19/06/2009 Nº 104 INTERNATIONAL

…AND COMMUNISM DESTROYED ASIA Twenty years after the Tiananmen student’s massacre, it is still forbidden to mention the matter in China

Guy Sorman 1, writer and former professor of Economics and Political Philosophy at the University of Paris s s e r P n o d r o C / S R E T U E R A citizen of Beijing stands motionless before the line of tanks at the Avenue of Eternal Peace (Beijing, 5 June 1989) Twenty years after the Tiananmen student’s massacre by the military following orders from the Communist Party, everything in China has changed and yet nothing has changed. Visible to all, China’s large cities have undoubtedly undergone great transformations. Largely invisible, China’s dirt-poor countryside seems unchanged, even immutable –as does the nation’s pervasive political repression. Twenty years after the Tiananmen massacre, it is still forbidden in China to even mention it: officially, on June 1989, nothing happened on Beijing .

1 Gota a Gota , FAES’ publishing house, has published two books written by Guy Sorman: La econo - mía no miente (2008) and El año del gallo. Chinos y rebeldes (2007). Government discourse and children’s schoolbooks mention some vague di - sorder that took place that year, imme - diately followed by the Beijing police’s restoring order. Beyond these huge po - litical efforts to hide the truth, most of the Chinese are aware of what happe - ned and many do remember in their he - arts. The younger generations however, are not that well informed about Tia - nanmen and their parents dare not speak; these young generations do not know much about Chinese history, past or present, in general. When in Beijing, I asked the well-known author of Red Sorghum , Mo Yan, if he would be able to write a novel about Tiananmen as he had done about the Cultural Revolu - tion; he became very embarrassed: “it cess. The Communist Party cease - is too early”, he whispered. lessly harasses Ding Zilin to halt her efforts. When she receives funding for Were there any victims on Tianan - her research from overseas Chinese men Square in June 1989? The Com - nationals, the Party confiscates the munist Party denies there had been money –she has repeatedly been indic - any. Even today, their number is unk - ted for corruption and jailed. At least, nown: according to the Red Cross’ es - Ding Zilin was privileged enough to ob - timate, the Chinese military killed tain the restitution of the remains of about 3,000 students. Most of the vic - her seventeen-year-old son, killed by tims’ bodies have disappeared, snat - the military. He had wandered into Tia - ched away and burned by soldiers to nanmen Square that fatal night, loo - destroy the evidence of the massacre. king for some schoolmates. Today, Ding Zilin, because she is beyond An association of mothers of Tia - eighty, is allowed to remain free in Bei - nanmen victims, led by Ms Ding Zilin, a jing but she is still harassed and pre - former Beijing university professor, has vented from talking to other families tried for twenty years to trace the who have lost a child in those same names of the victims, with little suc - circumstances.

“Most of the victims’ bodies have disappeared, snatched away and burned by soldiers to destroy the evidence of the massacre ”

2 “ ordered the massacre and his disciples are still in power”

The situation can be compared with proper funerals. The dead will never last year’s Sichuan earthquake that rest in peace without such restitution. buried thousands of young pupils under the rubbles of their poorly built Thus, the Tiananmen massacre and schools –the survivors had better not the police-imposed silence that follo - talk if they want to evade police ha - wed it have nothing to do with ancient rassment or worse. So far, Ding Zilin’s Chinese culture but everything to do association has been able to gather with the Communist Party’s repressive just four hundred victim’s names, the ideology. It also happens that the cu - list has been published in Hong Kong. rrent leaders of the Communist Party, the president of the People’s Republic Can so much cruelty be traced to and the prime minister, both belonged some Chinese cultural tradition? It is to Deng Xiaoping’s ruling clique in mostly among cynical European lea - 1989. ders and admirers of the “enlightened Chinese despotism” that one hears Deng Xiaoping ordered the massa - this kind of cultural argument. The in - cre and his disciples are still in power. dividual counts for little or nothing in In China, little has changed after all. Chinese culture, the argument goes. Communist parties in Asia have be - Only the larger community has legiti - come a sort of a dynasty in which the macy. If this were really the case, then ruling Emperor selects his successor. Western human-rights organizations The people know this when they men - should be deemed enemies of the res - tion their leaders names as being pectable civilization of an eternal “Mao III” or “Mao IV”. China. “Our major mistake,” Wuher Caixi Communists do try to sell to the tells me from Taiwan, where he lives in rest of the world the legend of their political exile, “was to believe that we Party as heir to ancient traditions. If could talk with the Communist lea - we were to accept this alibi, going ders”. In 1989, Wuher Caixi was elec - against the Party would be an imperia - ted by his fellow students as leader list disparaging of Chinese culture. and spokesperson of the democratic Some Westerners buy this alibi demonstrations. Twenty years later, it through ignorance or cynicism. In rea - remains out of the question to hold lity, true Chinese tradition would dic - discussions with the Party. A farmer in tate that corpses and remains be re - the Shaanxi province whom I met du - turned to the families in order to hold ring the summer of 2008 tried to find

3 out why the village leader appointed by pulation, usually members of the Party the Party, had confiscated his home. and members of the military, or with fa - “One does not discuss Party deci - mily connections to both, have reached sions”, was all he got for an answer. a fairly decent level of life. In both coun - The village leader gave the confiscated tries, such relative well-being is based house to his in-laws. “Those people on a relentless economic exploitation are not like us”, told me the helpless of the rural population, which lives in victim. Are those kinds of exactions a slave-like conditions. continuation of feudalistic cultural norms? Karl Marx, if he could see the pre - sent condition of China and North Again, Chinese traditions do not ex - Korea, would explain that the urban plain current day-to-day violence in Chi - Communist bourgeoisie has confisca - na’s countryside: only the Communist ted the surplus value produced by the ideology and the Communist Party or - rural proletariat. And in North Korea, ganization can help us understand the no more than in mainland China, one plight of the repressed Chinese. Let us does not argue with the Communist remember that current economic Party. One wonders if it means any - growth trickles down to twenty percent thing for foreign governments to try to of the people, mostly from cities, not negotiate with the Party. In North in the rural area where eight hundred Korea, like in China, civilization does million Chinese still live in medieval not explain much about these regi - conditions. mes; it has all to do with the organiza - tion, not with traditions. Travelling through East Asia, from one Communist country to another The “Organization”, or Angkar, was and between quite different civiliza - the name the Cambodian leader Pol tions, one confronts the same forms Pot gave in the early 1970s to the of tyranny, expressed with the same local Communist Party. The Angkar vocabulary, and harshly imposed with systematically murdered one quarter similar methods. of the Cambodian population when the Communists were in power, from 1975 In North Korea, which owes very little to 1979. Should we look for some cul - of its civilization to China, the Commu - tural explanation for this genocide? nist Party exploits the local people in Did anything rooted in the ancient the same manner as the Chinese Com - Khmer civilization, again very different munists. In Pyongyang, as in Beijing or from China’s, lead to the contemporary , I could see that the urban po - massacre? Nothing is to be found.

“In North Korea, no more than in mainland China, one does not argue with the Communist Party ”

4 “The common thread between the Cambodian killing fields, Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, North Korea’s concentration camps and forced re-education in Vietnam, is Communist ideology ”

The common thread between the they would likely provide similar expla - Cambodian killing fields, Mao Zedong’s nations: “building a better society, Cultural Revolution, North Korea’s con - being good Party members”. This tri - centration camps and forced re-educa - vial self-defence and the disasters tion in Vietnam, is Communist ideology. brought upon Asia, once again, are not One same ideology, one identical kind related to any ancient Asian tradition. of organization, the same holocaust. Marxism is a typically European ideo - Mao Zedong alone is credited with forty logy imported to Asia by leaders like million victims. , Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiao - ping, who, by the way, had all happe - Asia’s twentieth-century drama has ned to work or study in Paris. not been driven by poverty, overpopula - tion, colonization, or anti-modern tradi - In Beijing last summer, I asked eco - tions. The only true drama behind the nomics professor Feng Lanrui, now 86 mass massacres in China, the geno - years old, what the Chinese really wan - cide of Cambodia, the exile of the boat ted. When she was a young girl, Feng people from Vietnam, the concentra - Lanrui was close to Mao Zedong and tion camps in North Korea, the Tianan - men massacre, is nothing but Marxist ideology. Marxism has been the foun - ding stone of the “Organization” and has provided the “scientific” alibis of its leaders.

In Pnom Penh, these days, one can attend the trials of some of the former Communist leaders who massacred their own people. They show no re - morse and argue that they were trying to build a better society. “I tried my best to be a good Communist”, Duch declared to the judges, one of the main executioners of the now fallen Khmers Rouges regime. He was a good Communist indeed.

If the North Korean, Chinese, or Vietnamese leaders were to be tried,

5 participated with him in the so-called individuals who resist the anonymity of Liberation of Beijing in 1949. After the the totalitarian ideology. Tiananmen massacre, she left the Communist Party and became a We have so far described the Mar - human-rights . Only because xist regimes in Asia as immutable. But of her age, the police do not harass are they really? Will not economic her anymore. “Are the Chinese satis - growth lead spontaneously towards an fied with the relatively enlightened des - open society? This is probably just a potism of the Party?” I asked. “We are Western dream. Professor Samuel like everybody on Earth,” she replied. Huntington, in the 1980s, proposed a “We want the same democracy you theory in which, past a certain thres - have. We know perfectly well what a hold, economic progress would lead democracy is. We do not want a re - necessarily to democracy. He found pressive regime in the name of the so- inspiration for this view in Taiwan and called ‘Chinese characteristics’.” South Korea. These nations, however, never fell prey to totalitarian Commu - Twenty years after the Tiananmen nist regimes. massacre, to truly understand China, we had better listen to Feng Lanrui, a The historical truth is that there is lonely voice in an ocean of repression. no room for evolution, there is no path We have a duty to remember the unk - leading to political reform in a totalita - nown victims of Tiananmen and to sup - rian system: a Communist Party reigns port Ding Zilin’s endeavour to retrieve or it collapses, as the Soviet expe - their names. We have an even stron - rience clearly shows. When Gorbachev ger duty to support the living, like Hu tried to reform the Party in the 80s, the Jia and Liu Xiao Bo. Both of them are Party quickly disappeared. in jail for posting on the web a petition for political and religious freedom in Asian Communists have closely stu - China. The died the Soviet demise in order not to would like us Westerners, to perceive repeat what they consider the Gorba - China as a huge mass of faceless and chevian error. Within the Asian Com - nameless people, from where no indi - munist parties, any potential reformer viduals emerge without the Party in the Gorbachev style will be eradica - stamp. The Soviet regime tried to do ted before he reaches the top. In May the same until we learned the names 1989, when , then Gene - of Sakharov or Solzhenitsyn, among ral Secretary of the Chinese Party, tried others. Today, we have to etch into our to negotiate with protestors on Tianan - memory the names of those Chinese men Square, he was immediately fired

“We have a duty to remember the unknown victims of Tiananmen ”

6 “The Chinese Communist Party would like us Westerners, to perceive China as a huge mass of faceless and nameless people ”

by the Party’s real leader, Deng Xiao - on the people. “The yoke,” he says “to ping. Deng unleashed the army which the nation was accustomed against the students; Zhao Ziyang en - when it was heavy, became unbearable dured until the end of his as soon as it was lessened”. life. Since then, no one with the open style of Gorbachev or Zhao Ziyang has Contrary to what westerners would ever been in a position to reach the like to believe, we can be certain that commanding heights of the Party. there is no intra-Party confrontation in China, North Korea or Vietnam, bet - Perhaps, Chinese leaders have read ween the so-called reformers and the Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous re - hard liners. The hard liners’ ambition marks on the impossibility of achieving is to quell any attempt toward demo - political reform in an authoritarian re - cratization. They also want to demons - gime. When trying to understand the trate to the world that liberal demo - French Revolution, Tocqueville wrote cracy is not inevitable. that the Ancien Régime had provoked its own demise by alleviating the yoke Asian Communists do not really be - lieve in the unity of mankind but op - pose the Western mind to the Eastern mind. When listening to Communist leaders in Asia, it is evident that they consider liberal democracy to be good enough… for Westerners. What they call “Communist democracy” or “De - mocracy with Chinese characteris - tics” is promoted as being better sui - ted to Asian civilization and superior to Western democracy. Regretfully, some in the West are ready to buy this propaganda. We should instead listen to Feng Lanrui, Ding Zilin, Hu Jia or Liu Xiao Bo. They tell us: “We are like you: we want to be free like you are”.

On a personal note, I shall always remember a visit I made to Liu Xia, Liu Xiao Bo’s wife when she was under

7 “There is no path leading to political reform in a totalitarian system: a Communist Party reigns or it collapses, as the Soviet experience clearly shows ”

house arrest in Beijing. Once again, at the Communist Party’s whim. Why her husband had been arrested wi - the Western media, political leaders, thout any legal motive whatsoever. Liu and intellectuals do not support us Xia told me: “We, the Chinese human- more is a mystery to us. When we all rights activists, we are like the Jews disappear, you will ask yourself why were in Nazi Germany. We can be you did not do more. But it will be too arrested, jailed, killed at any moment late then.”

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FAES, the Foundation for Social Studies and Analysis, does not necessarily identify with the opinions expressed in the texts it publishes. © FAES, Fundación para el Análisis y los Estudios Sociales and the authors. D.L.: M-42391-2004

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