Twenty Years Since Tiananmen

The now-legendary image above, taken by Associated Press photographer, Jeff Widener, captures the heroic struggle and the tragedy that ended on June 4, 1989, when tanks cleared Beijing Tian'anmen Square (天安門廣場) after two months of protests by students against the government of the People's Republic of China. The collective response by the PRC, and the arrests, torture and murder of these students and other protesters was known as the Tian'anmen Square Massacre. Other protests occurred all across the country, and many other atrocities, even if not as media-spectacular, occurred as well during the period, but it was these incidents in Beijing that made the world notice the treatment of the Chinese people by their government.

It has been 20 years since the "June 4th Incident," sparked, in part, by the death of the pioneering Chinese reformer, Hu Yaobang (胡耀邦), leading to a march on Tian'anmen by more than 100,000 students and other activists, resulting in a senseless, violent crackdown by the Chinese government. I have that event vividly in my memory. Though I was thousands of miles away, though I am not Chinese, Chinese-American, or even Asian-American, though I had not yet traveled to China -- nor did I ever believe that I'd have the resources to do so (I finally visited Mainland China almost a decade-and-a-half later) -- though Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) was, to me, just the name of a foreign leader, though I didn't know at the time who, what, etc. caused the incident to occur, though I had no perceptible personal connection to the tragedy, I cried when I first saw Widener's iconic photo. At age 24, I my gaze was fixed every time I saw our U.S. television coverage of the incident which still made the whole thing seem so far away. Surreal as the experience was -- similar to my first reaction to the 9/11 Incident (which I watched in-person) -- something reached into my heart and made me sad, terrified, and strangely, at least in my own mind, empathetic. Could I have really had "empathy?" Not a chance--I had nothing in my limited life experience, not then or now, to compare. Still, something "connected" me to the images that I saw: of young people being strong, confused, angry, fearful, fearless, self-contained, unbridled, shouting, screaming, dying. Widener's image most personified -- and congealed -- what I felt. I always saw China and Chinese culture as something of a higher consciousness, with a higher purpose, yet I was born, raised, and heard nothing else from the U.S. media while growing up about China than about the atrocities and outrageousness of Mao Zedong (毛澤東) and his rule, the "remarkable" nature of the visit by President Nixon and Dr. Kissinger to China, and about Mao's later, hard-line Party followers. So why did I feel so connected to Chinese culture, to the heroism that I saw in martial arts films, yet also, specifically, to the thousands of young people who were protesting the government and dying, tortured, jailed, etc. to make their cause known?

My late, Great Aunt, a world traveler, visited China in 1977, a year after the doors to tourism opened. My father wanted her to take me with her. I would have been only either 12 or 13 that year. She didn't take me on her trip. She died only months after she returned from China. I felt later that I was meant to go on that trip but was, for some reason, stopped from going. Not because my Great Aunt didn't want to take me, but something else was halting me from taking that journey at that time. I didn't even think about "why isn't my Aunt taking me" -- though, I learned later, that my father did -- I just said to myself, at the time at, mind you, only age 13-ish, "I'm supposed to go to China why aren't I going?" This, from someone (me) who never even conceived that I would have enough money to do something as astonishing as making a journey of that magnitude.

One of my dear college friends visited Beijing the year before the protests. Both of us came from relatively humble, working-class family backgrounds. My friend is Chinese-American and his father had been pretty entrenched in Chinese-American social, cultural, political and religious (Catholic) issues in the New York Chinatown community. This created an opportunity for my friend to visit China in 1988 with other students/recent college graduates and room at Beijing University. When the protests happened the year afterward, I thought of my friend--how, if it were only a year later, he would have been in the middle of the situation, and could have been hurt or died, and how, very likely, young Beijing college students that he met, and shared discourse on things intellectual, cultural, social, or even with whom he just had silly fun, may also have been maimed, jailed, deposed, or died for what they believed. I felt this in ways I can't describe in words... so deeply in my consciousness. Perhaps this was my one, true personal bond to the tragedy, and this, along with my lifelong affinity for the culture, made it "gel."

As I wrote above, later, I did visit China, now a proponent of a weird hybrid Capitalism mixed with the ongoing ruling principles of two, three, even five decades before. It is odd for me--I grew up with a Socialist father, and have always embraced, and championed, many of the principles of Socialism. However, I do not believe a true Socialist society has ever existed. I believe GOVERNMENTS have always created the voice and have utilized elements of Socialism to benefit overt, or veiled, power-brokers. Communism, in turn, was and is a disaster. Communism in China turned into a sort of aggressive "hyper-Capitalism" with confusion of labor, with the depleting of natural resources and energy, with seemingly no recourse, and has been a weird and catastrophically oppressive model. But Chinese people are finding more of a voice--in China and around the world. And it shows. I am constantly reminded by a now dear friend and colleague of mine, who, ironically, is one of the most famous leaders of the 1989 protests, that things in China, and for the Chinese people on the Mainland, are moving, slowly but surely, in the right direction. I want to believe what he says. I want to believe too that the United States is beginning to learn from the mistakes of the greed of the recent, disastrous political and economic generation. I want to believe that things like the June 4th Incident will not go in vain. I don't believe it, but I will try. I do, at least, see some, even if minimal, evidence of this. I will, at least in part, trust my far wiser friends, far more studied scholars, far more insightful reporters, that humanity is chipping away at the insanity of exploitation, greed, and the political silencing of voices.

BUT WE CAN NEVER FORGET TIAN'ANMEN 1989. Please take one moment on this day to say a prayer, send light to the souls of, even, if you do not believe in any sort of spirituality, a moment of silent reverence, for the lives that were sacrificed in those two months at the end of the 1980s to raise their voices.