Following the Footprints of Music in Tiananmen Square Protests Wang Meng

From the Highest Court to the Furthest Wasteland: Following the Footprints of Music in Tiananmen Square Protests Wang Meng Music has always been an important component of social movements. As the one and only protest of its scale and influence in China, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests was a lively music venue. Protesters sang revolutionary songs and played rock music on cassette tapes players in the tent city. At night, the square turned into a concert and dance floor. (Gordon & Hinton, 1995) Cui Jian and Hou Dejian, the two most popular musicians at the time, performed for the protesters on the square. The singers’ featured songs, “Nothing to My Name” (Yiwusuoyou) and “Descendants of the Dragon” (Long de chuanren) became unofficial anthems of the protesters. Hou was deeply involved in the protest by joining the hunger strike initiated by Liu Xiaobo and was one of the negotiators at the dawn of June 4th with the military. In an interview with Tiananmen student leader Wuer Kaixi, he emphasized the importance of singers in the movement: “The people who are most influential among young people are not (the dissident intellectuals) Fang Lizhi and Wei Jingsheng, but singers such as Cui Jian.” (Huang, 2001) In Hong Kong, Concert for Democracy in China was held for 12 hours nonstop to raise money for the protesters on May 27th. After the crackdown, music became an important means of commemorating the protests and preserving memories and protecting legacies against state propaganda and collective amnesia. Even new generations who were born after 1989 wrote songs in memory of the protest. (Li, 2017) In this essay, I intend to find out what kind of music was used by protesters during the Tiananmen Square protests, and the symbiotic relationship of popular music and the state. I define popular music as the most widespread music that includes both revolutionary mass songs that are imposed from top to bottom to maintain hegemony, and unofficial songs like Gangtai songs (songs popular in Hong Kong and Taiwan) and rock songs that are under the state control yet express not necessarily the state’s interests. 1 Communist Legacy Before the end of the Cultural Revolution, the state exerted total control over people’s everyday lives including cultural products they consumed. A left-wing music style that emphasized masculinity dating back to 1930s was the only music style permitted. Only two types of singing, Western heroic bel canto singing (meisheng changfa) and artistic folk/national singing (min’ge/minzu changfa), were promoted. Soft singing and songs that expressed personal feelings were considered “yellow” or “decadent” and were wiped out of people’s aural memory. The link between music and state control can be dated back to more than two thousand years ago in the Book of Music (Yueji). In Mao Zedong’s Yan’an Talks in 1942, he stated “Literature and art [should] become a component part of the whole revolutionary machinery”. (Baranovitch, 2003, 193) The early legacy of referring music as “cry out on behalf of the mass” (Jones, 2001) by left-wing musicians like Nie Er, turned into a tool in serving political purposes for the state. There is no wonder that the most familiar music resources for the protesters on the square were the communist cultural legacies. One of the most popular songs during Tiananmen Square protests was “The Internationale”. The song has long served as a left-wing anthem and sung across time and space. Deriving from French national anthem “La Marseillaise”, the song was once adapted as Soviet anthem after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, until it was replaced by “Hymn of the Soviet Union” at the height of the Great Patriotic War in 1943, when the urge for patriotism ruled over the ideology of international revolution. (Brooke, 2007) The later Chinese national anthem “March of the Volunteers”, was first written as a movie theme song in 1935 and then became the most popular patriotic song during the Sino-Japanese War, was inspired by “The Internationale”. (Yu, 2001) When Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power, “The Internationale” was regarded equally important as national anthem. During Cultural Revolution when the composer of “March of the Volunteers” was criticized, the song lost its supreme status and was replaced by either personality cult songs for Mao Zedong like “The East is Red” and “Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman”, or “The Internationale”. The protesters on the square cleverly used the song that had a state imposed legitimacy to 2 protest against the state. Such a tactic is “an art of the weak”. (Certeau, 1984, 37) From the early use of “The Internationale” as an anti-establishment outcry in socialists and labor movements in the early 20th century, through formalization and consecration by communist countries, the song rejuvenated as calls for change when it was sung on the Tiananmen Square. Another making do example happened on June 3rd. When troops emerged from the Great Hall of the People through underground tunnels, they were immediately surrounded by protesters on the square. Since neither side could take a step forward, they transferred battleground to singing. Military songs such as “Without the Communist Party There Would Be No China”, “Three Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention”, “Military Anthem of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army”, were sung by both sides, as if which side sang louder would win. On the hot front line, several melees broke out between agitated people. Military songs that symbolized the state power and ideology were once again plagiarized by people and made it a weapon against the state power. (Gordon & Hinton, 1995) Many CCP officials were students protesters in their youth. Jiang Zemin, at the time the mayor of Shanghai, became General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party for his performance in crackdown protests in Shanghai in 1989. He remembered in his article that in 1943, he joined a protest organized by underground Communist Party in Nanjing. The student protests burned opium and smoking equipment captured from opium dens and sang “Graduation Song” before the armed Japanese military police. (Jiang, 2000) The song was written by Nie Er, the writer of national anthem, for a film Plunder of Peach and Plum in 1934. Written in the background of the Japanese invasion, the song was intended to evoke patriotism and nationalism among Chinese people. On May 4th 1989, the Youth Day of China, students held large protests on streets while the official ceremony for the 70th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement was held on the Tiananmen Square. 70 years ago, students protested the Beiyang government’s weak response to the Treaty of Versailles, igniting nationwide nationalism and a shift to Marxism. The day has been celebrated by the CCP as a hallmark of its origin. Three different protests across three different times were linked by the “Graduation Song”, connecting the history of the CCP as well as China. The state hegemony was challenged by the legacy of itself. Unfortunately high officials in the CCP seemed to have a collective amnesia of their resistant youth and treated students the same way as they were treated in their youth. 3 “Popular music both mirrors and shapes society and culture as they change.” (Baranovitch, 2003, 3) I want to single out a song that mirrors the protesters complex feeling of Mao, the symbol and the source of power of the CCP’s rule. It seems impossible for the young people in 1989 to reminisce about the Mao’s ear. But “I Love Peking Tiananmen”, a Children’s song and a personality cult song for Mao written by two adolescents during the Cultural Revolution, was sung by student protesters. The lyrics are simple and catchy: “I love Beijing Tiananmen, the sun rises above Tiananmen. The great leader Chairmen Mao, leads all of us forward”. For people who sang the song during the Tiananmen Square occupation, their goal was reformation not revolution. They more or less recognized and respected Mao’s legitimacy as a symbol of the state. This is why three radical protesters from Hunan, who fundamentally rejected the legitimacy of the CCP’s rule threw eggs filled with pigment to Mao’s portrait on the Tiananmen Gate on May 23th. They were captured by members of the Beijing Students’ Autonomous Federation and handed to the police, and they received heavy sentences of 16 years, 20 years and lifelong. Rock ’n’ Roll That Square In the post-Mao era, different music style started to emerge. While gangtai songs were introduced in the late 70s, rock music, a style that has been seen as subversive, was banned until late 80s. In 1986, an official concert “100-Singer Concert of Year of International Peace” was held in Beijing, and Cui Jian made his first appearance on national television and shocked the country. Cui is labeled as “The Father of Chinese Rock”, and he started his career as a trumpeter in Beijing Philharmonic Orchestra and performed western music for foreigners in diplomat hotels as a side job. He later quit his ‘iron rice bowl’ job and focused on creating his own music. Cui is recognized as one of the featured singers of the musical style Xibei Feng (northwest wind), which first emerged in the late-80s and was under strong influence of Xibei folk songs. Xibei Feng belonged to a large-scale Root-Seeking (xungen) cultural movement at the time. It was an attempt to re-establish a sense of identity in the post-revolutionary era when people were 4 deprived of history and tradition, cynical about communism and shocked by Western culture. Young people’s dissatisfaction and a sense of oppression expressed in Xibei Feng reached a high when the Tiananmen Square Protests broke out.

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