China's race to supremacy
I'd like to think the brave few commemorating Tiananmen Square this month can stop China's totalitarians, but I fear they cannot

by AC Grayling
May 28, 2009

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/28/tiananmen-china


This year, 4 June will be the 20th anniversary of the day the tanks rolled over the democracy camp in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. The regime in Zhong Nan Hai, the government complex on the lake near the Forbidden City, which ordered the violent suppression of the reform demonstration, is still in power – politburo faces and names change, but the regime does not – and the number of dissidents who are brave enough to put their own names and faces to opposing it are now very few.

A few of those few – 19 of them, to be exact – met in Beijing on 10 May to commemorate the event, choosing to do so early to dodge state vigilance. The commemoration took the form of a round table discussion of what happened on 4 June 1989, the significance and consequences of the reform demonstrations leading to it and the current prospects for democracy in China.

The 19 consisted of lawyers, editors, public intellectuals and some of the activists jailed because of their participation in the 4 June event itself.

One of those present was my friend and co-author Xu Youyu, alongside whom I once taught at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, and whom later I was able to bring to Oxford for a period of research, during which we together wrote a book entitled The Long March to the Fourth of June (under the joint pseudonym Li Xiao Jun) on the history of the Chinese Communist party.

I mention Xu Youyu, now celebrated in reform circles in China both for his dissident stance and his memoir of being a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution (an experience that converted him to the ideals of liberal democracy), in order to do what I can to protect him. International recognition is one way that the extraordinarily courageous reformists in China can be somewhat helped against the remorseless iron-fistedness of a regime apparently so insecure and guilty-minded that it has to silence people who criticise it by locking them up and maltreating them.

Those of us who maintain connections with members of the democracy movement inside China have covert methods of ensuring that our contacts are still at large; we know when they have been arrested, something that makes it more difficult for the regime closeted in Zhong Nan Hai to "disappear" their annoyingly intelligent, brave and insistent opponents. Xu was recently awarded a prize in Prague for his courage as a reform campaigner; that kind of thing can prove to be a lifeline in the most literal sense.

The campaigners of Tiananmen Square in 1989 were the vanguard for the liberation of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union later that same year. They were crushed by the Chinese regime and its tanks, and failed to free their own fellows, but they freed scores of millions elsewhere in the world from one-party dictatorship and the surveillance of secret policemen. They did it by their example. They made the Chinese regime the unwitting key to turning the prison-house locks of East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, by making it impossible for all but Romania (and even there half-heartedly) to try the same trick of opposing political protest with tanks and automatic rifles. They created a permanent outside opposition to the Chinese regime that with the same implacability as the regime itself – but by argument, organisation, and moral strength instead of armed force and bullying – is set on winning the argument for the liberation of China.

Churchill's famous remark about the Battle of Britain pilots, the few to whom so many owed so much, could now be applied to China's dissidents, the few to whom the many (the world's population) could come to owe a very great deal indeed, because the burgeoning economic, industrial and political influence of China in the world – it is the next great superpower – makes it absolutely imperative that the country should be a democratic one, signed up to the rule of law and the idea of human rights, rather than what it is now: an imperialist, irredentist, massively human-rights-violating totalitarian state that will use any means to get its way. It is only presenting a reasonably pacific face on issues such as Taiwan, Japan and the other irritations to its ambitions about regional hegemony and control of under-sea energy resources, because it is not quite ready to use military means instead – though it is rapidly getting there.

I have been writing intermittently for years about the dangers of China's long-term foreign policy aims, premised as they are on its totalitarian domestic attitudes, feeling like a Cassandra the while. In those years China has come to support even more delinquent regimes such as Burma, Zimbabwe and Sudan in order to keep the international arena unsettled, and to insinuate itself into parts of the world where it sees future profit and either supplies of energy or security for its energy routes (thus the deep-water harbours it has built, with its own labourers, for its tankers in Pakistan and Burma). It rattles its sabre, soon to be ready to use in earnest, over the gas and oil under the South and East China Seas, claiming the Spratly islands far to the south of Hainan and the whole of the continental shelf almost to the shores of Japan in the east. In its headlong rush for industrialisation it has grossly poisoned its own air, soil, rivers and people, loading itself with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of environmental clean-up costs for the future – if ever it cares to undertake it.

In that rush it kills dozens of its own workers every week – its coal mines, where the frantic 24-hour grab for energy supplies proceeds with total disregard for safety, are the most dangerous mines in the world. It is in a race with time: its population is rapidly ageing and not replacing itself, its crazy tradition of female infanticide and selective abortion of females means there is a superfluity of males so that girls are being kidnapped as brides. China's totalitarians want economic and military (it sees them as the same thing) superpower status before the age of its population and the poison of its environment jointly scupper the ambition. For then it can use that status to find other ways of solving those problems – ways not so friendly to a world in whose nest it will be the largest cuckoo ever seen.

I hope I am wrong. I hope those very brave, very few people around the table in Beijing on 10 May, Xu Youyu among them, will bring it about that these prognostications are wrong; that they will keep alight the torch of democratic liberty lit in Tiananmen Square, and that its light will eventually banish the thick dark clouds that roll perpetually out of Zhong Nan Hai.

I was teaching at a college that had a visiting professor from Beijing. She told us what had happened to her during the Cultural Revolution: under suspicion because of being Russian-Chinese interpreters (which, of course, the government had trained them to before the Sino-Soviet split), she and her husband were sent to separate villages on opposite ends of the country to "learn from the peasants." They had 24 hours to figure out who would take care of their two young children.

She heard nothing about her husband or children for five years.

After the "sent down" people were allowed to come home, she retrained as an English-Chinese interpreter and in 1987, was given permission to come to our college to teach Chinese.

When the Tiananmen protests started, she was absolutely jubilant. She must have seen Network, because she said, "The Chinese people are as mad as hell and they're not taking it anymore. They'll never go back!"

I was driving to choir practice in Portland when the news of the suppression broke, and all I could think of was Ms. Chen and how happy she had been.

By this time, her son was in Canada, and there must have been some long-distance family negotiation, because in the middle of the summer, she announced that she was joining her son in Canada and that her husband was going to move there, too.

The following year (1990), I was part of an eight-person delegation of faculty and staff that visited the college's new sister schools in China.

The foundation that funded us set it up so that we spent two weeks in Beijing first, staying on a university campus, receiving lectures on various aspects of Chinese culture, and taking field trips to all the major sights in the area. (This was before China stupidly embarked on its freeway building program and encouragement of car ownership. The air was bad enough already, but I feel privileged to have seen the last of the old Beijing, with its chaotic bicycle traffic and roadside bicycle repair stands instead of gas stations.)

While we were there. Tiananmen Square was reopened to the public, so our guides took us there. Our official guides were faculty from the university, but our actual guides were two young men who were majoring in English (I was quite impressed with the results the university achieved in its English and Japanese classes.)

As we stood in the huge square (it's quite an incredible space), one of the young men came up to us and whispered, "The Goddess of Liberty was over there, and the troops came in from over there."

Before leaving for China, I had read in The Nation about why the troops had moved in after tolerating the demonstrators for weeks. According to the article, the government didn't mind as long as it was just students demonstrating in the square. However, in the week before the troops came in, ordinary residents of Beijing and the surrounding areas started joining them and supplying them with food and other necessities. There were even demonstrations of sympathy in Beijing neighborhoods.

It was at this point that the government became worried about where it would all end and sent in the troops. However, they had to wait until troops could be brought in from elsewhere in the country, because the local commanders were telling the government that the Beijing-based troops were sympathetic to the demonstrators and might not fire on local residents.

Well, we know the rest of the story. A faculty member from the college (not a member of our group, although he advised us), a Chinese-American professor of Asian history whose summer hobby was leading tours to Asia, happened to be in Beijing with a tour group when the massacre occurred. He decided that it would be wise to move on to the next city, and as the tour bus crawled through the traffic, people knocked on the windows and yelled, "Tell everyone what you've seen here!"

Another of the members of our group had led a lot of student trips abroad, and before the trip, he suggested that an official visit to the American embassy in Beijing be scheduled. The Foreign Service Officer who showed us around told us about being in the embassy during the massacre and checking up on American residents.

I mentioned that I had heard that the government had sent in troops because the revolt was spreading to the general public.

The FSO looked surprised. "I don't know where you heard that, but it's true. When I went out around the city, I saw some of those demonstrations in the neighborhoods."

After two weeks in Beijing, we moved on to Xian, Chongqing, Shanghai, and Wenzhou.
Staying at another university in Chongqing, we talked to two Australians who were teaching English there. They had just finished their first year of teaching, so they had not been in China for the Tiananmen massacre, but they noted that on the first anniversary, the local military base held very visible maneuvers and training sessions, with gunfire heard at all hours of the day and night. The students told them, "They're trying to scare us."

Legally, China is one country with a dominant ethnic group (the Han, or mainstream Chinese), but the Tibetans and Uighurs are only two of its restless ethnic minorities. Furthermore, unless you've been there, you have no idea how diverse even the Han areas are. All the cities we visited looked very different from one another and had different cuisines. Shanghai and Wenzhou speak dialects that speakers of Mandarin can't understand and that should actually be called separate languages. (If Mandarin is French, then the Shanghai and Wenzhou dialects are Spanish and Portuguese.) Furthermore, economic development has been extremely uneven. Even then, Wenzhou was visibly rich, while Chongqing was visibly poor.

China could easily break apart, and the central government knows it. That's why they're working so hard to build up nationalistic feelings and clamp down on political dissent, trying to compensate for it by encouraging economic growth, although not always in the healthiest ways.

From what I understand from people who have lived in China recently, the government allows protests on strictly local, non-ideological issues, such as corrupt officials, but any questioning of the system will get you tossed in prison.