Kapok | The politics of memory

Eric Sautedé

Remembering and commemorating June 4, 1989 is not an easy task.

First and foremost as the government that sits in Beijing forbids and effectively prevents any attempt at commemorating what happened in Tiananmen Square and around that day. The official press is silent. People who were at the forefront of the movement are tightly monitored, if not under house arrest or gone for forced holidays. Sensitive places are not freely accessible, be it the Square itself, adjoining streets where most of the bloodshed took place or cemeteries where the ones who were killed that night rest forever. And even virtual candles cannot be posted online.   

Equally important is the fact that the regime has been systemically and thoroughly wiping off all traces of memory in connection with the events, and has refused to revise its judgement regarding those, even though what was once characterized as “a counter-revolutionary rebellion” has become mere “political turmoil” in official lingo. Actually, additional blurriness serves a purpose as it is one step further towards the completion of the erasing process.

And then, in places where it is actually possible to publicly pay tribute to June 4, what is it that we commemorate? The “massacre” so that unarmed students, workers and ordinary beijingers killed by the bullets of the People’s Liberation Army or crushed by its tanks do not fall into the oblivion of a mere “incident”?

But, in commemorating the tragedy and rightfully requesting a long-overdue vindication, aren’t we ourselves relegating to the background the hope and joy that existed beyond injustice and sadness? After all, the occupation of Tiananmen Square was the main stage of a social movement that initially started with a gathering of students from elite universities on April 15. That day they had come to the Monument to the People’s Heroes to mourn the passing away of a former general secretary of the very same Party that would ultimately order to fire on unarmed civilians on June 4.

In between these two dates, a tribute to a reformist communist cadre who had unjustly been sacked two years earlier had transformed over the course of almost two months into a resolute denunciation of rampant corruption and demands for greater political participation as well as democratic reforms, and spread to some 400 cities in China.

This year, as we were commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the massacre, a lot of the commentaries focused on whether or not the official attempt at wiping out the memory of the events among Chinese citizens and especially the younger generations had actually been successful.

Foreign journalists going around the streets of Beijing with an image of the Tank Man, the most iconic picture in the West of the Chinese people’s heroic resistance to savage repression, and asking passers-by whether they had recognized the image verged on indecency as it produced mainly bewilderment and embarrassment, and clearly did not prove much given the general political environment of the capital city at this sensitive time.

Much more convincing was what Louisa Lim, a journalist turned scholar, has characterized as the “People’s Republic of Amnesia” and her more recent essay in which she remarked that “indoctrinating China’s young people with a utilitarian view of history is an even more powerful tool than censorship itself.”

But then, are these really certainties, even though documentation goes beyond the incidental? Another scholar working on Chinese millennials is now stressing that most of his interviewees were indeed the ones who had brought up the subject of the Tiananmen repression during the lengthy conversations he had with them. Another journalist-scholar emphasizes that a significant number of unabated writers, filmmakers, poets, artists, songwriters and public intellectuals have turned into amateur historians to preserve the memories of the country’s many upheavals. And  then, what about the many private photos taken at the time?

In Hong Kong, there is no doubt that record numbers of participants turned up for the vigil this year also because of the ongoing debate over the extradition law. Ultimately, memories resurfaced when they resonate with the present. Sooner or later, they never fail to do so.