Final essay

Feel Liu was almost tripping over his numerous shopping bags, so keen was he to visit the June 4th Memorial Museum, which had temporarily been set up inside a building at a university in Hong Kong. “Feel” was his English name given to him by an English teacher from Sichuan, ostensibly because his grades were so good that he “had a feeling” for English. Rushing up to the yellow-vested volunteer manning the door, he asked whether he had to register his name in order to enter. No, he was told, just go straight in. Did it matter that he wasn’t a student at the university? No, he was told, it’s fine. Did they realize that this kind of material was banned in China where he lived? Yes, he was told, but here in Hong Kong, we can still show what really happened.

Feel collapsed into a seat in a row of chairs that had been set up in the room, arraying his purchases on the floor in front of him, and then proceeded to watch an 11-minute film on the student move- ment. He concentrated intently, his eyes growing wide with disbe- lief. When it was over, he watched it a second time. In between, he carefully unwrapped his new iPhone and plugged it into the wall beside him to charge it so that he could snap pictures of everything he was seeing. I happened to be standing behind him, and after his second viewing, I  asked him what he thought of the film. “This is the first time I’ve seen any of this, even though I’m already a college student,” he replied. “In the classroom, the teachers have mentioned

Student4 ::

8 4 T h e P e o p l e ’ s R e p u b l i c o f A m n e s i a

it in passing, but they don’t want to talk about it. They’re scared.” From a teacher’s perspective, no good could come of teaching about the “events of 1989”; it was best left untouched.

“I think the Chinese government is very good at covering things up and cheating people,” he said bluntly.

“When did you start to think like that?” I asked. “Right now, just as I’m watching this,” he replied. “In the past,

when I  was trying to join the Communist Party, I  thought its be- havior was very upright. There may have been a few things that weren’t quite so fair, but on the whole its behavior was very good. However, watching this, I realize how very little I know, particularly about the Communist Party.”

Feel was a 22-year-old marketing student visiting the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong on a shopping trip from mainland China. He had bought shiny peacock-blue Adidas train- ers—at a third of the mainland price—as well as his precious iPhone, also at a considerable discount. He stroked the screen lovingly as we talked. “I have to like this. I’ve invested everything I  have in this phone.” His shopping bags also contained brand-name cosmetics for a friend, but mostly they were packed with food and water that he had brought with him from mainland China to save money.

Feel had come to Hong Kong not just to shop, but to experi- ence all its differences from the mainland. He had been wandering around the campus of the university to see how it compared to his own school back in China. He had even made a special trip to the pharmacist to inquire about the different brands of condoms; such directness about sex was impossible inside mainland China. “The way of thinking here is very open,” he enthused. “It gives you the feeling that you dare to speak out, dare to do stuff, dare to criticize and dare to think.”

As he was walking down the street, Feel was astonished to be accosted first by members of the Falungong sect, which is banned inside China as an evil cult, and then immediately afterward by Falungong opponents. He had slipped literature from both groups into his bag, and when I spoke to him he had already dipped into the “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party,” a Falungong publication that offers a blistering condemnation of Communist

S t u d e n t 85

rule. Feel just wanted to know more although, he added quickly, he was unlikely to oppose the government in any case. He wasn’t polit- ical, after all; he was someone who pretty much went with the flow.

•  •  •  •

In the West, the iconic image of Tiananmen is that of “Tank Man,” a slender man in a white shirt and black trousers, facing down a column of tanks on Chang’an Avenue. The picture was taken on June 5th, one day after most of the killings. In each hand, the young man clutches a plastic bag, as if he had been on his way home from a shopping trip when he made a spontaneous decision to chal- lenge the state’s military might. Footage shot from the balcony of the Beijing Hotel shows how the man had positioned himself well in advance of the arrival of the long line of tanks barreling down the avenue toward him. When the first tank maneuvered to avoid him, he defiantly moved into its path again. When it ground to a halt in front of him, he clambered up onto the tank and had an exchange with a soldier who had peeped out of the hatch. One un- confirmed report said that Tank Man had shouted, “Turn around! Stop killing my people!” The footage shows him being hustled off by three unknown people; it is unclear whether they are security forces or supporters trying to protect him. Despite years of effort, no one has ever been able to ascertain what happened to the man, or even learn who he was.

How many young Chinese today know about Tank Man? In a crude experiment designed to test the limits of Chinese censorship in the Internet age, I took the photo of Tank Man to the campuses of four Beijing universities whose students had been instrumental in the 1989 movement:  Peking University, Tsinghua University, People’s University, and Beijing Normal University. I  was curious to know how many of today’s Internet-savvy students would recog- nize the photo. The students I spoke to are the crème de la crème, the best-educated students in China, yet the vast majority of them looked at the photo without the slightest flicker of recognition. “Is it in Kosovo?” one astronomy major asked. A  student pursuing a Ph.D.  in marketing hazarded a guess, “Is it from South Korea?”

86 T h e P e o p l e ’ s R e p u b l i c o f A m n e s i a

“I feel that it looks a bit like Tiananmen Square. But it isn’t, is it?” asked one student doing postgraduate work in education at Beijing Normal University. Out of 100 students, 15 correctly identified the picture; two of whom had never seen it before but had guessed cor- rectly. In fact, the number of students who mistakenly believed it to be a photo of a military parade was higher at 19, than those who recognized it.

Of those students who identified Tank Man, a couple had a vis- ceral physical reaction, gasping and literally shying away from the picture. One young Beijinger, with whom I  had been chatting in English, involuntarily cried out, “Oh my God!” A couple of students who claimed not to recognize the photo betrayed themselves by their reactions. “This is a sensitive topic,” one young man at Peking University offered nervously. When I  asked him if he would talk about it, he replied, “I think I cannot,” and then left, almost at a run. Another undergraduate showed the makings of a party official with his careful response, “This picture maybe is related to a counterrev- olutionary incident, which was two or three years after my birth in the last century.”

I was surprised to find how readily I, too, had internalized Chinese censorship. Confronting these young students with the picture of Tank Man felt like an act of heresy—as if I  were lob- bing an ideological grenade onto the orderly, treelined campuses. I became so nervous that someone might report me to the police or university security that I made a point of talking only to soli- tary students, calculating that a single student would be less likely to report a foreigner to the authorities. Despite the journalist’s credentials that allowed me to operate in China, I  became par- anoid that I might be detained for simply showing the picture of Tank Man.

I need not have worried. My informal survey revealed the degree to which the party has asserted its hold over the minds of China’s brightest youth. Indeed, several students who identified Tank Man defended the government’s actions. “I think the country’s reaction was a bit extreme,” one young English major at People’s University argued. “At the time, the country had its own reasons for crush- ing the turmoil. New China had just been established, and had

S t u d e n t 87

undergone so many destabilizing events. If at that time, turmoil were to break out, it was very likely the regime might fall. Lots of foreign powers had been using this turmoil to try to overturn the government of China.” She believed that the government had shown laudable restraint in permitting the protests to continue for so long and only taking action after “foreign reactionaries” had begun to stir up trouble. She was quick to point out that her understanding of the “events of 1989” had not come from official channels but from her own extracurricular reading.

“All countries have their own dirty laundry,” reflected an- other self-possessed young woman studying entrepreneurship at Tsinghua, in fluent English. “I know a lot of people blame our gov- ernment. Actually they have really done something to be blamed. But the thing is to consider if another party rules our country what would be the outcome? Maybe it won’t be as desirable as people thought. With the current status, we have to be grateful for the things they have done for us.” The government had acted in the interests of the majority, she believed, and those countries that condemned China’s reaction should look to their own records. “There is no real freedom of speech in other countries,” she said, neatly deflecting any blame by launching into accusations against others in a move straight from the playbook of China’s propaganda apparatus.

One young medical student was perched on a shiny motor scooter outside a student canteen, wearing a luxury watch and an ostentatious black-and-white T-shirt featuring the intertwined Cs of the Chanel logo. “I don’t think it’s reliable,” he pronounced, peer- ing closely at the photo. He mused on the large number of faked pictures online and the sophistication of digital photo-editing tools. “Photographs cannot be relied upon to prove anything. I think it’s very likely this is fake,” he concluded. With that, he donned a pair of expensive designer shades, revved up his motor scooter, and swooped off, turning a few female heads with his departure.

In the immediate aftermath of June 4th, China’s students did not swallow the government’s version of events quite so readily. Perhaps that was not so surprising given the crudeness of the government propaganda, which sometimes even reversed television sequences to make it appear as if the troops had only opened fire after the

8 8 T h e P e o p l e ’ s R e p u b l i c o f A m n e s i a

demonstrators had turned violent, obscuring the fact that those throwing stones were doing so in retaliation to gunfire. Indeed, one survey carried out in 1990 by the Hangzhou Electronic Research Institute found that only 2–3 percent of students surveyed “deeply believed” the Party’s version of events. At that time, there was al- most no access to the Internet. Now, every student can go online. Yet the propaganda apparatus has laid the groundwork so well that most students simply have no interest in questioning the govern- ment’s version of events.

•  •  •  •

Feel had never seen the Tank Man photo. Before traveling to Hong Kong, he had tried to look for information about June 4th on the Internet, but he didn’t know how to use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to bypass the government’s controls, and so had discovered lit- tle. He told me this when I took him up on his invitation to visit him at his college in the south of China, a couple of hours by bus from Hong Kong. The ride there was extremely comfortable, whizzing along in an air-conditioned cocoon past a jumbled amalgam of emerald-green palms, pink-tiled three-story houses, and urban sprawl, all criss- crossed by endless grey ribbons of highway from the recent infrastruc- ture binge—some of which had been abandoned half-finished.

For lunch, Feel chose a fast-food restaurant whose color scheme was dominated by virulent orange. He was polite but subdued, nothing like the exuberant young man I had met a few days earlier. He even made an attempt to excuse his behavior in Hong Kong, saying that he had not felt quite himself; it was too unfamiliar, too crowded, and he had been rather tired. Now he was back to normal. I had enjoyed chatting with Feel in Hong Kong because of his open- ness, and I  was taken aback by this new air of detachment, which continued to build as we approached his school.

During the hour-long bus journey from the city center to his campus, he peppered me with questions about money: How much does it cost to see a film in Hong Kong? Did my husband and I have a joint bank account? How much did I pay every month for my phone

S t u d e n t 89

bill? His concerns were purely materialistic, as if finances were the major factor determining happiness.

The bus jolted through the city, whose suburbs were still rather quaintly named after the villages they had long since outgrown. Outcroppings of skyscrapers rose up between the enormous factory buildings and gigantic government offices. As we finally appeared to be nearing the edge of the city, we glided into an area that looked more like Silicon Valley than China. Manicured bushes and trees lined the smoothly paved roads, and on both sides shiny new build- ing complexes appeared through the lush trees, though the quack- ing noises from nearby duck farms were a reminder of just how recently all this had been countryside.

Feel’s college was located in a recently built academic hub that houses an estimated 80,000 students, testimony to China’s push to invest in higher education; the number of colleges and universities has doubled in the past decade. In 1989, just over two million stu- dents were engaged in higher education. By 2012, that figure had tripled to almost seven million. Some things were unchanged, how- ever. I spotted a sign at one university plaza that encapsulated the restrictive nature of campus life: “Work Place: It is forbidden to sit or lie down, to stop, to play or to make noise.”

Feel’s idea of a good time was to invite me to sit in on a two-hour class in marketing. We scurried up the steps of the classroom building into a huge auditorium to watch the lecturer giving a PowerPoint presentation on the importance of after-sales service (“Don’t forget:  customers are your source of capital”). I  sat in the back row and took copious notes out of habit, until I  noticed that I  was the only person in the entire class bothering to do so. Most students had not even brought a pen or notebook with them, and many spent their time surreptitiously texting or playing games on their cell phones beneath the desks. One young woman in the front row was videoing the entire double session on her phone; she was the only person making any attempt at record-taking.

After a while, I became distracted by the slogans on the students’ T-shirts. My favorite, which read “Wicki Wacky Woo,” was embla- zoned in bright letters on the chest of a young man. Two rows ahead

90 T h e P e o p l e ’ s R e p u b l i c o f A m n e s i a

of me sat another student whose T-shirt identified him as a member of “Class Two Unremitting Marketing World.”

Feel sat next to his friend Moon, whose glasses were endearingly patched together with adhesive tape. The teacher valiantly tried to engage the class, forcing them to role-play by taking on the parts of salespeople and customers. An exercise in praising the customer proved to be an uphill struggle. One reluctant participant—who had admitted to the class that his interpersonal skills were poor— could not think of a single compliment to pay his neighbor. After an uncomfortably long silence, he had a sudden inspiration,  “You’ve got a nice cell phone!”

Earlier, I had asked Feel whether he liked reading. “Yes,” he had replied earnestly. “I like watching videos.” I asked what he had read recently. He spent a long time thinking about this before saying that he could not remember the last time he had actually finished an entire book. He had only managed to read halfway through the in- spirational autobiography of the Olympic badminton champion Lin Dan. It was on the shelf in his dorm room, along with just one other book that was not part of his curriculum—a double biography that outlined the strategies for success used by two homegrown busi- ness icons, Tang Jun, known as the “king of migrant workers,” and Alibaba’s Jack Ma. The tagline on the book read, “Success can be replicated. Every person can be a successful person.”

Success preoccupies these students, and for them money is the only yardstick for measuring achievement. They will be entering the job market at a time when an expansion of higher education has collided with a dearth of job opportunities in an economic slow- down. According to one poll, merely 35 percent of recent graduates have found work. Feel and Moon, both the first in their families to go to college, know that failing to find a job would devastate their parents who have invested years of toil in their education.

Feel was preoccupied with trying to find an internship for the next year when he was supposed to be getting some work experi- ence. A position in a leading company would help build his network of contacts and give him an advantage in the cutthroat job market. Hanging over him was the other alternative: the school-mandated placement, which would leave him spending a year stacking shelves

S t u d e n t 91

in a supermarket, a position at the very bottom of the marketing pyramid with a correspondingly low salary. The expansion of higher education has eroded the upward mobility once conferred by the simple possession of a degree, and as in most areas of life in today’s China, those with the right guanxi —the most expansive Rolodex— will prevail. Feel knew that his connections were not ideal, but he was a striver determined to better himself.

He already had an income stream. Having studied his parents’ transport business, he had set himself up as a middleman, helping factories find university students to work over the summer break. The factory hours were long—10 hours a day—and the pay was low—around $1.30 per hour—but food and lodging were included. There were always students willing to sign up. Judging by the adver- tisements plastered around the dorms, Feel was not the only one engaged in this line of work. Enticements included pointing out that the factories had karaoke rooms, ping-pong tables, and canteens of- fering three dishes and one soup at every meal. For this work, Feel negotiated a fee of around $30 for each student he himself recruited or $8 per head for workers that subcontractors had recruited on his behalf.

Factory life was not for Feel himself. He had once tried working on an assembly line in an electronics components factory, but he lasted only a couple of weeks. He needed something more inter- esting. His biggest challenge now, he judged, was finding the right job. Unlike his parents’ generation, Feel was not willing to put up with a job he did not like. “If it’s suitable, then maybe I  could do it a whole lifetime,” he said. “But maybe after a while, it might get a bit tiring or I  might not like it, then I  might quit.” Feel found it difficult to understand why the older generation had been willing to put up with such hard graft when there were easy pickings to be had elsewhere. “Why should you be a migrant worker and be tired and suffer your whole life? As a boss, you just need to make a few telephone calls, and you can earn 10 times as much. Everything depends on yourself and your own abilities.”

For Moon, the son of farmers, the situation was quite different. When he was 10 years old, his parents had left him, his brother, and their farmland under the care of their own parents, and had gone

92 T h e P e o p l e ’ s R e p u b l i c o f A m n e s i a

off to find factory jobs in order to earn enough to finance their boys’ education. “They really know how to eat bitterness, how to suffer,” Moon told me as he dug into an enormous bowl of meat stew in the canteen, which resembled a hipster coffee shop combining indus- trial chic with red-and-white Chinese motifs. “We are lazy com- pared to them.”

Moon’s life has become unimaginable to his parents, who in the past two years have not had the means or time to leave their jobs to visit him at college. He spent his school holidays touring the countryside by bike with friends, sleeping in cheap hotels or at friends’ houses. For his family, a number of reforms over the past decade, including the elimination of agricultural taxes, the provi- sion of nine years of free education, and the introduction of social security, have markedly improved the quality of their lives. From Moon’s standpoint, change has been tangible and positive. “Society is getting better, from one set of leaders to the next. The system and our education are all slowly getting better.”

Indeed, China accounts for three-quarters of the global decline in poverty in the past 30 years, lifting more than 600 million people out of poverty since 1981. For students like Feel and Moon, these are more than statistics; they are the stories of their lives.

But even within their own circles, there is a visible wealth gap. When we arrived at their dorm room, which houses four students, young men were lounging on the beds and chairs, each inside their own virtual world: some watching videos, others chatting online or playing games on their smart phones. They scattered as we came in, but a quick scan of their various electronic devices was revealing. Feel had far more electronic paraphernalia than the others, in- cluding a computer, his brand-new iPhone, and an iPad clad in a smart pink-leather case. One of his roommates had an entry-level cell phone; a single piece of clothing was hanging in his cupboard.

The evening’s drama was a dorm inspection by officious student inspectors with clipboards who were checking for illegal kettles or hotplates that could interfere with the building’s electricity supply. It was supposed to have been a surprise, but Feel had already been tipped off that the inspectors were on their way and had managed to hide his own kettle and hotplate. He devoted his energies to trying

S t u d e n t 93

to intercede for a female friend whose kettle had already been con- fiscated. “She’s weeping in her dorm room,” he said, lying shame- lessly. “She’s really upset. Maybe you could just give it back?” But the clipboard lady was unmoved, pushing her glasses up her nose and demanding a written statement of self-criticism from the offender. Self-criticism echoes the Chinese legal system itself by emphasizing the acceptance of guilt and a show of repentance as key steps in the punishment process, even for such minor transgressions as possess- ing an illegal kettle.

During an evening stroll round the campus, Feel and Moon proudly pointed out the enormous library and the sports facilities. It was a balmy, humid evening, and almost all the students were outside, practicing their hip-hop moves by the running track, doing soccer drills, or simply strolling about and chatting. Feel tried to flirt with a marathon runner who beat a quick retreat, shouting over her shoulder, “When did you break up with your girlfriend? I’m not talking to you!” Campus life was accompanied by the shrill chirps of cicadas and the bellows of water buffaloes from the adja- cent farms, which acted as a constant reminder to students of the lives to which they would return if they didn’t work hard enough.

•  •  •  •

The students’ ignorance regarding 1989 is hardly surprising consid- ering the efforts made to expunge the “Beijing Spring” from the of- ficial version of history. Most high-school textbooks take a simple approach by entirely neglecting to mention it. At the undergrad- uate level, the textbooks used by history majors devote a paltry few pages to June 4th, though these contain what French academic Michel Bonnin calls a “monumental historical untruth.” I found the inaccuracy repeated in identical passages of two separate books— The History of the People’s Republic of China and A New Edition of Chinese History—though nominally written by different authors.

The passages follow an explanation of the larger context, claiming that the imperialist Western world was “trying to make socialist countries abandon the socialist route” while the general secretary of the Communist Party, Zhao Ziyang, had neglected the

94 T h e P e o p l e ’ s R e p u b l i c o f A m n e s i a

struggle against “bourgeois liberalization.” Both textbooks zero in on the editorial that appeared in the People’s Daily on April 26th labeling the student demonstrations as part of a plot designed to “negate the leadership of the CCP and the socialist system.” “After the editorial was published,” according to the textbooks, “and due to the increased political and ideological education of the students by Party organizations at all levels, many realized the nature of the struggle. The situation at higher educational establishments in Beijing and other cities began to stabilize.” The statement is not merely untrue; it represents the polar opposite of what actually happened. The editorial enraged the students, sparking the largest demonstrations to that point and breathing new life into the move- ment. Protests opposing the editorial were held across the country, including in the cities of Shenyang, Dalian, Shijiazhuang, Jinan, Kunming, Shenzhen, Yinchuan, and Guilin, none of which had pre- viously seen any protests.

On the behavior of the military, one textbook praises the “ex- treme patience and tenacious persuasion of the martial law troops” while clearing the students from the square. As for the fact that sol- diers opened fire on unarmed civilians, the same textbook says that these actions were taken in self-defense, since “the heads of the il- legal organizations instigated some people who did not understand the truth to construct blockades at some crossroads to stop the army trucks. There even emerged some serious incidences of riot- ing in which army trucks were set alight and PLA soldiers killed. As the soldiers were in a situation that was no longer tolerable, facing savage attacks from thugs, they were forced to implement necessary self-defense tactics.”

Textbooks aside, the taboo surrounding June 4th means that it is almost never referred to in public institutions. Over the years, vis- iting dozens of mainland museums, I have found only one overt ref- erence to the suppression. It appears in a memorial honoring police martyrs inside Beijing’s Police Museum, an imposing granite build- ing fronted by Ionic columns and crammed with fascinating, if gory, glimpses of police life: fountain pens that magically transform into guns; a suspiciously clean grey hold-all that purportedly once held a dismembered corpse and had been discovered on a luggage

S t u d e n t 95

rack on the Beijing-to-Dandong train; the handcuffs worn by an unfortunate police chief when the Red Guards turned against him during the Cultural Revolution.

On the third floor is the Memorial Wall to the Martyrs, a spec- tacularly ugly 25-feet-high red sandstone wall relief dedicated to policemen who died in the line of duty. Cubes of red stone and enormous pairs of eyes jut from the wall. One pair of eyes is framed by large square spectacles, making the wall resemble a garish adver- tisement for an optician carved in stone. A  number of hands also protrude from the wall holding, variously, a pistol, some handcuffs, and a flower.

On top of a glass display case housing a police helmet and a gold wreath are two folders with leather pages listing the details of the police martyrs honored here. Among them are—as the English translation puts it—two policemen “killed by ruffians on June 4th 1989 while performing a mission” and a third who was mortally wounded that night. The explanation in Chinese adds the informa- tion that the policemen were “killed by ruffians while performing the mission of pacifying the ‘political storm.’ ” Reading between the lines, those who know what happened will find the alternate universe of the student movement and its brutal repression. But for today’s young people, who may not know what happened, parsing the lines of this bland account yields almost nothing.

•  •  •  •

The great forgetting is not just limited to campuses. It has happened in homes around the country, too. Parents who knew about or took part in the protests now want to protect their children from learning about what happened. Some go to extraordinary lengths to shield their offspring by lying or withholding information. One example is the artist Sheng Qi who, in the aftermath of the suppression, hacked off his own little pinkie with a meat cleaver as an act of protest. It was, he says, a moment of madness, but one that came to form a basis for his art. One series of his artwork entitled “Memories” features photos of his mutilated hand holding old black-and-white pictures, including one of himself as a chubby infant in a Mao cap.

96 T h e P e o p l e ’ s R e p u b l i c o f A m n e s i a

Yet Sheng Qi has still not told his 12-year-old son why he chopped off his own finger. Whenever his son asks him what happened, he jokes that he lost his finger on a bus. His son knows that he’s lying, Sheng Qi admits, but he has decided not to tell him the truth until he becomes an adult. “I’m always thinking of some story, because he’s still a little kid. I want to protect him.”

Paradoxically, the Chinese government’s success in enforcing collective amnesia and whitewashing its own history may now threaten its control over information. Many of those too young to have lived through Tiananmen are completely ignorant about what happened, indeed dangerously ignorant from the government’s perspective. On a couple of occasions in recent years, young media workers have even failed to recognize Tiananmen-related material and thus have neglected to censor it.

One example was a tiny classified advertisement that was printed in the lower right-hand corner of page  14 of the Chengdu Evening News on June 4, 2007. A single line long, it reads, “Paying Tribute to the Strong mothers of the June 4th victims.” Chengdu rights ac- tivist Chen Yunfei told me that he had placed the ad, which had been accepted by an ad agency worker who had been unaware that “June 4th victims” had any special significance. When she called him back to ask what the date meant, he told her that it referred to the anniversary of a mining accident. After the newspaper was pub- lished, Chen Yunfei was detained for a day and then placed under close surveillance for six months. Three editors at the paper were demoted, and the advertising agency was dropped. All of them were paradoxically victims of both the success and failure of government censorship.

The next year, the Beijing News fell afoul of the censors when it printed an iconic June 4th shot of a bicycle cart driver franti- cally pedaling two young men to hospital as they lay on a wooden pallet, their pale shirts drenched in blood. Simply captioned “The Wounded,” it was one of four photos accompanying a profile of Liu Heung Shing, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer who had captured that moment. Rather more aptly than intended, the accompanying article was titled, “I Used Photographs to Record the Journey China Has Taken.”

S t u d e n t 97

According to a U.S. Embassy cable released by Wikileaks, a senior editor at the paper attributed the mistake to the ignorance of edi- tors too young to recognize the picture. The editor tellingly admit- ted that he himself had failed to realize what the photo was until he started receiving telephone calls about it. The editor described “a wave of fear and anger” sweeping the newsroom over the pos- sibility of punishment, though senior journalists at the paper had “an interest in reviewing the Party’s taboo on media commentary on 1989.” The leaked cable concluded by saying that the editor and others “are hoping the case will become a test case that will lead to a change in the ground rules for covering Tiananmen, but conceded this is unlikely.” Indeed it remains unlikely; the ground rules are still unchanged.

It took a full two decades after 1989 before a state-run media outlet intentionally broke the official silence. On June 4, 2009, an article titled “Prosperity Tangible along Chang’an Avenue” was published in the Global Times, an English-language tabloid belong- ing to the People’s Daily. It wrote, “Twenty years after the June 4 Tiananmen Incident, public discussion about what happened that day is almost nonexistent in mainstream society on the Chinese mainland.” So complete has been the vacuum of information that even the acknowledgement of such a void constituted a step forward.

One other major discussion of June 4th appeared in an opinion piece in the China Daily in 2011. Entitled “Tiananmen Massacre A  Myth, it blamed “black propaganda” by the Western media for the “so-called Tiananmen myth,” opining that “Tiananmen re- mains the classic example of the shallowness and bias in most Western media reporting, and of government black information operations seeking to control those media. China is too important to be a victim of this nonsense.”

•  •  •  •

The only place on Chinese soil where the events of June 4th are pub- licly commemorated is Hong Kong, with a huge public rally, as well as a smaller, symbolic 64-hour-long hunger strike held by students every year. The student encampment is often incongruously located

98 T h e P e o p l e ’ s R e p u b l i c o f A m n e s i a

in the courtyard of a smart shopping center in the tourist district of Causeway Bay. When I dropped by, several dozen sweating students wearing white headbands were slumped on camping mats on the ground, typing madly on their cell phones and photographing each other. Their almost total silence was a vivid reminder of how social media is changing the act of protest; the pithy tweet is fast displac- ing the rousing, impassioned speeches of yesteryear.

The students’ choice of location was guided by the driving power of economics. They were aiming to catch the eye of passing main- land tourists—now the territory’s top spenders—and distract them from their shopping missions for long enough to educate them about their own country’s recent history.

Sure enough, as I  chatted with a young student who had been fasting for over 40 hours, a couple of inquisitive mainland tourists struck up a conversation. Neither of the mainlanders knew one an- other, but both had timed their trips to Hong Kong specifically to attend the candlelit vigil. Like Feel, they were hungry for knowl- edge, though they had managed to figure out how to bypass China’s strict Internet controls. One was a middle-aged civil servant, a small man in his 40s, who had first begun dreaming of attending a vigil in Hong Kong almost a decade earlier. He had intended to come with friends, except that one had missed his train and another had been prevented from leaving his hometown by police who had discovered his intentions. The civil servant had been part of the 1989 student movement in his hometown. He told me he had come to assuage his own conscience; when he thought of those who had died or served time in prison, he said, their voices clamored in his head. “That year we took to the streets together. Those of us who died, died, others went to prison. Don’t any of you care? Have you all forgotten or will none of you speak out about this?”

Despite vociferously condemning the Chinese government’s vi- olent repression of the protesters and its subsequent cover-up, the civil servant had continued to work for the same government for the past 20 years. “How can you cope with that contradiction day after day?” I asked. He squirmed, fiddling with his expensive camera, as he explained that at the time of his graduation, almost all university students had gone on to government careers. It was embarrassing,

S t u d e n t 99

he acknowledged, but he couldn’t blame himself too much. Like them, he also needed to earn a living. Besides, he went on, in his career he was working for the general good, avoiding participat- ing in “anything evil.” Yet, within five minutes, he was describing how he had spent almost six months seizing land from farmers for a government project. The compensation for the farmland had been far too low, he conceded, so some of the villagers had attacked and injured his boss. At least they hadn’t blamed him personally.

The younger mainlander, meanwhile, was smirking contemptu- ously while the older man offered this justification. When I  asked the younger man how he had funded his expensive French univer- sity degree, it was his turn to look embarrassed. His parents had paid for it, he told me, from the salaries they earned as a policeman and a government official. This conversation brought to mind the assertion by the jailed Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, who was imprisoned for 20 months after June 4th as a “black hand” behind the student movement, that China has entered an age of cynicism “in which people no longer believe in anything and in which their words do not match their actions, as they say one thing and mean another.”

Now more than ever before, these contradictions are called out and mocked in social media, which thrive despite the govern- ment’s attempts to muzzle them. At the time of writing, China had almost 600  million Internet users, ensuring that memes go viral before the censors are able to delete them. The authorities’ natural reflex has been to simply clamp down, banning sensitive words on weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, and deleting postings as quickly as possible. Every June 4th, the authorities’ level of paranoia can be charted by the increasingly lengthy lists of banned words. Terms deemed sensitive enough to be forbidden include “today,” “tomorrow,” “that year,” “special day,” and “sensitive word.” On the 2012 anniversary, censors moved to ban any references to the Shanghai stock exchange after an extraordinary numerological co- incidence led it to fall 64.89 points, numbers that when spoken in Chinese spell out “June 4th, 1989.”

In the run-up to the anniversary, sensitive images are also often scrubbed from the Internet, including birthday cake candles

10 0 T h e P e o p l e ’ s R e p u b l i c o f A m n e s i a

featuring the numbers 6 or 4; photos of chrysanthemums, which are traditional flowers of mourning; anything with the slightest similarity to a tank, including Lego tanks, cartoon tanks, or tanks made out of mahjong tiles; and, in 2013, even yellow rubber ducks. This stemmed from an artistic installation by a Dutch artist who had floated a gigantic yellow rubber duck in Hong Kong harbor. That theme was then adopted by Internet wags who recreated the Tank Man picture substituting yellow rubber ducks for tanks. The censors moved in quickly but not quickly enough, proving the limi- tations of old-school censorship in a new media environment.

On the square itself, the authorities have also betrayed the depth of their anxieties by attempts to stymie open reporting. On the 20th anniversary of June 4th, the authorities experimented with a new tactic: the “Umbrella Men” of Tiananmen Square. Plainclothes policemen ostentatiously shielding themselves from the sun with open umbrellas were sent to wander around Tiananmen Square with clear orders to disrupt foreign journalists’ work by inserting themselves and their umbrellas between the reporters and their cameramen. The result was a surrealist ballet between the weav- ing reporters and the pirouetting umbrellas of the security appa- ratus. Given that all other reactions were suppressed, the Umbrella Men themselves became the focal point of the television dispatches, serving as an unwitting symbol of the government’s deep insecurity.

Major political meetings held in the Great Hall of the People have also elicited extreme security measures that have tightened over the years to ensure that no acts of resistance might sully the square. Prior to the big party meeting at which the new leadership was unveiled in 2012—the 18th Party Congress—pigeon owners were forbidden from allowing their birds to fly, while model planes were also banned from Beijing’s skies. Taxi drivers were instructed to remove the window cranks so that passengers could not open the car windows. A memo was even circulated warning taxi drivers to be on their guard lest passengers try to throw “ping-pong balls bearing reactionary messages” out the windows.

In this climate, the category of “reactionary message” seems to cover a multitude of content. I myself was censored on weibo after tweeting one short sentence. I  had simply written “I am in Hong

S t u d e n t 101

Kong,” after which I  posted an icon of a candle burning. Almost immediately, I  was sent a warning that my post had been “made confidential” so that only I  could see it because “this weibo is not suitable to be made public.” Soon after that, the candle was removed from the list of available icons to ensure that nobody else could post such an incendiary picture.

•  •  •  •

Feel loved using weibo, but had no interest in tweeting anything political. He liked using it to chart his moods, favoring such inspi- rational maxims as “Take it slowly, and don’t be in a rush. Although it’s very difficult, I  can make it.” These were interspersed with his darker thoughts, offered at moments when he was clearly strug- gling. “My willpower is immature. It’s very difficult to achieve what I want.” For Feel, weibo was not a political platform; it was a tool of self-actualization.

The longer I spent at his school, the more I noticed the difference between Feel-in-Hong-Kong and Feel-at-College. He was nervous to the point of twitchiness, not because of embarrassment at my presence, but due to an instinctual wariness as he tried to police his own words. In Hong Kong, he had been temporarily liberated to speak freely—to “dare to speak out,” in his own words. Back at his school, the situation was more complicated. His self-control was a matter of self-preservation; nobody had warned him to mind his words. He knew without being told what was expected of him.

There were glimpses of the old Feel, but only brief ones. He admit- ted he had felt depressed since returning to China. He was worried, he said, that mainland students’ creativity was being stifled, though he would not elaborate on this. Moon, who had not been exposed to Hong Kong’s noisy plurality of views, disagreed. His reference point was the lives of his parents, who came from the generation that had required official permission to get married, change jobs, have chil- dren, apply for a passport, and travel overseas. From Moon’s per- spective, there was no comparison. “We are certainly freer than our parents’ generation, and our lives are better than theirs,” he stated, as he happily cracked his way through a pile of sunflower seeds.

102 T h e P e o p l e ’ s R e p u b l i c o f A m n e s i a

For all its modern facilities, their college is relatively isolated, with few opportunities to socialize with students from the neigh- boring schools. “Does it remind you of prison?” Moon had asked me jokingly. Until that moment, it hadn’t even occurred to me, but af- terward, I could not escape the image of the identical dorms stacked on top of each other, factory-farming China’s youth into depend- able, self-regulating citizens.

Feel had already tried to join the Communist Party. For him, the benefits were manifold, though the most compelling was an increased chance of getting a government job. Joining the party was little more than a rite of passage since his grades were good and he was deputy class monitor. All excellent students joined the Communist Party, he told me in a tone that made it clear that such a statement was self-evident. But this year, his grades had dipped dis- appointingly, and his application had not been approved. He feared there would not be many more chances to join the party while at college, though he hoped he would still be able to join after starting work. “It’s the trend. If everybody thinks the Communist Party is doing a good job, then why not join?”

Such pragmatic views are common among young Chinese, who tend to see party membership as a canny career move because it brings social mobility, not to mention the possibility of material gains due to greater proximity to power. The popularity of the Communist Party at home is such that it signs up a new member every 10 seconds on average. It is the world’s largest political party, with 85 million members at last count, outnumbering the entire pop- ulation of either Egypt or Germany. In fact, if China’s Communist Party were a country, it would be the world’s 15th most populous. Despite its burgeoning ranks, the party is selective, rejecting six new members for every one it accepts. And it is far from the ger- ontocracy that outsiders imagine, with more than a quarter of its membership below the age of 35.

Judging by the numbers, few potential party members are dis- suaded by the snowballing cascade of scandals, each more absurd than the last, whether it be the rail minister with his epic comb-over and 18 mistresses, the county traffic chief who arranged for 14 of his relatives to get government jobs, or the policeman who owned

S t u d e n t 103

192 separate properties. On the contrary, such preposterous stories could make party membership all the more attractive to China’s youth by suggesting that it might be the first rung on the ladder to unimaginable wealth, power, and sex. I once asked a 15-year-old schoolgirl in Yunnan what she dreamed of doing when she grew up. “I want to spend time with corrupt officials,” she answered. “The more corrupt they are, the better. Because they’re the ones who know how the world works.” Morality aside, it was difficult to argue with the logic of her argument.

The idea of the robber-baron official as an aspirational figure was further cemented by a video that went viral because it unwittingly exposed the spiritual bankruptcy of Chinese society. It stemmed from an innocent question that a reporter from the outspoken Southern Metropolitan News had asked some kindergartners: What do you want to be when you grow up? He filmed a video showing an adorable procession of starry-eyed, gap-toothed kids who stated their various ambitions to be a teacher, an artist, an astronaut, and a firefighter who helps people. Then a six-year-old girl appeared onscreen, her face pixelated. “I want to be an official,” she answered sweetly. “What kind of official?” the reporter asked. There was a long pause, and then she replied:  “A corrupt official. Because cor- rupt officials have lots of things.”

Even Feel had a pragmatic reason for wanting to join the party. One of the benefits of membership, he believed, was that it offers certain protections to party members who commit crimes, in- cluding the fact that party members might not be handcuffed in public like ordinary criminals.

When it came to the events of 1989, Feel was the first to admit that he didn’t really understand what had happened. “What I  say is blinkered,” he told me, as he unwittingly reflected the extent to which those events have been consigned to history. “If I  had been alive at the time, or if I were an archaeologist or a historian, then I’d have the right to speak about it.” After reflection, he was skeptical about the accuracy of what he had seen in the June 4th Museum in Hong Kong, wondering whether the curators had chosen to present a selective view of history. So loyal was he to a system that had served him well that he wondered whether he should even be trying to find

10 4 T h e P e o p l e ’ s R e p u b l i c o f A m n e s i a

out more. The Communist Party must have had good reasons for not being more open about what had happened, he thought. What it had done had turned out to be necessary for stabilizing the coun- try and propelling it to become the world’s second-largest economy. Even if it had made mistakes, the party had shown through its sub- sequent achievements that it deserved the people’s trust and under- standing. “If the government really was wrong,” Feel confidently concluded, “then it’s already in the past, and people will understand what they did.”