Today is the twentieth anniversary of the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests by the Chinese military.  The protests that started in Beijing and spread to other cities around China in 1989 and the Chinese government’s harsh military response have stood the test of time and remain among the most important historical events of my lifetime.

But how much do we really know about what went down at Tiananmen?  The typical mainstream media line is that gallant protests by brave, idealistic Chinese students in Beijing, at first, then other cities in China, were brutally suppressed by the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).  The reality of the situation was much more complicated however. 

For anyone wanting to get a firsthand account of the chaotic Tiananmen Square protests,  I highly recommend the chaotic documentary The Gate of Heavenly Peace (Check out Gina’s Tiananmen Post for this and other films on the event) for on the scene footage, much of which was shot by protesters, of a social movement spinning out of control.  The Tiananmen protests of 1989 are generally thought to have started around April 15, 1989 as mourning ceremonies in the square over the death of Hu Yaobang, a former Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party who had criticized Deng Xiaoping for not going far enough or fast enough with his economic and cultural reforms from the era of Mao Zedong.  But over the next month and a half they transformed into virtual anarchy, with well over 100,000 protesters in Tiananmen Square at any given time without any real leadership, and worse yet without any efficient way of communicating or often even deciding on what the actual goals of the protests were.

In The Gate of Heavenly Peace, the college aged protesters come off as you would expect a college protesters in America or anywhere else to be: idealistic, but disorganized and without any cohesive message or real path toward attaining their fractious goals.  Internal power struggles took place between the protesters themselves about both ideology and day to day strategy.  One protest leader, the notorious Chai Ling who subsequently fled China and went on to become an investment banker then start a technology company in America, said in an interview days before the June 4th crackdown that some of the protesters were hoping to provoke a violent response from the government in order to truly open the eyes of the Chinese people, while other moderate voices in the square wanted things to remain peaceful.  Meanwhile, the Chinese government engaged in its own fractious debate about how to deal with the situation.  Some prominent members of the Communist party wanted to reach out, and indeed did communicate, sometimes even with personal visits, to the protesters.  Others took a much harder line.

We now know who won this internal debate in the government of the PRC and who got what they wanted amongst the protesters.  Deng Xiaoping eventually emerged from semi-retirement to exert his full power over the Chinese military to put down the protests.  But this turn of events is more or less a replaying of a similar scenario which has emerged repeatedly throughout Chinese history.  It’s no piece of cake governing the largest population in the world, as Chinese leaders have found out time and time again.  Rebellions, riots and uprisings are commonplace throughout the often violent history of the nation.  There are many reasons for this but most come down to the fact that when you have a severely overcrowded country with equally strained resources, social upheaval is sure to follow.

In repeated instances, like nearly the entire first half of the Twentieth Century, after the Monarchy was overthrown for example, such uprisings have turned into prolonged fighting between various warlord factions in a nationwide Civil War.   Later in the Twentieth Century, after Mao Zedong’s foolhardy Cultural Revolution, youth and student groups in the late 60’s and early 70’s took over parts of many Chinese cities and turned them into riot zones, until the Army was called in to put them down. In the relatively stable China of today, there are still over 1,000 violent uprisings that occur every year in towns and villages across the country, often by impoverished farmers or factory or mine workers who feel they’ve been treated unfairly in China’s raucous free-for-all economy.

This is not to excuse the Chinese government for the Tiananmen crackdown, but this background does provide a context what Deng Xiaoping and others in the Chinese leadership must have been considering twenty years ago today.  The aftermath and harsh international condemnation also struck the Chinese state, used to being able to control information, by surprise.  Enough news on the event was able to make it out of China, in the dawn of a new electronic era, that the government was not able to simply operate however it wanted anymore without pressure from abroad.  Since that time, protests and dissent have been even more closely monitored by the Chinese government, which employs over 1 million people in the effort, to ensure things don’t turn into Tiananmen again.

LINKS:

Reuters: China marks Tiananmen Protests; US Critical

BBC News: Hong Kong protest over Tiananmen

WSJ: Thousands Protest in Hong Kong to Mark Tiananmen Anniversary