Then came that night, 4 June, when the tanks rolled in, and the China we know today was born. All the blood and terror that followed saved the CCP at a time when socialist regimes around the world were crumbling into dust. With the defeat of the ‘counter-revolutionary riots’, Deng Xiaoping secured his rule and that of many senior officials who had been condemned as corrupt and nepotistic by the demonstrators – and today are the heads of family clans in possession of wealth unimaginable in the late 1980s. The massacre bought the regime valuable decades. It gave Deng back power over truth and memory. And in the end, it won him admiration from politicians and businesspeople in the West. As Bertolt Brecht once asked: ‘Would it not be simpler/ for the government/ to dissolve the people/ and elect another?’ China’s government didn’t bother with elections; it shaped another people for itself.
The astrophysicist Fang Lizhi was one of the heroes of the 1989 movement. After the massacre he sought comfort in his certainty that, in light of the monstrosity of those days, in light of the millions of witnesses, this one time at least, ‘the technique of forgetting history was doomed to fail’.56 Few people could have guessed just how wrong Fang would prove to be. The CCP simply pressed ‘delete’ and reformatted the Chinese people. The Tiananmen Square massacre shook the world – but in China, it has been forgotten. The year 1989? ‘Without doubt, quite an ordinary year,’ according to a poem by the writer Yang Lian.
Guns and pens work together. The state’s soldiers murder the protesters; the state’s writers murder the truth. ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past,’ wrote George Orwell. Mao Zedong once wished his people were a blank white sheet of paper, upon which ‘the freshest and most beautiful characters could be written.’ The autocrat needs the collective amnesia of the people. The Party’s propaganda never ceases its task of reordering and reconfiguration. After 4 June 1989 the country was frozen in shock. When the people finally shook themselves out of their stupor and started bowing and scraping again, the propaganda machine began artfully to edit out the horror of those days. Over the years the ‘counter-revolutionary riots’ became known first as the ‘riots’, then the ‘political storm’, and finally just ‘the incident’.
In the end, even the ‘incident’ dissolved into silence. As if an old photograph had faded until only meaningless silhouettes remained. When Beijing police officers today warn foreign correspondents against writing about the massacre, they couch their warnings in vague terms, referring to ‘sensitive issues in sensitive times’. They aren’t even specific enough to say: that year or that day. In fact, every year around 4 June the very terms ‘that year’ and ‘that day’ reappear in the internet censors’ index of banned words. On Weibo, blocked expressions also include: ‘When spring becomes summer’ and ‘35 May’, terms thought up by inventive users as proxies for ‘4 June’. Wikipedia is banned in China; its Chinese counterpart is called Baidu Baike, and claims to be ‘an open and free online encyclopaedia’. You will find entries on Baidu Baike for the years 1988 and 1990 – but 1989 doesn’t exist. An entire year has been erased from history.
The mind-blowing thing about this is not the efforts of the censors, but the fact that they have worked. It can be done. Even in an era when, thanks to the internet, China’s doors were more open to the world than they had ever been, it was still possible to brainwash an entire nation. Thousands of young, intelligent, open-minded Chinese people, who have grown up with smartphones and social media, go abroad at twenty and hear for the first time the news of what happened in their homeland in 1989. Some are shocked; many others refuse to believe it even then. They close themselves off inside the cocoon the Party has spun for them, and refuse to let the information get to them. ‘Why won’t you Western journalists stop lying?’ a Chinese student in Germany once wrote to me. ‘You just can’t bear the fact that China is growing strong.’
The civil rights activist Hu Jia tells the story of 17 January 2005, the day Zhao Ziyang died. Zhao was the liberal head of the Communist Party from 1987 to 1989, and Prime Minister** prior to that. It was Zhao who tried to make some concessions to the students on Tiananmen Square, before being toppled by the hardliners around the eminence grise Deng Xiaoping. Hu Jia knew his family and went to offer his condolences. When he got home, his wife Zeng Jingyang asked where he had been. He explained. She gave him a quizzical look: ‘At whose house? Zhao Ziyang? Who’s that?’
‘That was a bit of a shock for me,’ says Hu Jia. ‘She was born in 1983, and she’s a clever, critical woman who studied at the People’s University, one of the elite universities in Beijing. And she had never in her life heard of Zhao Ziyang, who was – at least nominally – the most powerful man in the country for several years. At that moment I understood the power the Party has over our brains.’
When the American journalist Louisa Lim was doing research for her book The People’s Republic of Amnesia, she showed a hundred Beijing students the famous photo of ‘Tank Man’: the man in the black trousers and white shirt, standing in the way of the approaching convoy of tanks with nothing but a plastic bag in his hand, and bringing them to a halt just an arm’s length away from his slender frame. It is one of the iconic images of the twentieth century. But only 15 of the 100 students recognised – and to their extreme dismay – that the image was of China. Beijing. The Street of Eternal Peace that leads to Tiananmen Square. The other 85? They shrugged and guessed Kosovo or South Korea.57
The business of mental eradication – forgetting – is made easier when every few years, every few weeks even, the physical world around you is also pulverised, vanishes without trace and is completely reconfigured. In the past two decades the whole of China has been torn down and rebuilt, in some places several times over. This has brought a Western style of living to China’s cities, with beautiful new apartments in tower blocks that have sprung up overnight, and modern, faceless towns. At the same time it has erased everything that was familiar to people.
‘You just had to turn your back and the old familiar street would be gone,’ says Zhang Xiaogang, the painter, talking about the 1990s. ‘I was away from Kunming for a semester. Then I came back – and my hometown didn’t exist anymore. Destroyed, laid waste overnight.’ Wherever you went at that time, China’s cities had been reduced to rubble. They were waiting to rise again as thousands of clones. ‘I think it’s the first time this has happened, at such a speed, on such a scale, anywhere in the world,’ says Zhang. ‘Everything in this country is being radically changed day after day. In your city, but also in your life. The speed at which things are happening here is abnormal. It goes far beyond what the human soul can normally bear.’
The wiping of memories through cityscapes and architecture is just one expression of a collective forgetting that has become an instinctive survival technique for the Chinese. ‘The old buildings were probably the last things to be rubbed out,’ says Wang Shu, China’s most famous architect, who has won the coveted Pritzker Prize. ‘That explains why people stopped objecting to them being demolished and completely rebuilt. Everything else, our old life, our tradition and culture, had already been shattered, particularly during the Cultural Revolution. The old houses were just a final, hollow remnant.’
Today, China has more than 100 cities bigger than Chicago. Many of them have grown to ten or more times their original size over the past decade, and all have completely eradicated their history in the process. ‘It’s as if someone dropped 120 nuclear bombs on China,’ says Wang Shu. Of the buildings he designed in the 1990s, not a single one is still standing. They have all been torn down.
Sometimes, among China’s desperate, tumbling population, you can sense a lost-ness; a great insecurity. Both Zhang Xiaogang the painter and Wang Shu the architect had decided early on to try to keep their balance by stubbornly remembering. This takes a lot more effort in China than it does elsewhere. It also makes you an outsider.
The two men gained recognition within China only once their s
uccesses abroad had made them famous. Zhang became known for his family portraits, which were inspired by studio photos from the Cultural Revolution: people wearing cotton tunics, as stipulated by Mao, and serious, unmoving expressions. Almost everyone who had an interest in China or modern art was captivated by his portraits, and the hypnotic eyes of these dream-like faces. They are serious faces, calm as a silent lake, but their mute resignation hides a storm of emotions; the pain and desires of an individual human being swirl below the surface. All the pictures are slightly out of focus; the only living detail is the shimmering black eyes.
Zhang Xiaogang gave the title ‘Amnesia and Memory’ to a series of pictures begun at the start of the new millennium. The painter sees the sheer force of the change that has been unleashed in China as something that you have to resist to have any hope of holding onto the past. But in doing so you are up against the might of the Communist Party, which views memory is a dangerous and subversive power. If you make people homeless and rootless, it calculates, they will run, naked and shivering, into the protective arms of the Mother Party.
The inspiration for Zhang’s work comes from his childhood during the Cultural Revolution. From the age of five, he was trapped inside the four bare walls of the Chengdu apartment allocated to his family by the work unit. Just like the little boy in one of his paintings, who rides his bicycle round a table. No light shines through the windows in these pictures. ‘All the windows in our building had been bricked up,’ he remembers. They stayed that way for two years, because of the Red Guards who occasionally fired shots at the building. There was no electricity either; just oil lamps.
‘It was dark. Like a bunker. My eyes were ruined.’ Was it a terrible time? Yes and no. The eight-year-old Zhang and his friends thought it was cool. ‘We were a big gang of friends. And there were no adults there to keep an eye on us. We roamed around just as we pleased.’ The Cultural Revolution was one of humanity’s darkest hours. But for some of the children – you hear this quite often – it was tremendous fun. The adults were out at ‘struggle sessions’ from morning until night, denouncing and humiliating each other. The Red Guards paraded around triumphantly with the bodies of ‘counter-revolutionary enemies’ who had been tortured to death. Meanwhile the young children raced up and down the stairs, finding themselves in a fairy-tale realm of anarchy where all the adults were far, far away. They may have been freer and less constrained than any other generation of Chinese children. No authorities, no school, no homework, for years. Zhang saw a lot of dead bodies in those days, and heard a lot of shooting. ‘It was terrible for a little boy,’ he says. ‘And exciting.’
From 1966 to 1976, the Cultural Revolution laid waste to the nation’s souls. ‘And today,’ says Zhang, ‘it has been forgotten.’ This was particularly obvious in 2016, exactly fifty years since Mao fired the starting pistol. There was not a single commemoration all that year, not a single memorial event. No debates, no self-criticism. A blanket of silence lay over the country. The Party knows that it might be under threat if people remember too much. So it rewrites the past into a fantastical historical novel that serves its present needs.
After Mao’s death, the Communist Party grandees condemned the Cultural Revolution as ‘ten years of chaos’ – but they quickly added that Mao had done the Motherland a great service, and his errors were trivial in comparison. The Party drew up a balance sheet and concluded that Mao had been ‘70 per cent good and 30 per cent bad’. The 30 per cent part would include the 40 million people who died of starvation during the ‘Great Leap Forward’ from 1958 to 1961 – that devastating campaign in which Mao ordered every last peasant in every last village to melt down their tools and pots to provide steel. Mao wanted to ‘catch up with England and overtake America’ by turning China into an industrial nation overnight. Eventually, China had no spades or shovels left, no ploughshares and no woks, and the result was one of the greatest famines in history.
Not long after taking office, Party leader Xi Jinping declared that any criticism of Mao Zedong was once more taboo. What the Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung – coming to terms with the (Nazi) past – the CCP calls ‘historical nihilism’, and those who practise it can be prosecuted. In April 2018 the National People’s Congress passed a law threatening punishment to anyone ‘insulting or slandering the [communist] heroes and martyrs’ – meaning anyone who dared to question the historical accuracy of the heroic stories from the Party’s glorious past. On the day I went to visit the painter Zhang Xiaogang in his studio, some workmen were replacing the famous portrait of Mao at the gate to Tiananmen Square: the Great Chairman was to appear untarnished and in fresh colours for the national holiday.
‘I always thought history and memory would triumph over temporary aberrations and return to their rightful place,’ the author Yan Lianke wrote in 2013.58 ‘It now appears the opposite is true. In today’s China, amnesia trumps memory. Lies are surpassing the truth.’ Fear is one factor. The silence of those who were there, the mute acquiescence with those in power: in China these are simple survival techniques. You fear for your children and hide the truth from them, because – spoken unthinkingly in front of classmates or teachers – it might put them in danger. I once asked Cui Jian, the rock musician who had played to the students in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and whose song ‘Nothing to my Name’ (Yi wu suo you) became their anthem, what he was most concerned about in China. ‘Zhuang-sha,’ he replied like a shot: the pretence of ignorance that becomes second nature to people living under dictatorships.
Yan Lianke decries the silence and the timidity of his fellow writers and the caste of intellectuals as a whole when faced with this state-led amnesia. ‘The opened window we have now is more a small mercy bestowed by the powerful at a permissive moment, than a victory won by intellectuals because of our persistent quest for openness,’ he writes. ‘Someone who has spent years in a dark cell is bound to be grateful if a window in his cell is unshuttered and some light is allowed in. Would he dare to ask for the prison gate to be opened for him?’
But there is more than just fear at work here. After 1989, something new was added to the mix. The government of Deng Xiaoping offered its people (the city-dwellers among them, at any rate) a deal: make money, get rich – but keep your mouths shut. And the people accepted that deal. Wang qian kan was the slogan of the moment: ‘Look ahead!’ Just don’t turn around. Helpfully, the sounds wang qian kan can also be written with different characters that mean ‘Follow the money!’ Since then, the Party has been pursuing an unprecedented course of economic opening-up, while refusing to loosen its political stranglehold. It still worships the shrines of communism as if they contained holy relics, although everyone knows that the thing they’re required to venerate has been dead as a doornail for years. The leaders have hit upon nationalism as the new opium of the people, a poisonous little plant that they have been conscientiously feeding and watering, and which has now produced a host of wild blossoms.
The past may be forgotten, but it is not past. The way China’s society functions today cannot be separated from what happened in the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution, says Zhang Xiaogang, isn’t just an historical fact, it’s more a ‘mental state’. Today’s China may be glittering and booming, but you shouldn’t let that deceive you: ‘Much in the psyche of Chinese people today goes back to that time.’ A trauma of this kind, as we know from studies of war, is passed down the generations. If everyone in China today mistrusts everyone else; if everyone automatically assumes that everyone else is out to cheat and trick them, that attitude is rooted in a time when husbands betrayed their wives and children got their parents sent to labour camps, or even to the scaffold. The young people of that time, both perpetrators and victims, are now in power. They’re leading the Party, the state, the big Chinese businesses.
The way China looks today is also impossible to separate from what happened in 1989. The glittering, powerful, ambitious China – and the rottenness at its core. The boom and
the growing prosperity that Chinese cities have enjoyed for many years has turned the urban middle classes into the Party’s most loyal accomplices. And because ideals have been banned in the country since 1989, they have thrown themselves into uninhibited materialism. The families of the CCP’s leaders have enriched themselves shamelessly in the process, foremost among them the clan of Li Peng, who as prime minister declared martial law in 1989. This is a society in which young people’s idealism and willingness to make sacrifices have now slid into a general cynicism. The moral crisis ravaging China’s society, people’s loss of all trust in each other and in the state apparatus, the rampant corruption, the ecological devastation – all these things can to some extent be traced back to the course set in those fateful moments.
When you have been ordered to forget the night of 3-4 June, then remembering is a crime. Year after year, in the early days of June the Weibo censors’ index of banned words includes daonian, ‘mourn’. Mourning is forbidden, in word and deed. Who exactly is the Party afraid of? Clearly the handful of stubborn people who cling to their memories. Each year the performance is repeated: in the weeks leading up to 4 June the authorities silence dozens of these stubborn people or throw them in prison. The drawing Zhang Xiaogang posted on his Weibo account on 4 June 2012, of a face with hands clapped to its mouth in horror, was deleted immediately. In spring every year, foreign journalists and diplomats start finding it almost impossible to contact the ‘Mothers of Tiananmen Square,’ a group of female democracy activists who refuse to stop commemorating the violent deaths of their sons and daughters. And then there is Chen Guang, one of the soldiers from that time who later became a painter: he was arrested just before the 25th anniversary of the massacre, after a performance for friends during which he painted the numbers 1989 to 2014 on brightly coloured walls, and then whitewashed over them.
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