. He visits Mao's home village, a site of pilgramage 10 years before, and finds it completely deserted.
He talks about the massive protests which took place all over the country in 1987, involving both students and workers demanding greater political freedom: press freedom, electoral reform, a multiparty system, official permission to demonstrate and, perhaps more importantly, their right to have their protests reported in the press; and social freedom - the students' demands included sexual freedom (in 2005 it is still illegal to 'cohabit') and better food in the canteens. At one point there were between 100,000 and 200,000 people on the streets of Shanghai, and similar protests in other cities. The person scapegoated and purged in the wake of these protests was Hu Yaobang, whose death was the initial impetus for the buildup in Tianamen Square in April 1989. There also followed a general campaign against the effects of 'borgeouis liberalism', especially amongst the young.
We all know what came of that - if anyone needs reminding they only need to take the time to read the report which the Guardian fortunately keeps posted on it's Special Report on China page here. As I say, it was not an isolated event. The ongoing impact has involved a partial rehabilitation of Mao's reputation, a refusal to confront the consequences of the Cultual Revolution and what I consider to be a general intellectual impoverishment, contrasted with the real intellectual awakening of the nineteen-eighties which is evident in Paul Theroux's book and also in Ma Jian's 'Red Dust', which is the story of a Beijing writer and painter travelling the country in the mid-80s, on the run from the authorities visiting his friends and witnessing the changes taking place. His friends also paint, write and talk about the recent past and about the possibility of living in a freer society.
I can only compare that with the conversations I've had over the last ten months, obviously especially with young people, in which political change has not been any kind of issue for them.
The authorities after 1989 took the decision that they would systematically crush any sign of independent thinking amongst young people. In order to achieve this they increased military-style discipline in universities, increased political (read nationalistic) education for university and school students and removed from campuses any places where students or teachers would be able to gather and discuss their lives. This over the last few years has happily coincided with a general improvement of the standard of living, along with certain projects of national prestige which are used to bolster young people's sense of national pride and attachment to the state.
Just as important in my opinion has been the growing availability of mobile phones and the internet. Chinese students see themselves primarily as consumers, just as connected to and engaged with the outside world as young people in Japan or the USA. In reality they are disconnected from the society that they live in, atomized, disregarding of any notion of solidarity or democracy. What it will now take to shake them out of this stupor and make them think about what is going on around them I do not know. They really don't seem to know or in fact care that the internet they see is filtered and a pale imitation of what the rest of the world uses. I've tried asking them what they would do if the government banned mobile phones, but it's a bit too abstract as that clearly is not about to happen.
This, on the other hand, is fantastic news.
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