“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” writer Milan Kundera said. The quote has been widely used in articles commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing. For Chinese around the world who are more than 40 years old, the incident is unforgettable. Many of those who demonstrated extraordinary courage pursuing political reform in China lost their future and their lives because of the violent crackdown by the Chinese government. The massacre denotes the annihilation of any possibility that China might become a pluralistic society. Since the massacre, people who still remember are caught in a struggle against forgetting.
By the standard of transitional justice, on Beijing’s Changan Avenue — the road before the Tianenmen gate and the entrance to Tianenmen Square — should have a memorial, much as the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial in Washington where in 1963, King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Perhaps decades later there will be such a memorial in China.
However, the generations that experienced the impact of the massacre have lost their ability to speak about it. Even though some of them became middle-class, the pressures of life and a lack of human rights still constantly invoke their conscience and memories. Unfortunate are those born after 1989, who, under the influence of party-state education and media controls, have no knowledge of the massacre because it has been obliterated by the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party. When younger people talk with those who remember the massacre, they cannot help but feel confused, alienated and humiliated, as they lack critical thinking skills and are filled with patriotic emotion.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) posted a comment on Facebook in commemoration of the incident, talking of the universal value of liberty and democracy, but without invoking emotion about the massacre.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) called for redress for the massacre. In the legislature, 45 lawmakers from various parties made a joint statement on the incident. However, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu’s (洪秀柱) commentary was more akin to a supplication for forgiveness for Beijing on behalf of the activists, prompting bitter criticism.
Last Saturday evening, I attended a commemoration at Liberty Square in Taipei. This year, organizers voiced less criticism of the “Chinese impact on Taiwan,” while expressing sympathy for the weiquan (維權) civil rights movement in China. Despite different stances by different parties and organizations, they all did what they could to remember and showed a refusal to forget.
After the 2014 “Umbrella movement” pursuit of democratic reform in Hong Kong suffered a setback, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, the Hong Kong Federation of Students and other groups were divided over whether to organize a commemoration to “build a democratic China” or to “realize Hong Kong’s autonomy.” They conducted four commemorations separately, but they all leaned toward universal values and rejected Chinese nationalism.
Although the weather was as changeable, hundreds of thousands of people attended the candlelight vigil in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park commemorating the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
What is certain, people are farther away from the “Chinese dream.” China’s refusal to commemorate the Tiananmen Square Massacre affects not only the possibility of a democratic China, but also the future of its relations with Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Lin Thung-hong is an associate research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Sociology.
Translated by Ethan Zhan
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