Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.Hey! It's the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre! I've been somewhat fascinated with Chinese politics lately, after reading Oracle Bones a couple months ago and 1984 more recently. Not fascinated enough to, say, be able to tell you the name of the Chinese president. Wait, that's a lie! I do know it! Hu Jintao! [I'm smart, not like everybody says, not dumb!] It's not really politics, but the censorship and totalitarianism thing that I find fascinating.
It is so not necessary for us -- we let apathy and stupidity and capitalistic concerns censor and totalitarize us. As an American busy studying the behaviors of fruit flies in a petri dish (that's my job...), I also don't concern myself with the outrages my government committed 20 years ago and continues to commit. Maybe that is just from the hopelessness and practicality of being an individual with a firm grasp of statistics, and the pessimism of some understanding of what motivates myself and this sea of people I swim among. Maybe I have already been brainwashed into only caring whether my "team" (Go Democrats!) is winning. As Vonnegut said, "Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative". The only presidential candidate I have ever wanted to vote for (vs. wanting to vote against the other guy) still gives speeches full of the same platitudes that progress the status quo.
So, how different is the state of censorship in China? As Zhang Lijia writes on the China Beat blog, "There’s still a cage in China. But for many, my fellow marchers from Nanjing included, the cage has grown so big that they can’t feel its limitations." Life is more comfortable in China, and growing more comfortable by the minute, leaving many people there with nothing to feel they need to rise up against (or so is my understanding from what I've read). The restrictions on their liberty don't interfere with their daily happiness and hope and aspirations. And if the Chinese are prospering, who am I to say that the lying and hiding information and using fear to control dissidence is wrong? Well, I guess I am Kristin, and I feel that it is very wrong, a thousand times more wrong than George Bush Jr. et al. never admitting the many egregious mistakes made by their administration. And I find that many Chinese are not bothered by their government pretty crazy and also fascinating. Maybe that's the brainwashing again -- my team in this case would be America vs China.
Random reading list:
- After Tiananmen and Prison, a Comfortable but Uneasy Life in the New China, NYT: An interview with Liu Suli who was arrested after the 1989 protests.
- Tiananmen at Twenty, The Nation article by Jeffrey Wasserstrom.
- NYT article Police Swarm Tiananmen Square to Bar Protests.
- NYT article about the websites the Chinese government has shut down to commemorate the day: To Shut Off Tiananmen Talk, China Disrupts Sites. Sounds like there's not much to read on the internet in China today.
- Beijing Clamps Down om Media: video on CNN.
- The Legacy of Tiananmen for Chinese Politics, "the Tiananmen movement's significance to China's current leaders", by Susan Shirk.
- Bullets over Beijing: Nicholas Kristof, who was the Beijing bureau chief for the NYT in 1989, describes his memories of the event.
- Tiananmen Square, 20 Years Later: News, Photos And Video From Around The World on the Huffington Post.
- Zhang Lijia's article China’s Growing Cage: The Legacy of Tiananmen is an interesting description of the changes in Chinese society from 1989 to now (a shorter, badly edited version was in the NYT here.
- Chapter 3 of Hessler's Oracle Bones recounts his experiences on the 10th anniversary of the massacre. You can read it on Google Books here. James Fallow's wife tells a similar story about the 20th anniversary here.
- China's Forgotten Revolution, a NYT op-ed by Yu Hua.
