Remembering the ‘forgotten’ massacre
Josh Hong
At a press conference held in Beijing in June 1999, a Hong Kong journalist sought the view of Zhu Rongji, then premier, in regard to the 10th anniversary of the June 4 massacre. Zhu, ever so cool and steady, uttered, ‘I have completely forgotten it.’
Needless to say, all those present were seasoned enough to not pursue the issue further.
Did the bloody incident that took place in the summer of 1989 in the heart of the Chinese capital truly escape Zhu? I think not. Most likely, he did what other leaders of the Party Central would do, that was to forcibly pluck the people from the bloody memory of the Chinese nation in the most recent past, all under the canonical principle of ‘stability above all else’.
Maurice Halbwachs, a French sociologist, stresses strongly that social processes influence not only people’s personal memories of their own lifetimes, but also a community’s shared memories of the past. To say that social processes have contributed tremendously to fostering the shared memories is hence an understatement. For a society, nation or state to continue in existence, a cautious and conscious selection of memory reins supreme.
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It would appear that Halbwachs values social memory more than history. As far as he sees it, the collective memory of the past is a resource shared by the entire community, while history remains a domain exclusive to historians and scholars. What Halbwachs may have failed to realise is the horrible power of the regime to manipulate social memories as well as to concoct historiographies.
Historical discourse is essential to the survival of a regime. Even when the history is recorded, the memory can still be diluted or even whitewashed. Post-WWII Japan, for one, worked strenuously to rebuild the nation. In tandem with the nation’s growing and burgeoning economy of the 1970s and 80s, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) government began an effort to ‘revise’ the history, with a view to presenting a reborn Japanese nation, but also to consolidating the LDP’s legitimacy.
Whitewashed history
Across the Pacific Ocean in the United States of America, the Red Indians, whose forefathers were brutally persecuted to the point of near extinction by the white invaders, are only given minimal acknowledgement in America’s nation-building discourse. For the US to cultivate a historical memory, ‘departure from the ancestral land’ became a theme that could only be seen as right and proper by the whites.
When the natives of different regions were forced to resettle away from their homelands, as was the case with the Cherokees, the pain of being forcibly removed from the ancestral land was constantly played down by the white settlers, who argued that great their pain might have been, but by no means greater than that endured by the forbears of the white communities, who had sailed across the treacherous seas to seek new opportunities in a distant continent.
It is therefore clear that invasion and occupation are conspicuously absent from the memory of the white regime when it comes to the historical discourse pertaining to the founding of the USA.
As Vidal-Naquet aptly puts it: the worst of all historiographies is plainly state historiography, and governments rarely confess to having been criminal, hence the insistence by the Turks on the ‘wartime situation’ which called for the drastic measure (read: massacre) against the Armenians of the 1890. No apology is needed here. In the same vein, a right-wing government official in Tokyo is always ready to downgrade the Nanjing Massacre to an ‘incident’ by applying the paltry subterfuge that ‘casualties are unavoidable when two countries go to war’.
Not dissimilar from others who seek to whitewash and renew historical memory, Pauline Hanson of Australia’s One Nation Party once dismissed the view that those who arrived earlier should be given greater rights than the latter-comers as wishful thinking. She, too, was attempting to play down the genocidal crime of the white settlers against the aborigines. In the context of Malaysia, I would have no problem with Hanson’s statement. However, if her very motive was to justify the dominant position of the dominant community, such discourse has to be challenged and rebutted at all costs.
Bloody histories, of course, deserve pages of account. Throughout Chinese history, every dynastic change was almost always followed by an elaborate and detailed collection of the evil deeds of the previous regime, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) being no exception. The victory over Japanese aggression is attributed to the competent leadership of the CCP, while the in-depth description of Japan’s war crimes in China is aimed to strengthen the legitimacy of one-party dictatorship. Paradoxically, the series of political disasters and man-made catastrophes after the CCP came to power are either exiguous or nonexistent.
Political amnesia
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Therefore, the resoluteness of Zhu in erasing his own memory of the June 4 massacre need not have shocked the Hong Kong journalist. After all, the CCP is replete with leaders that constantly suffer from such political amnesia, although it may not have greatly affected their historical accomplishments for the country. In fact, Zhu himself was once deceived by Mao Zedong during the Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1957, when he spoke critically of the CCP leadership and paid dearly for his daring act by going to a labour camp. He must have put this raw memory behind also.
Slightly different from Halbwachs, Pierre Nora makes a distinction between true memory and artificial history, arguing that ‘memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name, while history is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer.’ Nora’s scepticism towards history is so overwhelming that he is prepared to call the reconstruction of history ‘the terrorism of historicised memory’.
Nora’s preference towards memory is not without its own pitfalls. The state may play the leading role in assassinating historical memory, but many a time this cannot be done without the supporting role of the people when the latter seeks to preserve or eliminate their own memories as they see fit.
Why should a community and a nation place strong emphasis on a certain collective memory? To construct an identity as well as to enhance ethnic cohesiveness. That the Jews have long internalised the Holocaust, without having to seek help from the ruling elite, in their national psyche speaks volumes of the significance of a collective memory.
Voloshinov, a Soviet linguist, once succinctly argued that ‘to remember is always to give a reading of the past’, and this insight of his has become a basis for oral history that is now common in sociological research, especially where the dark side of the memory is concerned. The memory of an ex-comfort woman is no doubt painful, but it need not hinder the work of collecting; traumatic the May 13 incident must have been, the social memory has to be put down in words and this work should not be procrastinated further.
But there is another way of constructing memory, that is the conscious effort to whitewash or erase the dark side of history that poses grave implications for a nation’s future wellbeing. Should there be a discontinuity in social and ethnic memory, it would not always be sufficient for one to hold the regime accountable, for the attitudinal ambivalence of the people in regard to the dark memory has to be closely scrutinised also.
Bloody crackdown
When Zhu said he had forgotten everything about the June 4 Massacre, does it mean that the entire Chinese nation, too, has lost its memory? If a foreigner was to conduct oral history with Professor Ding Zilin, whose son was innocently killed in the bloody crackdown in the summer of 1989, would her painful memory of losing her beloved child become part of the contemporary Chinese history? Or, worse, the oral history of her unhealed bereavement should be regarded by her compatriots as evidence of treachery?
It is disclosed in the Tiananmen Papers, a collection of highly confidential and reliable official documents on June 4, that Deng Xiaoping, the chief architect of China’s Open Door Policy and for more than a decade the paramount leader of the country, urged other elders in the CCP to ensure that the reform agenda would not be reversed in the aftermath of the crackdown, in return for his approval of sending troops into Tiananmen Square to end the crisis. Deng, more than anyone else, was beyond doubt that the CCP had lost almost all its legitimacy after the calamitous Cultural Revolution.
For the CCP to regain the legitimacy to rule following an unprecedented military crackdown against the barehanded crowd, how to sustain economic growth therefore became crucial. After June 4, China went through three bleak years of economic stagnation, and it was not until February 1992, when Deng made use of his tour to the southern provinces to call for a most thorough economic reform, that the Chinese economy began to turn around. Deng knew it was impossible to maintain stability without a vibrant economy.
Yang Jisheng, a former mainland Chinese journalist who covered June 4 in 1989, states in his book Political Struggles in China’s Reform Era that, immediately after the bloody crackdown, Deng must have agonised over the way in which his revolutionary and political career would be judged. Would his fame spread for generations to come? Or would his notoriety be passed down from one millennium to another?
It must be said here that Deng was always closer to the hearts of the Chinese people than Mao, for he knew that only by constantly making the Chinese folk rich would his legacy be remembered by the succeeding generations, while the negative evaluation of him kept to a minimum. The spontaneous sorrow and grief of the people in the wake of his demise in 1997 go to show that, when it comes to manipulating social memory, Deng was always a notch above his contemporaries. He is still sorely missed by millions today.
With China’s economic prosperity in recent years comes the aspiration for a peaceful rise of the ancient nation. It is now apparent that the Chinese in the mainland as well as the Chinese communities worldwide have chosen to dilute, or erase even, their memory of June 4. Many have gone as far as to argue that the crackdown was perfectly justified in order to maintain peace and security, and the death of a few hundreds of students was a price worth paying for the economic wonders of China today.
Booming economy
This shift in attitude is partly informed by the fact that many are now the beneficiaries of China’s booming economy, and partly a result of the need to safeguard the dignity and pride of the entire Chinese nation internationally. This selectiveness in social memory has not gone down well with the late Li Shenzhi, a former deputy head of the prestigious Chinese Academic of Social Sciences and a highly respected scholar, and it pained him to question if the Chinese, like their Japanese counterparts, had lost the virtue of contrition.
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Given the distorted historiography of June 4 by the CCP, coupled with the selective memory of the people, it has not come as a surprise to me that the new generation of university students in China only has scant knowledge of Zhao Ziyang, a former CCP General Secretary and a central but tragic figure in the 1989 incident, when he passed away early this year. Assassination of memory can be executed by the regime as well as by the people.
However, if June 4 was truly merely a ‘disturbance’, as referred to nowadays in the Chinese media and history books, why on earth that the memoirs of Li Peng, the former premier who ordered martial law to be imposed in Beijing in May 1989, are yet to see the light of the day?
If indeed not a single life was lost on Tiananmen Square, as vehemently argued by the CCP till this very day, why must the Tiananmen mothers, such as Professor Ding, be kept away from occasions that are deemed ‘highly sensitive’ by the authorities?
Today, a great number of Chinese businesspeople, scholars and elite around the world are eager to rub shoulders with the high and mighty of Zhongnanhai, the official residence of the CCP leaders. They may do so for national pride or for economic interests. As these people fraternize and exchange toasts with the CCP leadership, the memory of June 4 is quietly fading, dying a slow death.
What is June 4? It was perhaps only an insignificant interlude in China’s millennia of labyrinthine history, as well as a minor disruption to the mosaic and wrenching social memory of the Chinese race.
So, what really is June 4 in comparison to all the riches, glory and fame that a strong Chinese nation can offer in seemingly not too distant a future?
