Trinta anos desde Tiananmen: o esquecimento como politica de Estado - livro de Louisa Lim

The People's Republic of Amnesia

Tiananmen Revisited

Louisa Lim

Finalist for the 2015 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism

Longlisted for the Lionel Gelber Award for the Best Non-Fiction book in the world on Foreign AffairsAn Economist Book of the Year, 2014A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice"One of the best analyses of the impact of Tiananmen throughout China in the years since 1989." --The New York Times Book ReviewOn June 4, 1989, People's Liberation Army soldiers opened fire on unarmed civilians in Beijing, killing untold hundreds of people. A quarter-century later, this defining event remains buried in China's modern history, successfully expunged from collective memory. In The People's Republic of Amnesia, Louisa Lim charts how the events of June 4th changed China, and how China changed the events of June 4th by rewriting its own history.Lim reveals new details about those fateful days, including how one of the country's most senior politicians lost a family member to an army bullet, as well as the inside story of the young soldiers sent to clear Tiananmen Square. She also introduces us to individuals whose lives were transformed by the events of Tiananmen Square, such as a founder of the Tiananmen Mothers, whose son was shot by martial law troops; and one of the most important government officials in the country, who post-Tiananmen became one of its most prominent dissidents. And she examines how June 4th shaped China's national identity, fostering a generation of young nationalists, who know little and care less about 1989. For the first time, Lim uncovers the details of a brutal crackdown in a second Chinese city that until now has been a near-perfect case study in the state's ability to rewrite history, excising the most painful episodes. By tracking down eyewitnesses, discovering US diplomatic cables, and combing through official Chinese records, Lim offers the first account of a story that has remained untold for a quarter of a century. The People's Republic of Amnesia is an original, powerfully gripping, and ultimately unforgettable book about a national tragedy and an unhealed wound.

• Oxford University Press; May 2014
• ISBN: 9780199347711
• Read online, or download in secure PDF or secure EPUB format
• Title: The People's Republic of Amnesia
• Author: Louisa Lim
• Imprint: Oxford University Press

In The Press

"One of the best analyses of the impact of Tiananmen throughout China in the years since 1989." --The New York Times Book Review
"Lim presents a sequence of sensitive, skillfully drawn portraits of individuals whose lives were changed by 1989...These portraits show us how the party tightly constrains those who defy it, but they also depict determined resistance and even suggest an optimism among those most directly affected by the events of 1989...[This book] enhances our sense of the human costs of suppressing the past." --Wall Street Journal
"[Lim] offers a series of meticulously (and often daringly) reported portraits of participants, the events of that night and what has followed." --The Economist
"Lim tells her stories briskly and clearly. She moves nimbly between the individuals' narratives and broader reflections, interspersing both with short, poignant vignettes." --New York Review of Books
"Lim's outstanding book skilfully interweaves a wide range of interviews in China with an account of the protests in Beijing and ends with the fullest report to date of the crackdown in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province." --Financial Times
"STUNNING and important...The People's Republic of Amnesia provides a powerful antidote to historical deception and a voice to those isolated by the truth." --Los Angeles Review of Books
"Louisa Lim peers deep into the conflicted soul of today's China. Twenty-five years after the bloody suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing, the government continues to deploy its technologies of forgetting -- censorship of the media, falsification of history, and the amnesiac drug of shallow nationalism -- to silence those who dare to remember and deter those who want to inquire. But the truth itself does not change; it only finds new ways to come out. Lim gives eloquent voice to the silenced witnesses, and uncovers the hidden nightmares that trouble China's surface calm." --Andrew J. Nathan, coeditor, The Tiananmen Papers
"For a country that has long so valued its history and so often turned to it as a guide for the future, the Chinese Communist Party's efforts to erase actual history and replace it with distorted narratives warped by nationalism, has created a dangerous vacuum at the center of modern-day China. With her carefully researched and beautifully reported The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, Louisa Lim helps not only restore several important missing pieces of Chinese posterity that were part of the demonstrations in 1989, but also reminds us that a country which loses the ability to remember its own past honestly risks becoming rootless and misguided." --Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director, Center on US-China Relations, Asia Society
"In The People's Republic of Amnesia veteran China correspondent Louisa Lim skillfully weaves the voices that 'clamor against the crime of silence' to recover for our collective memory the most pivotal moment in modern China's history." --Paul French, author of Midnight in Peking
"Astonishingly Beijing has managed to obliterate the collective memory of Tiananmen Square, but a quarter-century later Louisa Lim deftly excavates long-buried memories of the 1989 massacre. With a journalist's eye to history, she tracks down key witnesses, everyone from a military photographer at the square to a top official sentenced to seven years in solitary confinement to a mother whose teenaged son was shot to death that night. This book is essential reading for understanding the impact of mass amnesia on China's quest to become the world's next economic superpower." --Jan Wong, author of Red China Blues and A Comrade Lost and Found
"A deeply moving book-thoughtful, careful, and courageous. The portraits and stories it contains capture the multi-layered reality of China, as well as reveal the sobering moral compromises the country has made to become an emerging world power, even one hailed as presenting a compelling alternative to Western democracies. Yet grim as these stories and portraits sometimes are, they also provide glimpse of hope, through the tenacity, clarity of conscience, and unflinching zeal of the dissidents, whether in China or in exile, who against all odds yearn for a better tomorrow." --Shen Tong, former student activist and author of Almost a Revolution
"Lim's intimate history of the events of 1989 deepens our understanding of what happened, and touches our hearts with its humanity. Where other writers succumb to describing history in impersonal terms, Lim brings the history to our doorsteps, reminding us that we aren't so different from those who lived and shaped history and tragedy. The People's Republic of Amnesia is a wholly original work of history that will alter how China in 1989 is understood, and felt." --Adam Minter, author of Junkyard Planet
"NPR's veteran China correspondent Lim shows how the 1989 massacre of student human rights protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square continues to shape the country today... A forceful reminder that only by dealing with its own past truthfully will China shape a decent future for coming generations." --Kirkus Reviews

About The Author

Louisa Lim is an award-winning journalist who has reported from China for a decade, most recently for National Public Radio. Previously she was the BBC's Beijing Correspondent. She lives with her husband and two children in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Massacre de Tiananmen: 30 anos depois China retorna aos tempos imperiais: documentos pos-massacre - Foreign Affairs

A revista Foreign Affairs transcreve excertos de uma reunião pós-massacre de Tiananmen que consolida o poder brutal do PCC contra modernizadores, liberais, democratas e "agentes do imperialismo", ratificando a linha do Comitê Central, e de Deng Xiaoping, de que a única forma de lidar com a dissidência era a repressão dos manifestantes na Praça da Paz Celestial.
Depois disso, a China embarcou numa experiência quase "helvética" de alternância no poder entre as diferentes linhas de liderança no Partido, por períodos determinados, o que foi rompido por Xi Jinping, quando ele decidiu retornar ao estilo imperial de dominação política, ou seja, eterna.
Não há muita novidade nas declarações dos velhos líderes do PCC, a não ser a repetição de velhos slogans stalinistas, profundamente idiotas, servindo apenas ao reforço da tirania do partido.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

The New Tiananmen Papers

Inside the Secret Meeting That Changed China

May 30, 2019

ESSAYForeign Affairs, May 30, 2019

Inside the Secret Meeting That Changed China

By Andrew J. Nathan

On April 15, 1989, the popular Chinese leader Hu Yaobang died of a heart attack in Beijing. Two years earlier, Hu had been cashiered from his post as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party for being too liberal. Now, in the days after his death, thousands of students from Beijing campuses gathered in Tiananmen Square, in central Beijing, to demand that the party give him a proper sendoff. By honoring Hu, the students expressed their dissatisfaction with the corruption and inflation that had developed during the ten years of “reform and opening” under the country’s senior leader, Deng Xiaoping, and their disappointment with the absence of political liberalization. Over the next seven weeks, the party leaders debated among themselves how to respond to the protests, and they issued mixed signals to the public. In the meantime, the number of demonstrators increased to perhaps as many as a million, including citizens from many walks of life. The students occupying the square declared a hunger strike, their demands grew more radical, and demonstrations spread to hundreds of other cities around the country. Deng decided to declare martial law, to take effect on May 20.

But the demonstrators dug in, and Deng ordered the use of force to commence on the night of June 3. Over the next 24 hours, hundreds were killed, if not more; the precise death toll is still unknown. The violence provoked widespread revulsion throughout Chinese society and led to international condemnation, as the G-7 democracies imposed economic sanctions on China. Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, had advocated a conciliatory approach and had refused to accept the decision to use force. Deng ousted him from his position, and Zhao was placed under house arrest—an imprisonment that ended only when he died, in 2005.

A little over two weeks later, on June 19–21, the party’s top decision-making body, the Politburo, convened what it termed an “enlarged” meeting, one that included the regime’s most influential retired elders. The purpose of the gathering was to unify the divided party elite around Deng’s decisions to use force and to remove Zhao from office. The party’s response to the 1989 crisis has shaped the course of Chinese history for three decades, and the Politburo’s enlarged meeting shaped that response. But what was said during the meeting has never been revealed—until now.

On the 30th anniversary of the violent June 4 crackdown, New Century Press, a Hong Kong–based publisher, will publish Zuihou de mimi: Zhonggong shisanjie sizhong quanhui “liusi” jielun wengao (The Last Secret: The Final Documents From the June Fourth Crackdown), a group of speeches that top officials delivered at the gathering. New Century obtained the transcripts (and two sets of written remarks) from a party official who managed to make copies at the time. In 2001, this magazine published excerpts from The Tiananmen Papers, a series of official reports and meeting minutes that had been secretly spirited out of China and that documented the fierce debates and contentious decision-making that unfolded as the party reacted to the protests in the spring of 1989. Now, these newly leaked speeches shed light on what happened after the crackdown, making clear the lessons party leaders drew from the Tiananmen crisis: first, that the Chinese Communist Party is under permanent siege from enemies at home colluding with enemies abroad; second, that economic reform must take a back seat to ideological discipline and social control; and third, that the party will fall to its enemies if it allows itself to be internally divided.

The speeches offer a remarkable behind-the-scenes look at authoritarian political culture in action—and a sign of what was to come in China as, in later decades, the party resorted to ever more sophisticated and intrusive forms of control to combat the forces of liberalization. Reading the transcripts, one can see serving officials closing ranks with the elderly retired officials who still held great sway in the early post-Mao period. Those who had long feared that Deng’s reforms were too liberal welcomed the crackdown, and those who had long favored liberal reforms fell into line.

The speeches also make clear how the lessons taken from Tiananmen continue to guide Chinese leadership today: one can draw a direct line connecting the ideas and sentiments expressed at the June 1989 Politburo meeting to the hard-line approach to reform and dissent that President Xi Jinping is following today. The rest of the world may be marking the 30-year anniversary of the Tiananmen crisis as a crucial episode in China’s recent past. For the Chinese government, however, Tiananmen remains a frightening portent. Even though the regime has wiped the events of June 4 from the memories of most of China’s people, they are still living in the aftermath.

THE PARTY LINE

Participants in the enlarged Politburo meeting were not convened to debate the wisdom of Deng’s decisions. Rather, they were summoned to perform a loyalty ritual, in which each speaker affirmed his support by endorsing two documents: a speech that Deng gave on June 9 to express gratitude to the troops who had carried out the crackdown and a report prepared by Zhao’s hard-line rival, Premier Li Peng, detailing Zhao’s errors in handling the crisis. (Those two documents have long been publicly available.)

It is not clear who, exactly, attended the Politburo meeting. But at least 17 people spoke, and each began his remarks with the words “I completely agree with” or “I completely support,” referring to Deng’s speech and Li’s report. All agreed that the student demonstrations had started as a “disturbance” (often translated as “turmoil”). They agreed that only when the demonstrators resisted the entry of troops into Beijing on June 2 did the situation turn into a “counterrevolutionary riot” that had to be put down by force. Each speech added personal insights, which served to demonstrate the sincerity of the speaker’s support for Deng’s line. Through this ceremony of affirmation, a divided party sought to turn the page and reassert control over a sullen society.

In analyzing why a “disturbance” had occurred in the first place, and why it evolved into a riot, the speakers revealed a profound paranoia about domestic and foreign enemies. Xu Xiangqian, a retired marshal in the People’s Liberation Army, stated:

The facts prove that the turmoil of the past month and more, which finally developed into a counterrevolutionary riot, was the result of the linkup of domestic and foreign counterrevolutionary forces, the result of the long-term flourishing of bourgeois liberalization. . . . Their goal was a wild plan to overturn the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, to topple the socialist People’s Republic of China, and to establish a bourgeois republic that would be anticommunist, antisocialist, and in complete vassalage to the Western powers.

Peng Zhen, the former chair of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, echoed those sentiments:

For some time, an extremely small group of people who stubbornly promoted bourgeois liberalization cooperated with foreign hostile forces to call for revising our constitution, schemed to destroy [Deng’s] Four Cardinal Principles [for upholding socialism and Communist Party rule] and to tear down the cornerstones of our country; they schemed to change . . . our country’s basic political system and to promote in its place an American-style separation of three powers; they schemed to change our People’s Republic of democratic centralism led by the working class and based on the worker-peasant alliance into a totally westernized state of capitalist dictatorship.

Others put an even finer point on this theme, evoking the early days of the Cold War to warn of American subversion. “Forty years ago, [U.S. Secretary of State John Foster] Dulles said that the hope for the restoration [of capitalism] in China rested on the third or fourth [postcommunist] generation,” railed Song Renqiong, the vice chair of the party’s Central Advisory Commission. “Now, the state of political ideology among a portion of the youth is worrisome. We must not let Dulles’ prediction come true.”

THE FALL GUY

Many speakers contended that ideological rot had set in under Hu, Zhao’s predecessor. Hu had served as general secretary from 1982 to 1987, when Deng’s reform policy began to introduce foreign trade and investment, private enterprise, and elements of market pricing. Along with these reforms, China had seen an influx of pro-Western ideas among journalists, writers, academics, students, the newly emerging class of private entrepreneurs, and even the general public. The conservatives who had prevailed on Deng to remove Hu from office had blamed Hu for failing to stem this trend. They had hoped that Zhao would do better. Instead, they charged, Zhao did not pay sufficient attention to ideological discipline, and the party lost control over public opinion.

Former Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang in the garden of his home in central Beijing, China, June 1998

The speakers at the Politburo meeting believed that most of the people who had joined in the demonstrations were misguided but not hostile to the regime. They had been manipulated by “an extremely small number of bad people,” as one put it. Song Ping, an economic planner and Politburo member, even claimed that Zhao and his reformist allies had hatched a nefarious plot to split the party, overthrow Deng, and democratize China. Several other speakers supported this idea, without offering proof.

The speakers also railed against foreign enemies who they alleged had colluded to worsen the crisis. According to Song, “During the student movement, the United States stuck its hands in, in many ways. The Voice of America spread rumors and incitement every day, trying to make sure that China would stay in chaos.” Vice President Wang Zhen expressed a widely shared view that Washington’s interference was just the latest move in a decades-long plot to overthrow communism:

After the October Revolution [of 1917], 14 imperialist countries intervened militarily in the newborn Soviet regime, and Hitler attacked in 1941. After World War II, U.S. imperialists supported Chiang Kai-shek in the Chinese Civil War and then invaded Korea and Vietnam. Now they’d like to achieve their goal the easy way, by using “peaceful evolution”: . . . buying people with money, cultural and ideological subversion, sending spies, stealing intelligence, producing rumors, stimulating turmoil, supporting our internal hostile forces, everything short of direct invasion.

By demonizing domestic critics and exaggerating the role of foreign forces, the victorious conservatives revealed their blindness to the real problems affecting their regime. Prime among them was the alienation that the party’s atavistic methods of political control had produced in students, intellectuals, and the rising middle class. Instead, they blamed the reforms. The party’s now ascendant conservative faction had been worried about Deng’s policies all along, as Zhao recounted in his secretly composed and posthumously published memoir, Prisoner of the State. He had battled conservative critics throughout his tenure as premier (from 1980 to 1987), when he served as the chief implementer of Deng’s vision, and Deng had often been forced to compromise on his ambitions in order to placate hard-liners.

The conservatives who condemned Zhao at the Politburo meeting often did so by attacking policies that were actually Deng’s. Wang, for example, warned that economic reforms were leading China into a convergence with the West, but he pretended that these reform ideas were Zhao’s, not Deng’s. (He and others referred to Zhao as “comrade” because Zhao was still a party member.) Wang said:

We need to acknowledge that the reform and opening that Comrade Xiaoping talked about was different in its essence from the reform and opening that Comrade Zhao Ziyang talked about. Comrade Xiaoping’s reform and opening aimed to uphold national sovereignty and ethnic respect, uphold the socialist road, uphold the combination of planned economy and market regulation, continue to protect the creative spirit of bitter struggle and to direct investment toward basic industries and agriculture. Comrade Zhao Ziyang’s reform and opening was to take the capitalist road, increase consumption, generate waste and corruption. Comrade Zhao Ziyang was definitely not the implementer of Comrade Xiaoping’s reform-and-opening policy but the distorter and destroyer of it.

Speakers also pilloried Zhao for failing to adequately support the People’s Liberation Army, even though military affairs had been under Deng’s control. Marshal Nie Rongzhen defended the military’s centrality to the stability of the state in stark terms:

In recent years, with the relaxation of the international situation and under the influence of the bourgeois liberal thought trend, our awareness of the need for dictatorship [that is, armed force as a guarantee of regime stability] weakened, political thought work became lax, and some comrades mistakenly thought that the military was not important and lashed out at military personnel. There were some conflicts between military units and local authorities in places where they were stationed. At the same time, some of our comrades in the military were not at ease in their work and wanted to be demobilized and return home, where they thought they had better prospects. All this is extremely wrong. I think these comrades’ thinking is clear now, thanks to the bloody lesson we have just had: the barrel of the gun cannot be thrown down!

Although policy disagreements among the party’s leadership had paved the way for the Tiananmen crisis, the armed crackdown did nothing to set a clear path forward. Indeed, the Politburo speeches betrayed the lack of solutions that the party leadership was able to offer for China’s problems, as members fell back on hollow slogans, with calls to “strengthen party spirit and wipe out factionalism” and to “unify the masses, revitalize the national spirit, and promote patriotic thought.” Owing to this paucity of genuine policy thinking, the consensus that formed in the wake of Tiananmen was fragile from the start.

A few days after the Politburo meeting, the party gathered its full 175-person Central Committee, together with alternates, members of the Central Advisory Commission, and high-ranking observers, for the Fourth Plenum of the 13th Central Committee. Zhao’s successor as general secretary, Jiang Zemin, delivered a speech in which he tried to fudge the differences between Deng and the conservatives. He claimed that Deng had never wanted to loosen ideological discipline: “From 1979 to 1989, Comrade Xiaoping has repeatedly insisted on the need to expand the education and the struggle to firmly support the Four Cardinal Principles and oppose bourgeois liberalization. But these important views of Comrade Xiaoping were not thoroughly implemented.” Jiang pledged to unify the party and to seek advice from “the old generation of revolutionaries.”

Despite Jiang’s promises, the former Politburo member Bo Yibo worried that the new leadership would continue to face opposition. “We cannot afford another occurrence” of division, he warned. “In my view, history will not allow us to go through [a leadership purge] again.”

After 1989, the conservatives remained ascendant for three years, until the aging Deng made his attention-getting “trip to the South” in 1992. By visiting “special economic zones” (places where the government allowed foreign-invested, export-oriented enterprises to operate) and issuing statements such as “whoever is against reform must leave office,” Deng forced Jiang and his colleagues to resume economic liberalization. This was Deng’s last political act. It helped usher in rapid economic growth but did nothing to revive political liberalization.

CORE BELIEFS

After coming to power in the wake of the Tiananmen crisis, Jiang spent more than a dozen years as general secretary, from 1989 to 2002. But like Zhao, he was never able to achieve complete control over the party. Indeed, none of Zhao’s successors was able to do so—until Xi. Zhao’s failure on this count was discussed at the enlarged Politburo meeting in a way that reveals why the Chinese system tends toward one-man rule, despite the costs and risks of concentrated power.

The words of President Yang Shangkun are especially interesting because he was Deng’s most trusted lieutenant and personal representative and in that capacity had participated as an observer and mediator in a series of crucial Politburo Standing Committee meetings during the Tiananmen crisis. He also served as Deng’s emissary to the military during the crackdown. Yang faulted Zhao for failing to make himself what would later be called a “core” (hexin) leader—that is, for failing to build a working consensus among all the other senior acting and retired leaders, even though many of them fundamentally disagreed with him. Zhao, he complained, “did not accept the opinions raised by others, nor did he perform any serious self-criticism. On the contrary, he kept the other members at a distance and did things by himself, which pushed the work of the Standing Committee into a situation where there was only a practical division of labor and not a collective leadership. This was a serious violation of the supreme organizational principle of collective leadership of the party.”

What does it mean to establish an effective collective leadership? Peng, the former chair of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, explained how it worked as an ideal:

In the party, . . . we should and must implement complete, true, high-level democracy. In discussing issues, every opinion can be voiced, whoever is correct should be obeyed, everyone is equal before the truth. It is forbidden to report only good news and not bad news, to refuse to listen to differing opinions. If a discussion does not lead to full unanimity, what to do? The minority must follow the majority. Only in this way can the Four Cardinal Principles be upheld, the entire party unified, the people unified.

But the party has seldom, if ever, achieved this ideal. Zhao, his critics agreed, never found a way to work with those who disagreed with him and instead listened to the wrong people. “He took advice only from his own familiar group of advisers,” Song Ping charged. “[We should not] lightly trust ill-considered advice to make wholesale use of Western theories put forward by people whose Marxist training is superficial, whose expertise is infirm, and who don’t have a deep understanding of China’s national conditions.”

Zhao’s detractors complained that instead of trying to persuade them, Zhao would turn to Deng for support. Wan Li, chair of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, complained that at a meeting in December 1988, Zhao ignored critical comments. “Worse,” Wan declared, “he went and reported to Comrade Xiaoping what [the critics] had said, and then . . . bragged about how Comrade Xiaoping supported him. Isn’t this using Comrade Xiaoping to suppress democracy?”

THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD

These vivid portrayals of life at the top—rife with factionalism and backstabbing—demonstrate the dilemma created by the party’s leadership doctrine. The leader must solve problems decisively while also accepting, and even inviting, criticism and dissent from a host of elders and rivals who, given the complexity of China’s problems, are bound to have different ideas about what to do. Mao Zedong did not do so (he purged a long series of rivals instead), and neither did Deng, who contended with powerful equals who frequently forced him to rein in his reform ideas. Deng devised the idea of a core leader after the Tiananmen crisis to encapsulate this demand, reflecting his and other senior leaders’ anxiety that an inability to work together would cripple the leading group going forward, as it had done in the recent crisis.

Although the first post-Tiananmen leader, Jiang, claimed the label of “core,” he did not establish true dominance over the system, and his successor, Hu Jintao, did not even claim the label. Xi has made himself a true core and awarded himself the label in 2016, after four years in office. He achieved that position by purging all possible rivals, packing the Politburo and the Central Military Commission with people loyal to him, creating an atmosphere of fear in the party and the military with an anticorruption campaign that targeted his opponents, and moving quickly to crush any sign of dissent from lawyers, feminists, environmental campaigners, and ordinary citizens. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the Chinese political system abhors genuine democracy and presses its leaders toward dictatorship.

Yet centralized leadership has not resolved the abiding contradiction between reform and control that generated the Tiananmen crisis 30 years ago. The more China pursues wealth and power through domestic modernization and engagement with the global economy, the more students, intellectuals, and the rising middle class become unwilling to adhere to a 1950s-style ideological conformity, and the more conservative party elites react to social change by calling for more discipline in the party and conformity in society. That tension has only worsened as Xi has raised incomes, expanded higher education, moved people to the cities, and encouraged consumption. China now has a large, prosperous middle class that is quiescent out of realistic caution but yearns for more freedom. Xi has responded by strengthening the state’s grip on the Internet and other media sources, intensifying propaganda, constraining academic freedom, expanding surveillance, fiercely repressing ethnic minorities in western China, and arresting lawyers, feminists, and other activists who dare to push for the rule of law.

Marshal Nie was right when he told the post-Tiananmen Politburo meeting that “the counterrevolutionary riot has been pacified, but the thought trend of bourgeois liberalization is far from being eliminated. The battle to occupy the ideological front will remain a bitter one. We must resolve to fight a protracted battle; we must prepare for several generations to battle for several decades!” The party did indeed prepare, and the battle rages on today, with Xi counting on the power concentrated in his hands to stave off divisions within the party and opposition in society. So far, he seems to have succeeded: economic development has continued, and another episode of dissent on the scale of the Tiananmen incident seems unthinkable today.

A China depois do massacre de Tiananmen - Gerry Shih (WP)

Três trechos selecionados desta matéria do Washington Post: 

After the blood had been washed from the streets, the Communist Party began the great reshaping of the country. It created an implicit compact with the people: You can have economic growth, but you can’t have political freedom. (...)

The Communist Party’s central office in 2013 distributed a watershed document warning that seven dangerous Western ideas, including democracy, media freedoms and the free-market system, was forbidden in classrooms. (...)

Anecdotally, some well-educated or rich Chinese say they have had enough. Data also suggest they are voting with their feet. In 2018, twice as many millionaires — about 15,000 — emigrated from China than from any other country, according to the consultancy New World Wealth.

Por enquanto é assim, mas a liberdade sempre prevalece ao final. Nenhuma ditadura, ou tirania. dura eternamente...

How today’s China was shaped by the events in Tiananmen Square 30 years ago

Gerry ShihBEIJING —

The Washington Post, June 2, 2019

China’s vice president, Wang Qishan, was in no mood for questions when a group of American economists went to see him in a pavilion at Communist Party headquarters in Beijing recently. 

Instead, Wang, wearing a tracksuit and slippers, delivered a philosophical, hour-long lecture to scholars from the Peterson Institute for International Economics in which he asserted the supremacy of the Chinese way over Western traditions.

After reminding his visitors that the lives of Socrates and Confucius overlapped, he talked about how Europe ended up as small, splintered states while China became a vast and powerful empire. There was no doubt his critique of the West’s perceived weaknesses also included the present-day United States.

This is the China of today: supremely confident, richer than it could have imagined three decades ago, and more convinced than ever of the rightness of its repressive model of authoritarian political control.

In many ways, this is a direct result of a seismic event that took place 30 years ago Tuesday. On June 4, 1989, unknown numbers of Chinese — hundreds or perhaps thousands — were killed by their own military in response to a huge gathering in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to call for change.

As many as 1 million people — students from Beijing’s most prestigious universities, later joined by Chinese from all walks of life — had made their way to the heart of the capital. That sparked smaller supporting demonstrations around the country. They were calling for greater transparency, less corruption and, ideally, the opportunity to elect their own government.

The Communist Party of China, which had been in power for 40 years by that stage, viewed the demonstrations as an existential challenge. Its leaders ordered the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army to clear Tiananmen Square, using whatever means necessary. The soldiers beat people, shot people, ran people over with tanks.

[He spent 17 years in prison after Tiananmen. But he will not be silent]

“The powerful figures in the country were meant to serve the people, but they turned out to be the enemy of people,” said He Weifang, a Peking University law professor and public intellectual who was involved in the 1989 movement and continues to call for greater freedoms.

After the blood had been washed from the streets, the Communist Party began the great reshaping of the country. It created an implicit compact with the people: You can have economic growth, but you can’t have political freedom.

This bifurcation is more apparent than ever as President Xi Jinping enters his seventh year at the helm of China.

“My generation had so much hope and enthusiasm,” said Liu Suli, who was a 29-year-old university lecturer when he joined the protests in 1989. “We wanted elections, freedom of speech, freedom of association, the ability to demonstrate, education for all.”

Today, however, many academics are banned from talking to foreign media. Officials from government departments and state-owned enterprises are allowed to travel abroad only if they go in pairs. Think tanks and historical journals have been closed. 

[PostReports: How China erased the Tiananmen massacre]

Ideological education has been re-energized in scenes reminiscent of the era of the communist leader Mao Zedong 50 years ago. Students at the top universities are finding Marxist lessons woven into their curriculum. Human rights lawyers have been detained by the scores.

TOP: In Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 2, 1989, a statue called the Goddess of Democracy stands in a sea of demonstrators demanding greater freedoms. ABOVE: A view of the square on May 18, 2019, three decades later. (Catherine Henriette (top) and Greg Baker (above)/AFP/Getty Images)

Religion is repressed, none more than Islam. The authorities have razed mosques and locked millions of Uighurs, a largely Muslim ethnic minority, in indoctrination centers in an attempt to instill loyalty to the Chinese state.

Social pressures are building because Xi’s China does not offer a release valve for dissent. “If you’re beating a child, you should allow it to cry,” said He, the intellectual, citing an old Chinese saying. “They should let us cry.”

Meanwhile, China has flourished into the world’s second-largest economy, a global power with 400 million middle-class consumers and a military budget exceeded only by the United States’. It is going toe to toe with Washington on trade and is able to project its influence worldwide by disbursing $1 trillion in loans through its “Belt and Road” infrastructure project. 

It is building high-speed trains to rival Japan’s and next-generation telecommunication products that alarm American intelligence agencies.

[China tends to its economy with eye toward possible long trade war]

China’s reality is one few would have foreseen in 1989. Except maybe Deng Xiaoping, who, as chairman of the Central Military Commission, was ultimately responsible for the massacre.

A decade before the Tiananmen protests, Deng had set out a vision for a more open, free-market economy that also ushered in a wave of foreign, liberal ideas. After he crushed the 1989 protests, Deng quickly tried to forge a more positive legacy for himself and his country.

In 1992, Deng, then 88, set out on a famous journey to accelerate the development of special economic zones in Shenzhen and Guangzhou that were powering China’s transformation into a manufacturing powerhouse.

“It was a shock. Deng came out of nowhere on his Southern Tour,” said Xu Youyu, a former researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “Everyone was rushing in to get rich. Deng was determined to push through his economic reform vision no matter the cost.”

“But it was apparent: There would be no political reform, only economic reform,” Xu added.

On one level, the numbers have backed up Deng’s vision: Income per capita has soared from $311 in 1989 to $8,826, according to latest World Bank figures.

But the party could not just present its economic accomplishments as justification for its rule. It has also sought to erase its darkest moments, creating the kind of “memory hole” that George Orwell only imagined in his classic dystopian novel “1984.”

“China has been surprisingly successful in erasing the memory of June 4,” said Louisa Lim, the author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia.

“They have so many different tools at their disposal, like censoring the Internet, removing any kind of material that mentions June 4 from the bookshops, and making sure that the narrative, when there has to be one, parrots the party line,” Lim said. “Wherever possible, they’ve just removed it.”

High school students, if they are told anything at all on the subject, learn only that there was an “incident” between the spring and summer of 1989. And few Chinese under age 30 recognize the “Tank Man” photo, the quintessential image of the protests in which a man carrying two shopping bags, as if he’d been out shopping for vegetables, stood in the street and stopped a column of tanks.

A young woman is caught between civilians and Chinese soldiers, who were trying to remove her from an assembly near the Great Hall of the People on June 3, 1989. (Jeff Widener/AP)

In the National Museum of China on the edge of Tiananmen Square, there is no mention of the protests or of the government’s response, only a photo of a Communist Party meeting that was held soon after. 

[Anchors from China’s state TV and Fox are facing off]

Today, a history textbook assigned at Peking University — whose students led the 1989 Tiananmen occupation — states that “throughout the student protests and hunger strikes, the party and government exercised great restraint” to deal with “those plotting riots.”

Several students said in interviews that they were cautioned by parents and teachers about discussing the event.

“Even if you know about it, you can’t say anything about it,” said one woman who is about to graduate from one of China’s best universities. The students and other Chinese spoke with The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity to avoid official reprisal.

There has never been a public reckoning about that day. There has never been an official death toll. Most parents received no explanation about how, let alone why, their children died. Some parents never even found their children’s bodies. 

“It’s 30 years now, but we have never been told the truth: How many people died, who they were, and why?” said Zhang Xianling, whose 19-year-old son, Wang Nan, was found dead a few hundred yards from Tiananmen Square on the morning of June 4. He had bullet wounds in his head. 

Authorities have been on particularly high alert this year ahead of the 30th anniversary. 

Automated censoring software is blocking any mention of the event on China’s parallel Internet. Activists and dissident former government officials who typically live under house arrest have been sent away on enforced vacations during the sensitive period.

“Even if people remember, they have no way of actively expressing that memory,” said Lim, the author.

[China’s Xi looks to stoke nationalism as Tiananmen anniversary nears]

Though China’s leaders smothered dissent and acts of remembrance, they have presented their economic accomplishments as justification for heavy-handed rule. While China boomed in the 2000s, the West was crippled by the 2008 financial crisis. The difference was proof, party officials said, of their authoritarian efficiency and the shortcomings of the chaotic liberal democratic model.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, bottom center, attends a Communist Party Congress on Oct. 18, 2017. He has been China’s leader since 2012. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

As China gained its swagger, Xi Jinping, the son of a politically moderate Communist Party elder statesman, was rising to the top of the party apparatus.

“When Xi became leader in 2012 and president in 2013, many people hoped that he would be like his father, a very open leader,” said He, the public intellectual. “People thought Xi would be amenable to reform. But there’s an Arabic saying to describe what happened instead: ‘A man can be more like his era than like his father.’ ”

Under Xi, the sense of Chinese preeminence quickly morphed into outright hostility to Western values. The Communist Party’s central office in 2013 distributed a watershed document warning that seven dangerous Western ideas, including democracy, media freedoms and the free-market system, was forbidden in classrooms.

If Tiananmen was a milestone in the Communist Party’s retreat from a political opening, the 2013 communique was the definitive repudiation, said Gao Yu, the dissident journalist who was jailed in 2015 for obtaining and leaking the document.

“Document No. 9 almost cuts off all Western politics and economics, it completely cuts off China’s connection with world civilization,” Gao, whose seven-year prison sentence has been reduced to house arrest, said by email. 

Months after the communique was distributed, Xi personally drove his point home. In what became known as his “August 19” speech in 2013, Xi warned Communist Party cadres that their rule could end if they loosened controls on thought.

But China’s intellectuals increasingly wonder about the cost and sustainability of the ideological firewall.

Every year, more than 360,000 Chinese students attend American universities. That number includes Xi’s daughter, who graduated from Harvard in 2014. Many leading professors and administrators at China’s top universities have studied overseas.

Chinese who spend time abroad “bring back not only the specific skills, but also the whole package, a changed framework of social values,” said a senior professor at Peking University, the Harvard of China. “It’s getting difficult for the Chinese leadership to maintain ideological discipline.”

Anecdotally, some well-educated or rich Chinese say they have had enough. Data also suggest they are voting with their feet. In 2018, twice as many millionaires — about 15,000 — emigrated from China than from any other country, according to the consultancy New World Wealth.

Those who remember 1989, when China seemed a more hopeful country, doubt the repression can hold.

As Liu, former protester and now bookstore owner, puts it: “You can build a dam higher and higher but the water just rises higher, too.”

Tourists visit Tiananmen Square on May 18, 2019. (Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images)

Read more:

‘If I disappear’: Chinese students make farewell messages amid crackdown

China’s Xi looks to stoke nationalism before Tiananmen anniversary

His death 30 years ago today was the speak for the Tiananmen protests 

Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world

Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news