Rebels with a Cause: Tiananmen in History and Memory

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The 1989 Tiananmen Movement, known in Chinese as "June Fourth (Liu Si)," is considered the most serious open conflict between the Chinese Communist regime and the Chinese people since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Sparked by the April 15, 1989 death of Hu Yaobang, the former general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party whose reformist leadership distinguished him from other hard-liner leaders, Chinese intellectuals and students began a series of nationwide petitions, demonstrations, and hunger strikes calling for political reforms, but they were suppressed on June 4 as the Chinese government ordered the military to fire on unarmed civilians. What is significant about June Fourth in China today? On the surface, it seems that the event is completely remote and irrelevant to the reality of the "rising China," but every year on its anniversary, the government clamps down with intense security and meticulous surveillance. June Fourth epitomizes the relationship between history, memory, and power in the Chinese context. Haunted by the relationship between the crackdown in 1989 and the legitimacy of the party and government, the post-Tiananmen regime has constructed a narrative that portrays June Fourth as a Western conspiracy, under the guise of a "pro-democracy" movement, to weaken China, hence justifying its crackdown as "patriotic" and paving the way for China's rise. This officially-constructed history is disputed by various groups of people who regard their efforts to preserve the memory of June Fourth as part of a broader struggle for social justice and human rights. Because public opinion pertaining to nationalism and democratization is inseparable from a collective memory (truthful, selective, or manipulated) of the nation's most immediate past, the memory of this traumatic past has become a highly contested field. This course…