Tiananmen

It’s 20 years later after the Tiananmen incident.

It’s interesting how things in Chinese history are called “incidents”, and named after the date where there were large uprisings. There was the May 4th movement in 1919, in Taiwan there was 28th Feb 1947, and in Beijing there was 4th June 1989.

We don’t call these things “revolutions”. Yes, there were genuine revolutions, like the 1911 revolution in China, actually that was it. The communist revolution in China never was, because what happened was Chiang and Mao fought, and Mao won, that was it. Chinese don’t consider their revolutions are big break from their past, Chinese history has been going on for so long that you cannot have something like a French Revolution in 1789, English Revolution in 1688, American Revolution in 1776, where these were events that symbolised a complete break from the past, and sent shock waves throughout the world.

To be sure, China is modernising and it is vastly different now from, say 221 BC when Qin Shihuang united the whole place. But things happened gradually. It’s a large place, and important things that take place take a long time to influence the rest of China, which is why China rarely has a clean break from the past. That being said, the 30 years from 1978 till now has been pretty dramatic even when you consider that you are comparing this with 4000 years of history.

We don’t call these “incidents” as anything else other than incidents. I think perhaps us Chinese have been around long enough to be very non-judgemental about things. Like when Henry Kissinger asked Zhou Enlai what he thought about the French Revolution, it was almost 200 years later and he still replied, “it’s still too early to tell”. Yes, the shockwaves from that incident in 1789 are still reverberating and the dust has not died down.

I suppose if the Communist party had lost power in 1989 you could call it a revolution. If the uprising does not become a revolution, it is still not a revolution.

The western interpretation of a revolution is something like this: First there is a tyrant who is making peoples’ lives miserable. Then people get together and overthrow the tyrant. After that a new regime is formed which is better in some vague way and which is a better representative of the people.

In particular, the French revolution was notable for an extremely radical point of view. This view is so common nowadays that it is easy to forget how radical it is, and how controversial it still is today: all men are equal.

This is a wonderful idea, but does it work? How does it work out in practice? Does it mean that everybody is given opportunities, but it’s inevitable that not everybody will end up the same? OK, you start a race, and then everybody’s at the same level. Then you end the race, and the best man wins. Sounds good. But this is life, this is not a race that has a beginning and an end. Does equality mean that at the end of every year, we confiscate everybody’s property so that everybody has the same amount of money again? What does equality and fairness mean?

Should all men be equal? We know the result of some social experiments that were performed in communist countries: all the educated and all the smart people, we forced them to do manual labour to understand what real life is all about. But did that make society a better place? Was there progress?

During Chinese New Year, my relatives would make "tang yuan" for everybody. (That's small dumplings filled up with crushed peanuts / sesame / sugar for those who don't know, and they are occasionally also called "ah ball ling"). They come in unequal sizes, and the "deeper meaning" behind all this is that you have to remember that not everybody's equal, and the small guy will inevitably have to give way to the big guy. Inequality in society is an accepted part of Chinese culture. It is ingrained in our society. When you meet a Chinese Emperor, you kowtow to him. When you meet the Queen of Britain, you stand up, and shake hands with her. (OK, this has probably only been true for the few hundred years following the Enlightenment).

So in China you have the very curious sight of a society which has always accepted some form of inequality, and suddenly it's run by a communist. Now in communist societies, everybody's supposed to be equal. But look at what happened: Party leaders became local deities, and Mao himself became the Chinese Emperor. To a smaller extent, Deng Xiaoping is also an emperor. It was hard for people to believe that he was the one who ordered the military action. You always want to believe that it was the prime minister (Li Peng) who was at fault for giving bad advice.

On one hand, we don't need some crazy utopianist ideals where everybody is equal all the time. Sometimes people are lucky, and sometimes they are unlucky, sometimes they are rich and sometimes not. So we tolerate some inequality in life. We only talk about inequality of opportunity, and we want the poor to have equal opportunity to succeed, and the rich to have equal opportunity to fail. But this is ridiculously hard to achieve in practice.

I think that when you call something an “incident” you don’t immediately want to associate it with a certain idea. The people who took part in Tiananmen were protesting against living conditions, probably against unemployment rates and the economy. I’m sure they all had their reasons and motivations, which had little in common with each other, other than a vague dissatisfaction with the government. The communist government made China a very equal society, so they could not have been protesting against inequality.

But they were protesting against living conditions. I suppose all revolutions are really about living conditions, even though on the surface they are all about political ideals. You won’t really complain that your leaders are dictatorial and undemocratic, until your stomach has to go hungry for long enough. Look at Singapore, look at a lot of governments who have been very oppressive, but have survived so long as they did their job. This is the true meaning of human nature. I believe that the real meaning of the French revolution has been missed. The peasants were revolting not because they were under a tyranny, but because the tyranny was screwing up their lives.

I suppose the revolution is something that is very much a part of the Enlightenment, or the Romantic spirit. The image of a mob rising up against their aristocratic oppressors and bringing forth a better and more equal society is a romantic one, not necessarily something that is found in other countries like Great Britain or Germany. Only in France will the aristocracy be so self indulgent and oblivious to the sentiment of the common people. Yet the French also have the talent for organisation that can transform the mob insurrection into something greater, something resembling a state. Only French people are so talkative that everybody, including the common man is philosophical enough to be excitedly chattering away about what Freedom means.

It is also the reason why French schoolchildren every morning have to sing a barbaric song about a mob wanting to rip the heads off a bunch of aristocrats.

Great revolutions have different symbols in different parts of the world. The Russian Revolution was largely seen as a tragedy, something that brought to power a brutal and despotic regime, whose first act was to unleash a great and destructive civil war upon a land that was already pretty fucked up to begin with.

The image of the Iranian revolution is forever associated with 50 Americans being held hostage in an embassy for 15 months, and an angry crowd of Muslim fundamentalists outside, baying for their blood. It is associated with the bloody war against Iraq, the rule of the Ayatollah, and the Fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie for “The Satanic Verses”.

The image of the Mexican revolution is associated with Zorro, the peasant on horseback, draped with bullet belts and sombreros, Indian war cries and pistols fired in the air.

The image of the revolutions that ended the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe are no less arresting. A shipyard worker leading a union against the government. The Berlin wall being knocked down. 300000 Czechs marching down the town square.

I suppose there is something in western culture which romanticises the revolution, in spite of how many revolutions have gone wrong. The Russian revolution is now understood to be a tragedy of vast proportions. Soldiers marching into Phnom Penh in 1975 were not a harbinger of better things to come. The Iranian revolution in 1979 benefitted only a few people. The Chinese revolution in 1911 was the beginning of some of the most chaotic times in Chinese history (although Chinese history is so old that nothing is truly new).

Images form the narrative of the revolution, and our emotions are galvanised by the act. We want to believe that tomorrow will be better. We want to believe that things will always get better. We want to believe that everything will be swept aside in one good session of cleansing. We want to believe that everything is achievable in a short period of time.

When the revolution is over and done with, what has been accomplished? Sometimes the promise of a better life is met, and often not. While writing a play I borrowed the image of a man confronting a tank because I understood the dramatic effect. But what is life really like?

Look at what’s taken place in China – that is a real revolution. This does not excuse the thousands who died in Tiananmen, but it does make the Tiananmen incident look less like a “revolution” and more like an “incident”. People always overestimate what can be done in 1 year, and underestimate what can be done in 10 years. If we disregard the communist connotations for the moment, what has happened in China is that there were a few 5 year plans (or 5 year programs, because a lot of things were done on the fly) If you want to compare what’s been done in China to what’s been done in much of Eastern Europe, the change is very dramatic, and there is a favourable comparison. It’s almost as though Tiananmen was the fake revolution that had to be put down so that the real revolution could take place.