GibburtLooking back at Tiananmen Square
We were watching T.V.
Watching T.V.
We were watching T.V.
Watching T.V.
In Tiananmen Square
Lost my baby there
My yellow rose
In her bloodstained clothes**
Last week it was 20 years ago that the Tiananmen Square massacre took place. For those of us who are too young to remember: after weeks of continued protests on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, on the 4th of June 1989 the Chinese government sent in the army to clear the square. As a result hundreds of people were killed in the course of one night. For more information please look here or here .
The terrible events of that night happened to have been pretty well covered by the western media, because the protests coincided with a visit of Mr. Gorbachev to Beijing, who was at that time president of the Soviet Union. As such pictures and reports can be found all over the internet.
Upon reading through a number of these reports however, I realized that there were very few news providers that cared to show a bit more than just the tanks rolling through the streets of Beijing. Isn’t it at least strange that the whole world was watching this live on TV and hardly anybody tried to write something about why a thousand people died?
The assumption made by the average western news consumer was probably that these young idealistic students wanted exactly that, which the old communistic powers in China didn’t want to give them: democracy. And although this is no doubt part of the story, presenting that these events were about some intellectuals who were fighting for a greater measure of political freedom seems to be a gross oversimplification.
Searching further I found two interviews on PBS with Chinese human rights activist Xiao Qiang and eye witness Orville Schell.
Schell describes how the crowds participating in the demonstrations did not just consist of students but came from all layers of the Chinese society. Democracy was one of their requests but there were also wide spread concerns on other areas like growing corruption within the communistic party hierarchy and the direction China was moving in. In the Qiang interview we can read that although China has known a period of unprecedented economic growth since the events of June 4th 1989, it is the middle class that has mostly profited from this growth and that the workers and peasants have been left behind by the system. Most public facilities like the public health care system, the public education system and basic social security have been practically torn apart during the reforms of the early 90’s. Another source claimed that by 2006 around 90% of all billionaires in China were children of senior party officials. In other words the workers’ concern for corruption seemed not so unreasonable.
In her book ‘The Shock Doctrine’ Naomi Klein suggests that the events of Tiananmen Square allowed the Chinese regime to push through a series of unpopular economic reforms such as price deregulation and the sale of large number of state owned companies to foreign investors.
I will not pretend that in the context of a blog post it is possible to provide anywhere near a complete analysis of the causes and consequences of the terrible events of June 4th 1989. I do hope however that the links I provided will have sparked enough curiosity in the reader to look a bit further than what most of the mainstream media offers.
**The above listed lyrics are Roger Waters’ view of how the media handled the massacre: as entertainment for the western world. The song Watching TV can be found on his Amused to Death album.
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