The Tiananmen legacy

JUNE 4, 1989, was squarely a setback from which China has yet to recover.

The Goddess of Democracy erected in the square before the June 4 crackdown.

TODAY marks the 25th anniversary of the most famous event in modern Chinese history — unless you’re Chinese.

The hundreds of deaths that resulted from the deployment of heavily armed troops against unarmed civilian protesters in and around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, the symbolic heart of China, drew a grim line under a decade of the most rapid liberalisation the People’s Republic has ­experienced.

Despite seizing the horrified ­attention of the rest of the world, at home the event has been wiped from every record.

During the anniversary period, even entering the characters for June 4 — liu si — triggers the clanging of the protective online gates of the Great Firewall of China.

Many, probably most, young Chinese — even graduates — know little or nothing of the tragic train of events that began with such reformist optimism earlier that year, but June 4’s mark on history will remain massive.

Timeline: The Tiananmen tragedy

It explains the muted nature of the events organised in Beijing to honour Deng Xiaoping, blamed for unleashing the troops, when he died eight years later.

It explains the constant double-digit growth in spending on the People’s Liberation Army, which is credited with rescuing the Chinese Communist Party, on June 4 and beyond, from the ebbing of power that doomed its Soviet counterpart. The PLA remains resolutely the party’s army, not that of the government.

In Australia, the events were a shock to prime minister Bob Hawke, who had built a strong relationship with the party’s general secretary Zhao Ziyang, who was discarded for his failure to deal sufficiently severely with the demonstrators and held under house arrest until he died in 2005.

Hawke said: “To crush the spirit and the body of youth is to crush the very future of China itself.” He broke down on television and announced — without any previous discussion — that no Chinese student in Australia would be forced to return home.

More than 20,000 such students were here, many from Shanghai. Most chose to stay, obtained permanent protection visas and then citizenship, and have ­become exceptionally productive citizens, including by building bridges back to China.

Although China’s economy has expanded massively in the 25 years since the Tiananmen Square episode, there has been no significant political change and some controls have been tightened.

Some of Australia’s foremost experts on China explain to The Australian the significance of what happened on June 4.

Kerry Brown, executive director of the University of Sydney’s China Studies Centre, says the event has for 25 years “stained the conscience” of the CCP.

Former leader Hu Yaobang’s “period of experimentation and openness was ended by the June 1989 events”, he says.

“And while it is unlikely the party will openly admit fault about June 4 anytime soon, in an indirect way the return of positive language about Hu in recent years, culminating in a laudatory article about him by former premier Wen Jiabao in 2010, testifies to the fact that official attitudes towards the 1989 tragedy are changing.

“In Hu’s slow rehabilitation we see at least some admission that the handling of events was wrong, and that the great unmet challenge Hu Yaobang laid down of delivering a more just, balanced and humane politics in China must one day be addressed. That will be June 4’s lasting legacy.”

Mobo Gao, professor of Chinese studies at the University of Adelaide, says that on June 4, 1989, “China lost an opportunity for beneficial political reform. Had the event not taken place, Zhao ­Ziyang would have been in power for more years, and a more stable transformation of governance in China could have happened.”

The event also “caused China, the CCP and even the Chinese people to suffer a huge blow in reputation. Placed in history, the number of people killed in Beijing might not be the worst, but it was under the full scrutiny of the global media. So the impact was disproportionately huge.

“The Chinese government lost the trust or support of many young Chinese, many of whom are highly talented and educated, including those who decided not to return to China from overseas.

“The saddest thing of all,” Gao says, “is that hardly any of the ­issues raised by the demonstrators have been adequately addressed. If anything, most have become worse, such as corruption and lack of civic freedom.

“The party is less coherent, and no longer has the credibility to call on the Chinese from the heart.

“Many, if not the majority, of party members join for career gain.”

Geremie Barme, director of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University and co-author of a documentary film about June 4, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, says: “To this day, Chinese authorities, when confronting major anniversaries of the 1989 protest movement, organise ritualised persecutions that further victimise the country’s thinking people who nurture the hope to realise an equitable, open and democratic modern society.”

In 1989, Barme says, mass discontent over a broad range of ­issues was fanned by party intransigence and factionalism into a ­national crisis. Among erroneous information about this movement, “the Chinese party-state avers that, following the death on April 15 of the ousted ‘bourgeois liberal’ Hu Yaobang, a sinister coterie of US-inspired plotters inveigled large numbers of protesters in Beijing and dozens of other Chinese cities to agitate for the overthrow of the party and the People’s Republic itself”, he says.

The still active former protest leaders and their followers claim they were, above all, political naifs calling for the kinds of freedoms long promised by Chinese reformers and revolutionaries, Barme says.

Hundreds of innocents were killed in the approaches to the square that fateful night, and “families can still not mourn those deaths”.

John Fitzgerald, director of the Asia-Pacific Centre for Social Impact and Philanthropy at Swinburne University of Technology, says the party “is acutely conscious that inequality in China ranks among the highest on earth”.

“It has launched a fusillade of policies to bridge the yawning gaps,” he says. “All such policies land with a thud because the party won’t budge on the most essential inequality of all. The party acknowledges no equal to itself.”

The 1989 demonstrations were about equality before they touched on democracy, he points out; they were about special party privileges.

“They ended up calling for democracy because their egalitarian demands were resisted.”

In his memoirs, party secretary Zhao recalled premier Li Peng growing furious, telling him that “allowing demonstrators to negotiate with the party and government as equals would be to negate the leadership of the CCP and of the entire socialist system”.

Fitzgerald says: “Li won the day. Today no one in China equals a party official except another party official.

“In consequence, the corruption that comes with special privilege has spiralled out of control.

“When Li Peng won, power won. Everyday dignity and civility lost.

“So every day since June 1989 has been a reprise of that fateful day — an everyday struggle for ­ordinary human dignity.”