{"id":850,"date":"2014-05-26T01:08:29","date_gmt":"2014-05-26T01:08:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/?p=850"},"modified":"2014-05-26T01:10:53","modified_gmt":"2014-05-26T01:10:53","slug":"jonathan-mirsky-an-inconvenient-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/jonathan-mirsky-an-inconvenient-past","title":{"rendered":"JONATHAN MIRSKY: An Inconvenient Past"},"content":{"rendered":"

May 23, 2014<\/span>
\nDuring the night of June 3-4, 1989, when the Chinese Army was slaughtering demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, Wang Nan, a young student, was shot in the head. As he lay dying at the side of the road, soldiers threatened to kill anyone, even some young doctors, who tried to help him. In the morning, finally dead, he was buried in a shallow grave nearby. A few days later, the smell of Wang Nan\u2019s body was so great that it was dug up and moved to a hospital.<\/p>\n

After 10 days, his mother, Zhang Xianling, was called to the hospital to identify her son\u2019s body. It took eight months, in the face of official obstruction, for Zhang to uncover what had happened to her son. In 1998 she held a modest remembrance service on the spot where he had died. The next year, on that day, she was barred from leaving her apartment. When she met Louisa Lim, Zhang said she longed to go to the fatal place again to pour a libation on the ground and sprinkle flower petals. \u201cHowever,\u201d Lim observes, \u00ad\u201csomeone will always be watching her. A closed-circuit camera has been installed\u201d and \u201ctrained on the exact spot where her son\u2019s body was exhumed. . . . It is a camera dedicated to her alone, waiting for her in case she should ever try again to mourn her dead son.\u201d<\/p>\n

Until I read about that camera in \u201cThe People\u2019s Republic of Amnesia,\u201d I imagined, after decades of reporting from and about China, that nothing there could still shock me. As Lim contends, Zhang\u2019s \u201csimple act of memory is deemed a threat to stability.\u201d Lim\u2019s overwhelming evidence of the leaders\u2019 \u201cmoral vulnerability,\u201d together with her accounts of the amnesia of many Chinese, make hers one of the best analyses of the impact of Tiananmen throughout China in the years since 1989.<\/p>\n

A longtime reporter for the BBC and National Public Radio, Lim makes the essential point that \u201cChinese people are practiced at not dwelling on the past. One by one, episodes of political turmoil have been expunged from official history or simply forgotten\u201d \u2014 from 1957, when \u00adhundreds of thousands of \u201cRightists,\u201d including many intellectuals and Party members, were detained, tortured or driven to suicide; the famine of 1959-62, in which tens of millions starved to death; and the vast destruction produced by the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. One would think these things would be hard to forget; indeed, the astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, one of China\u2019s greatest dissidents, predicted \u201cthe failure of the \u2018Technique of Forgetting History,\u2019 which has been an important device of rule by the Chinese Communists.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"25MIRSKY-articleInline\"<\/a>
\nTanks at the ready in Beijing on June 6, 1989, two days after the Tiananmen Square massacre.VINCENT YU \/ ASSOCIATED PRESS
\nLim disagrees. Her view is underpinned by interviews I would have thought impossible to obtain in a security state as highly developed as China\u2019s. Zhang Xianling, for example, now a grandmother and retired aerospace engineer, is a descendant of generations of high-ranking officials, and thus a member of a class tormented since the Communist victory in 1949. But her guilt about her \u201cexploitive\u201d past \u00advanished after the death of her son and the accompanying cover-up. This caused her to found, with the famous Ding Zilin, whose son also died in the square, the Tiananmen Mothers, \u201cthe closest thing to a \u00adpolitical lobby in China.\u201d These remarkable mothers of over 200 murdered children are ceaselessly hounded, largely because of their unyielding \u00addemands for \u201ctruth, compensation and accountability\u201d about what happened in the square. They are a constant refutation of Premier Li Peng\u2019s big lie about why the regime refused to make public the names of the killed: \u201cThe family members of the dead are reluctant to have their names disclosed because they view the event as an antigovernment riot.\u201d This aroused Zhang\u2019s \u201cwhite-hot rage.\u201d She told Lim, \u201cThat\u2019s a barefaced lie. My child died on June 4. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s harming my image. I demand that name-list is released.\u201d When she discovered that some of the security personnel hounding her knew nothing about who she was, she told one, who \u201cabandoned her post in disgust.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another scoop was interviewing an ex-soldier, now a painter, who had been in \u00adTiananmen. He remembered ordinary citizens, young and old, blocking the army\u2019s trucks on their way into the square and telling the soldiers what the demonstrations were about. (I saw this.) He recalled, too, that after the massacre citizens now exhibited \u201cfawning treatment,\u201d offering the soldiers food and drink. Puzzled about the change in public attitude, he concluded, \u201cIt\u2019s a survival mechanism that people in China have evolved after living under this system for a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Evan Osnos, a New Yorker writer who spent the years from 2008 to 2013 reporting from China, would not disagree about the Chinese people\u2019s survival mechanism. But rather than amnesia, what is plain in \u201cAge of Ambition,\u201d his eloquent and comprehensive collection of reports from the time he was in the People\u2019s Republic, is an increasingly rigid Communist Party, constantly contradicted and evaded by a population that uses the Internet like a \u201cvirtual Tiananmen.\u201d Generally pessimistic about China, despite his happy years working there, Osnos shows that the kaleidoscope of Internet abuse, jokes and cynicism displays a depressing picture of \u201ca train with a limited number of seats.\u201d Those with seats were happy. Those without seats \u201ccould run as far and fast as their legs would carry them, but they would only be able to watch the caboose shrink into the distance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like Lim, Osnos is a determined interviewer, tracking down not only dissidents like the world-famous artist Ai Weiwei, but also the ancient granny who helped a child badly injured in a street accident while many others passed by (as most Chinese have always done), and a master briber who explained exactly what mixture of money, food and massage parlors succeeds in corrupting officials, high and low.<\/p>\n

Tiananmen is not given special attention in Osnos\u2019s book. But in his \u00adexperience, the uprisings of 1989, which actually occurred all over China, are forgotten by neither the leaders nor millions of suspicious, scornful ordinary people. On the anniversary of Tiananmen, the Party issues instructions to all journalists including foreign ones, banning these words on the Internet: \u201cFire, Crush, Redress, Never Forget.\u201d Observing the members of the seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, which rules China, at a party congress, Osnos notes that all but one were wearing identical suits and ties and all had dyed their hair the identical shade of black. While collecting billions of corrupt dollars they are ever on the watch for \u201ccounterrevolutionary acts.\u201d In 2010, Oslo awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, then \u2014 as now \u2014 serving an 11-year detention, and at the ceremony the Nobel committee placed an empty chair on the dais. Osnos writes that the censors then came up with a new Internet-search taboo: \u201cthe empty chair.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ai Weiwei, still under house arrest in Beijing, told Osnos, \u201cChina has come to the end. . . . It is still an underground party. . . . They can never meet anybody who challenges them intellectually.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much the same dismal view of the Party was offered to Lim by Bao Tong, once one of China\u2019s highest officials, imprisoned before the Tiananmen killings for being on the wrong political side. He told her what had happened in the China he had loyally served: \u201cHave you ever seen a dead person? After they have been made up, they look amazing. Better than a live person.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jonathan Mirsky was named British international reporter of the year in 1990 for his reporting from Tiananmen for The Observer.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

From\u00a0http:\/\/mobile.nytimes.com\/2014\/05\/25\/books\/review\/the-peoples-republic-of-amnesia-and-age-of-ambition.html?_r=1&referrer=<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

May 23, 2014 During the night of June 3- … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,95],"tags":[227,94,101],"views":828,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=850"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":852,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850\/revisions\/852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}