Reading: The Meaning of Tiananmen (Burt Green) [2004]
To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State related tags: #HNvPtS
Around the world, the events in Beijing on June 3-4, 1989, have been commemorated with solemn speeches and ceremonies, each crafted to reflect the glory of Beijing's courageous citizenry onto the current projects of the official world in a light filtered by its present interests.
Yep. But also I find it amusing that, for younger generations who participate in gaming, they are more likely to learn about this event because of how the Chinese government mandates that game companies must handle it, which results in them often disabling all sorts of features that might enable players to even interact with each other (lest they mention Tiananmen's anniversary).
Ironically, in trying to force people to forget, China forces them to remember what they're forgetting in the first place.
Human Rights activists, trade-unionists and spokespersons for the Chinese democracy movement deplore the massacre of non-violent protestors and the continued repression of political, labor and religious oppositionists, without calling for the liquidation of the bureaucratic class in whose interest this ongoing reaction is structurally embedded. When the citizens of Beijing are mentioned, it is largely as victims, not as actors. Those whose voices should be loudest of all are still stifled.
This has always been one of my frustrations with human rights activists and trade unionists: they never want to go far enough. Sometimes I don't think it's malicious, but other times I find it hard to believe that they can seriously think that the world we live in now won't have to change that much for any of their goals to be realised.
So it feels like they don't want to give up their positions, even if the world we could create would be better.
They also established linkages and routes for information, underground libraries, and escape routes for fugitives. Continuity in the development of this current to the present may be seen in the contemporaneous Beijing group “North Star,” which included Chen Zeming, one of the “black hands” (i.e., hidden organizers) later alleged to be behind the Beijing events of 1989.
For my own notes to come back to.
While some of this feels overwhelmingly lacking... I do know that I need to look more deeply into events like this, just as I do others. I'm going to use this source as it stands, but I want to acknowledge my own ignorance regarding aspects of these events.
Based on this, I feel like Peter's synthesis of it with his own work is extremely superficial. He takes this part:
Many of the shortcomings of the movement lay in its origins in a student milieu still burdened with the habits of the old Chinese scholar-gentry and its neo-Confucian role as moral repository and advisor to the imperial court. To preserve the purity of ''their'' movement, students sought initially, as they had during the1986-1987 movement, to limit contacts with and participation by the workers and other outsiders. In fact their movement only really began to resonate throughout Chinese society and raise the actual question of power when the massed citizenry of Beijing, pointedly among them the workers of Capital Steel, joined them first in support of their hunger strike and then in defiance of martial law. Even so, when the organizers of the Workers' Autonomous Federation wanted to set up a tent in Tiananmen Square, they were confined to the outer perimeter. The authorities who suppressed the occupation of the square were not so blinkered as to their importance; the WAF tent was one of the first at which they directed their assault. The students' misdirected desire to appear as a loyal opposition to the regime (and their equally absurd thinking that this attitude would protect them) appears repeatedly as the greatest limitation of a movement which had already broken the bonds of loyalty in the eyes of China's masters, and was going to be made to pay for it. The student's nearly complete misunderstanding of the nature of legitimacy under bureaucratic power and the illusion that the Party could be negotiated with, left them defenseless both in terms of the theoretical means of describing their undertaking and in regards to the narrow practice of civil disobedience it led them to adopt. There were fewer who shared this view in the working-class suburbs, where large numbers were arrested for possession of weapons and ammunition: proof that there, the requisite conditions for the negation of bureaucratic capitalism were better understood.
And he focuses on the aspect of how the students misunderstood the nature of legitimacy under bureaucratic power, but he doesn't synthesise it with anything and just... drops it as a piece of information.
Personally, my first inclination in why a movement fails tends to be around the people who want to maintain control over something (be it political control or even narrative control), and that was something that was made clear in this paragraph on its own (the students didn't want to engage with people they treated as 'beneath' them, despite the fact that those ordinary people are also likely tired of the same shit as they were).
This is further made clear by this part:
In the three weeks during which the movement grew and developed, it was not always possible for institutions of self-rule to realize directly democratic forms, the more so as China was not a society in which the ideas of directly democratic, anti-statist, anti-capitalist social organization could be freely or legally disseminated. Partly as a consequence, there was a lack of clarity regarding the nature of organizational forms and a fear by what was already becoming the elite of the student movement, of the consequences to their power arising from the adoption of democratic procedures. When Liu Xiaobo, “the liumang ('hooligan') intellectual”, proposed elections to the student leaders, the response of one of them, Wuer Kaixi, was ''what if we don't win?” On the other hand, however prominent the movement's informal leadership became, it always remained subject to the sovereign base. Again, in Wuer Kaixi's words: “Anyone in charge had to support the Tiananmen occupation. Were you to ask the students to leave, they would get rid of you.” The disproportional importance of personalities, a corresponding underdevelopment of ideas of self-organization and the lack of a general critique of bureaucratic capitalism (as of world capitalism in general) were signs of the movement's relative immaturity. How really insignificant these “leading personalities” turned out to be, once detached from the movement of which they had been a part, became only too clear later in exile. Today, the continuing preoccupation with personalities by the Chinese opposition in exile is the sign of a milieu still without a substantive oppositional politics. The feeble philosophical and psychological resistance to religion afforded by many of these same refugees serves as well as another unedifying display of their soft critical cores. The greatness of the 1989 Protest Movement was not in its leaders, but in its rank-and-file, ordinary citizens, workers and students.
You can see that, while some people may have wanted to create a more inclusive structure (even if by voting, Liu Xiaobo's suggestion allows more people to participate in the decision-making here), others were against it because they saw themselves as losing control (exemplified by Wuer Kaixi in this passage). This highlights a problem in perspective (two perspectives that very much cannot work together).
Before the issue of nonviolence (whatever is meant by that for Peter with regards to 1989), they were already having issues regarding goals. Nonviolent or violent strategies wouldn't have changed this because they were clearly not all on the same page, with all wanting to change society away from the Maoist politics they had endured prior but having incredibly different ideas on what that would mean (both in the interim and in the long-term).
Not taking that into account doesn't... help.