Rana Mitter
The Cold War, in its classic sense, did not start or end in East Asia in 1989. There was an uprising against the Communist Party in China in the spring of that year, but it was suppressed at the cost of many deaths as the army was sent in to crack down on protesters in Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989. We now know that the inner circles of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were dismayed not only by the events of that year, but also two years later in 1991, at the fall of the USSR. Yet the liberalisers within the CCP, who were more reformers of the existing system than pluralist democrats, were purged from the leadership in 1989. China’s leadership made the bet, which turned out to be a cynical if valid one, that there was a way of combining economic reform with political continuity.
One of the great moments of possibility was symbolised by the Chinese television show River Elegy, broadcast to hundreds of millions in summer 1988. More than three decades after it was broadcast, this six-part programme remains one of the most important shows ever to be broadcast in any country. Part documentary, part polemic, the show advocated democratisation, made a condemnation of Mao, and embraced closeness to the West. It is probably the most liberal statement of values ever seen in the Chinese public sphere. It mixed interviews with intellectuals, archive footage, and shots of top CCP leader Zhao Ziyang. After 1989, both Zhao and River Elegy were locked away, unmentionable in the new, harsher atmosphere. In China, the show has never been seen again; for the rest of the world, though, much of it has now reappeared on YouTube. Watch it. It’s worth it.
Despite the political chill after 1989, however, there was also real political liberalisation in China, albeit not on the scale seen in Eastern Europe, or indeed in South Korea or Taiwan: the 1990s and early 2000s saw a move toward a limited civil society as well as more openness of political discussion. The overall pattern of post-1989 political discourse in China is more complex than it appears on the surface: post-Tiananmen crackdown and freezing of discussion (1989-92); cautious openness influenced by the desire to re-enter the global community (1992-2008); shock at the global financial crisis and turn toward a more authoritarian rule, underpinned by the Bo Xilai political scandal (2008-12); and then the steady narrowing of political discourse under Xi Jinping (2012-). Xi’s rise was not the cause of the new authoritarian turn – it was a symptom of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment