transcript

Liao Yiwu's poem 'Masscre'

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Tiananmen protests timeline

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LISA MULLINS: I'm Lisa Mullins, and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH in Boston. 20 years ago tonight, Chinese troops in Beijing opened fire on unarmed civilians. The attack ended weeks of pro-democracy demonstrations lead by Chinese students. Hundreds, possibly thousands of students were killed. It became known as the “Tiananmen Massacre”. The outside world saw coverage of the crackdown. There were the iconic images, such as the lone man blocking a line of tanks. Inside China, the government has tried hard to erase those images and that history, and to silence those who insist on remembering. The World's Mary Kay Magistad is in Beijing. Can you tell us what's going on in the city tonight?

MARY KAY MAGISTAD: Well, it's like many other nights in Beijing. It's an ordinary night here. People are at home with their families watching television, getting ready for school tomorrow. The younger generation really doesn't consider this any remarkable day to remember, and the older generation that does remember it, these days prefers not to talk about it.

MULLINS: Does that mean that the Chinese people, young and old alike, don't have access even now in these days of the internet, to the foreign news – the reports now of what happened 20 years ago there?

MAGISTAD: Any foreign reports on Tiananmen are blocked, or the government tries very hard to block them. If they come in by satellite television, the screen goes blank. If you try to access anything about the Tiananmen demonstrations on the Internet, you get your access cut off – at first for several seconds, then for several minutes. It's not mentioned in the Chinese state-run media, and if people speak out publicly about it, those who are aware of the sensitivity of the anniversary know that they're putting themselves at risk. But, you know, they say history is written by the victors, and China's communist party always saw the merits of that.

MULLINS: All right. Let's hear your piece now, Mary Kay, on how the party has done over the years.

MAGISTAD: The teenage Red Guards shouting here were encouraged to get rid of the “four olds” – old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits. They burned books, destroyed ancient temples, and persecuted anyone who dared to question their beloved Chairman Mao Zedong. Such “enemies” were silenced – some killed, some sent to re-education camps, some – the higher-level ones – literally airbrushed out of photos. Much has changed in China since Chairman Mao's day, but one thing that's changed less is the control over the telling of history – recent history, sensitive history, history like the Tiananmen crackdown. Qi Zhiyong was then a construction worker, caught in the crossfire on a side street.

QI ZHIYONG: There was no place to hide. People were running around trying to get away from the tanks and the military trucks. And then a huge military truck stopped by the street, and soldiers inside the truck started to fire with machine guns. They jumped out of the truck and were machine-gunning people randomly on the street.

MAGISTAD: Qi was hit by a bullet and lost a leg as a result. He also lost his job and, like many of those connected in any way to the Tiananmen protests, he's had a hard time finding work since. He says his faith in China's leaders is gone. Not so, in much of China's young generation – like this 17-year-old freshman at People's University in Beijing.

ZHOU: I really like our government. I think it can build a prosperous China. And the China economy, they are really fast. So I'm really proud of the government.

MAGISTAD: And that's even though she knows the government censors the news, and the internet and the telling of history in China.

ZHOU: China has a large population, so to take care of so many people, they must conceal something.

MAGISTAD: They must conceal something. And that doesn't bother you?

ZHOU: Yeah. Doesn't bother me.

MAGISTAD: Do you think they censor the internet?

ZHOU: I think they can. I think they can block certain websites.

MAGISTAD: And does that bother you?

ZHOU: I'm okay with that.

MAGISTAD: But one thing has begun to bother her – something one of her books, by a foreign publisher, referred to in passing, about Chinese troops killing unarmed Chinese citizens who had been demonstrating against corruption and for democracy. She says that's the first she'd ever heard of it.

ZHOU: I think it's unbelievable. So I'm very curious about it. Why would our government be so cruel? I don't believe about it. I think maybe the book is wrong. I should read more books about it.

MAGISTAD: You think the book is wrong? That the government did not crack down?

ZHOU: Maybe it cracked down, but it may have reason. It is not so cruel, I think. It must have reason to do so.

GEREMIE BARME: It confirms all my worst fears which relates to the nature of public memory and the reinforcement of historical knowledge in society.

MAGISTAD: Geremie Barme is a China historian at Australian National University. He lived for years in China, including in Beijing in 1989. These days, he says, young Chinese know little or nothing about what happened back then.

BARME: If one doesn't have the mechanisms in the public media, even the private media, electronic media, the print culture, to constantly reinforce and revisit historical moments, then these moments can disappear. Especially if there is a concerted political effort to either displace those memories or to rewrite them in a way that serves a political function.

MAGISTAD: Which is what has happened. On the rare occasions the Chinese government refers to the Tiananmen “incident”, as they call it, it's to show footage of angry mobs attacking and killing soldiers – which did happen in isolated spots, usually after soldiers had shot civilians. And in schools, the Tiananmen demonstrations, which involved millions of people in dozens of Chinese cities over six weeks, are just not on the agenda. In this Beijing high school, students are settling in for a class on something that is stressed – the Opium War against the British in the 1840s, and how it began China's 150 years of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers. The lesson is that China must always be strong and united, and must never let such a humiliation be repeated. It's part of the “patriotic education” campaign that the government imposed shortly after the Tiananmen crackdown, to try to ensure that future generations didn't challenge the Party. After class, I ask the young history teacher, Yan Wei, whether he teaches about the Tiananmen crackdown. He says he doesn't. I ask whether he can or whether that would get him in trouble. “Not necessarily,” he says. “It's just that there are so many lessons to get through and time is limited.” He says he knows those outside China tell the story differently from Chinese government, but as a Chinese citizen, he believes his government and tells its version to students who ask. Of course, he says, few of his students ask. Few of his students are interested in history at all. And that's sad, says historian Geremie Barme.

BARME: In other societies, moments of great tragedy or of great historical uplift or trauma are remembered by younger people who are interested, those thinking people, through these media mechanisms that allow for the constant revisiting of history. Reinvention, reinterpretation, certainly, but also that constant ability to remember and to reflect on how that past influences and shapes the present. And in China, that's something that is very, very difficult not only regarding the events of 1989, but much earlier events like the Cultural Revolution era and so forth.

MAGISTAD: So what does that cost China as a society?

BARME: I just feel the People's Republic is constantly on the verge of maturation. It simply can't grow up and it simply can't be allowed to grow up because it is under the political tutelage of the one-party state. It has profound ramifications for every aspect of society life – intellectual, culture, you name it – engagement with the world. Profound. Devastating. Worrying.

MAGISTAD: Some Chinese do try to remember and mark the darker chapters of China's recent history. The further back those chapters are, the more likely there's room for discussion. Not so for Tiananmen. Liao Yiwu is a poet now living in Sichuan province. He was in Beijing when the Tianamen crackdown began. This song, “Tianamen Mothers” is a dirge in memory of the dead. The night of the crackdown, he wrote another poem about it – and a few months later, he and 20 other poets were arrested while trying to make a film about the crackdown.

LIAO YIWU: It was impossible to communicate with the police, because poets kind of have messy minds. For instance, I was telling them I was influenced by a poet named T.S. Eliot, who wrote “The Wasteland”. The cop wanted me to explain it to him, and it took a long time. I got annoyed and even smashed a cup, and then the cop beat me. It really was impossible to communicate.

MAGISTAD: Liao's trial lasted almost three years, and he was sentenced to four years in prison. These days, he seems supremely cynical about Chinese politics, although he did sign the pro-democracy petition “Charter ‘08”. It was put together by his friend Liu Xiaobo, a professor who was one of the last people to leave Tiananmen Square during the crackdown. He served time in prison too, and is now in detention again because of Charter '08. Liu Xiaobo told me earlier that what the students were calling for, what he's still working for, will happen but gradually.

LIU XIAOBO: This gradual transformation will not stop, because today is different from the Mao era. Back then, China was an ignorant society. Now, the public is aware and it's totally different.

MAGISTAD: But the public is aware to varying degrees, particularly about the Tiananmen crackdown. Many of those who have spoken out about it have been silenced. Mothers of dead students have called for the government to admit it was wrong and are under constant surveillance. A soldier involved in the crackdown expressed remorse about it this year and was detained. For many parents who lived through it, it remains the subject that must not be mentioned – certainly not to their kids, lest their kids say the wrong thing to the wrong people. So for younger Chinese, it's a wound their society bears that many don't even know exists. Back at People's University, the freshman I was talking to says now she'd like to find out what happened.

GIRL: First, I want to know the reason. Then I want to know the process. Then I want to know why it happened and the result and what has become of the students.

MAGISTAD: What has become of the people who were there?

GIRL: Yeah.

MAGISTAD: One of the people who was there in Tiananmen Square, just days before the crackdown, was Wen Jiabao. He was accompanying his then-boss, Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang. Zhao had been sympathetic to the student demonstrators and told them tearfully at the time that he had come too late. Soon after, Zhao was put under house arrest and stayed there until he died four years ago. Wen Jiabao is now Premier. He has said the crackdown was necessary because the future of the Party and the country hung in the balance. He has said that China's economic growth since shows the Party made the right decision. But history is a work in progress, despite the Party's best efforts to have the last word. Zhao Ziyang has had his, by recording his own secret history of the Tiananmen era. Here he says, “I said at the time that most people were just asking us to correct our flaws, not trying to overthrow our political system. After so many years and so many interrogations, what evidence is there? Have I been proven right or have they?” The question hangs in the air on dark anniversaries like this one, and history can only answer it when history is free to speak.

MULLINS: And that is the former Communist party leader Zhao Ziyang. Mary Kay Magistad, in that report, you talked to so many people. How difficult was it to get people to talk now?

MAGISTAD: Well, not that difficult, because I didn't interview a lot of them now. I interviewed them much earlier because I knew that as the anniversary comes closer, the government tends to crackdown and tends to try to get the most prominent dissidents out of town in places where people can't talk to them. In the case of the college freshman at People's University, when I went up to talk to her, she at first was very willing to talk and she gave me her name and her Major. But after we got into the subject and after she realized what we were really talking about, she started to take it more seriously, she called me back a couple of days later and said, “Actually, please don't use my name. I think it might get me in trouble.”

MULLINS: What kind of trouble would she potentially get into?

MAGISTAD: She doesn't know -- and I don't know. And that's the thing. There's a line, but people don't know where the line is and it keeps moving. So this is a sensitive anniversary and a sensitive year – the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China is also coming up, so the Party is very vigilant at the moment. And things that people might have been able to do two months ago or last year maybe they couldn't do now. And what a lot of people do as sort of a coping mechanism, a survival mechanism, is just when there's a sensitive anniversary coming up, caution is the best way forward: just keep your mouth shut.

MULLINS: Mary Kay, we look forward to hearing more tomorrow. Thank you very much. The World's Mary Kay Magistad, in Beijing.

MAGISTAD: Thank you, Lisa.

MULLINS: Now, Mary Kay mentioned that poem written by the Chinese author Liao Yiwu, a poem that landed him in prison. On our website, Bill Marx, editor of the World Book segment, features the story of the poet and a translation of some of the verse. Again, it's at the World Book section of our website, theworld.org.

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