Tiananmen

Saleem Samad
Quietly the infamous day passed off without a large vigil to mark the 31st Tiananmen Square massacre on 4 June.
Hong Kong is the only territory of mainland China where a candlelit vigil, mass commemorations are held for the event since 1990. The event attracted tens of thousands of participants and visitors from all over the world.
Hong Kong police have banned the annual vigil marking the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre for the first time in 30 years, citing coronavirus pandemic restrictions.
The candlelight vigil was in memory of tens of thousands pro-democracy movement were brutally suppressed on 4 June 1989 at ancient Qing dynasty Tiananmen Square built-in 1651, ending months of unarmed student-led demonstrations in China.
The governing Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has never acknowledged the massacre.
About 180,000 troops and armed police marched into Tiananmen Square and crushed a student protest calling for democratic reform following the death of a progressive leader in CCP, who had been deposed by Chairman Deng Xiaoping.
Well, no death toll has ever been officially released, but rights groups and Chinese in exile estimate hundreds, if not thousands were killed when China's elite People's Liberation Army was deployed to crack down on unarmed protesters in Beijing.
Surely there was global outcry and media made screaming headlines around the world, with iconic images such as the "Tank Man" bravely defying the troops on the square.
China's hardliners exploited that event to oust reformers who had been sympathetic to the demonstrators. The hawks have rewritten history and demonizing political opposition and dissidents.
Tiananmen Square has brought the hardliner bigwigs of CCP into drawing board to rethink the state policy and implemented methods of repression and strict state control, according to Zhang Lifan, who was a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1989.
Post Tiananmen, many of China's reformers (including the head of the Communist Party himself) were condemned to lifelong house arrest, while some dissidents fled to the West in collaboration with a network of exiled Chinese in Paris who advocates on how to bring democracy to China.
China's state authority censorship increased manifold with a particular emphasis on purging the protest from Chinese news and history books. Within a year of the massacre, the Chinese government "had closed 12 percent of all newspapers, 13 percent of social science periodicals and 76 percent of China's 534 publishing companies," according to Minxin Pei's From Reform to Revolution.
China's hawks were initially perturbed by the Tiananmen pro-democracy struggle and further frightened by the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. America's victory in the Cold War and the outright dissolution of the USSR shook Beijing hardliners.
The Tiananmen syndrome has impacted proactively upon open-door policy in trade, commerce, and investment. The economic policy has catapulted China to become an Asian giant and gradually came at par of Western countries.
Amid anti-American conspiracy theories, which portrayed the devious United States continually undermine the Chinese people. The purge of pro-American reformers in China left few reform advocates in positions of power, rest were toppled and send into exile.
The hawks also adopted "hyper nationalists" concepts and soon became official Party doctrine in the Patriotic Education Law in 1994, which China later tried to impose on Hong Kong.
Behind the curtain, the reformers in China keeping their heads low, silently watching the Hong Kong's pro-reform protests and of course giving up hopes of Chinese apology to the families and survivors for the massacre and another ten of thousands thrown into dark dungeons in punishment to dare challenge the CCP hawks. #

Paperback available via Routledge and elsewhere: https://www.routledge.com/China-and-Orientalism-Western-Knowledge-Production-and-the-PRC/Vukovich/p/book/9780415592208

You can see some reviews in section listed on left. https://hku-hk.academia.edu/DanielVukovich/reviews-of-%22China-and-Orientalism%22-(selected)

'It is a pointed and spirited book that incorporates a remarkably transdisciplinary range of approaches and texts.'

Carla Nappi, East Asian Studies, July 2012

'A book of startling honesty and conviction. Writing from Hong Kong but not as a Sinologist, Vukovich presents an erudite case for re-thinking the lessons of Tiananmen, reassessing the legacy of Mao, and questioning the idea that China needs to be saved by becoming like "us." As a revisionist reading of post-war China, the book brims with antinomian vignettes on everything from Chinese cinema to the novels of De Lillo and the philosophy of Arendt.Vukovich blasts the new Orientalism that seeks to free China from its supposedly Borg-like past. A rare voice, and a welcome one.'

Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota, USA

'This is a unique critique of orientalism in contemporary Chinese studies. Daniel Vukovich argues that there is a new form of orientalism, which does not project China as an ‘'other'’ as many traditional Sinologists did, but emphasizes ‘'sameness'’ or general equivalence of China to the US-West. From this basic observation, the author highlights the cultural logic of capitalism in the new Orientalistic interpretation of China. A sharp, inspiring and timely book!'

Wang Hui, Tsinghua University, author of The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, China's New Order, and The Politics of Imagining Asia.

‘Vukovich's tenacious critique of the China Studies field is by itself worth the price of admission. But the bonus for readers is his remarkable history of the complexities of post-liberation China. As timely as could be, and guaranteed to spark debate.’

Andrew Ross, New York University, USA, author of Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade; Lessons from Shanghai.

‘An important intervention into the battle for China's past and present . At its heart is a wide ranging, strong critique of the bulk of China studies scholarship on the P.R.C since the 1980s. But it also draws extensively on revisionist, new leftist, and other Chinese scholarship to argue for what is being erased by Sinological-orientalism." Its framing of this knowledge as orientalist and 'post-colonial' should cause a sensation. It may even finally trigger a sorely needed debate in the field.’

Mobo Gao, Chair of Chinese Studies & Director, Confucius Institute, University of Adelaide, Australia.

'This slim, sharply-argued volume should be a mandatory reading for all of us who work on post-1949 China. China and Orientalism is a refreshing and often eye-opening analysis on how knowledge of the object called "China" has been constructed in the West since the end of Maoism…China and Orientalism is an essential contribution to our self-awareness as producers of knowledge and offers a welcome and indispensable criticism of the field.'

Fabio Lanza, The China Beat, Twentieth Century China.


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TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Preface and Acknowledgments


Chapter 1: Sinological-Orientalism Now: ‘China’ and the New  Era


Chapter 2: Uncivil Society, or, Orientalism and Tiananmen,  1989


Chapter 3: Maoist Discourse and Its Demonization


Chapter 4: Accounting for the Great Leap Forward: Missing  Millions, Excess Deaths, And A Crisis of  Chinese Proportions

Chapter 5: DeLillo, Warhol, and the Specter of Mao:  The ‘Sinologization’ of Global Thought


Chapter 6: Screening Sinology: On the Western Study of  Chinese Film


Chapter 7: The China-Reference And Orientalism in the  Global Economy


Bibliography & Index

A quarter of a century has passed since the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations and June Fourth crackdown in Beijing. At the 25th anniversary of the tumultuous events of 1989, this paper scrutinizes the prospects and challenges in the struggle of post-1989 Chinese dissent and non-violent action (NVA), both exiled and domestic, in the context of State-civil societal relations, analyses the conflict and reluctant symbiosis across the unfortunate State-society divide, assesses the tribulations and prospects of contemporary Chinese dissent and NVA, and ponders how the struggle of this one fifth of humanity for political rights and civil liberties could be understood in a more global, long-term context, especially in view of the PRC's momentous global prowess by means of her astounding economic influence and "smart power" outreach, and in particular, her controversial "soft power" leverage. <https://www.dropbox.com/s/mc537rhxqjm0814/IJCS-V5N2-yeoh-article.pdf>

Emile Kok-Kheng Yeoh (special issue editor) (2014), International Journal of China Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2, June/August 2014 (Special Issue – June Fourth at 25: The Quarter-Century Legacy of Tiananmen), pp. 197-563 (367 pp. + xv). [Scopus - Q1] <https://www.dropbox.com/s/1x335y8yf504anr/IJCS-V5N2-combined-text-cover.pdf>

At the 25th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations and June Fourth crackdown in Beijing, this article examines the legacy of the tumultuous episode unprecedented in the history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and scrutinizes the prospects and challenges in the struggle of post-1989 Chinese dissent and nonviolent action (NVA), both exiled and domestic, in the context of State-civil societal relations. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s Party-State domination has so far continued to be stable, with the NVA movements being disadvantaged by both a low degree of internal solidarity and organization as well as numerical weakness to effectively engage in concerted action, vis-à-vis the same factors on the side of the State. Without any impending national economic crisis, military defeat or internal power struggle severe enough to destroy the CCP’s ruling echelon from within and with no sign of the weakening of the State’s will and machinery to suppress those who dare to challenge the CCP’s self-justified legitimacy to rule without being elected to do so, the Party’s rule looks set to continue to stay strong and political democratization of China seems destined to be long in coming. Ironically, the CCP’s present consensus-based collective leadership, while supposed to prevent the rise of another disastrously strong leader like Mao Zedong, will count against quick democratization too. Against this backdrop, taking into consideration the divergence and convergence of the strategic and ideological approaches of the democracy movement and civil rights activism as well as the corresponding factors of instrumental activities, bargaining power and ideology on the part of the Party-State, the article analyses the conflict and reluctant symbiosis across the unfortunate State-society divide, assesses the tribulations and prospects of contemporary Chinese dissent and NVA, and ponders on the potential for political change. <https://www.dropbox.com/s/c9pqfcf2wpmok3h/IJCS-V5N2-yeoh-intro.pdf>

During the 1980s, an interlocking complex of U.S. non-governmental organizations (the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Asia Society, and the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations) gradually built up contacts with Chinese elites. By mid-decade, the National Committee and the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs began a series of “U.S.-China Dialogues” in which influential figures from both sides met alternately in Beijing and the United States, supposedly informally, to discuss the state of Sino-American relations. Though the outcome of the protests at Tiananmen in June 1989 shocked them, American China-watchers consciously decided that contacts and efforts at communication and understanding must continue. At the Fourth U.S.-China Dialogue meeting in Beijing in early 1990, the American and Chinese participants assumed radically different positions, with the Chinese complaining bitterly about U.S. interference in China’s internal affairs. However, as the meeting ended, both sides agreed that, while there had been little agreement, such contacts and dialogues were valuable and must continue.