Jeffrey Wasserstrom
speaker
385 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And the 1989 protests at Tiananmen, even though kind of in the Western press in particular was discussed as a movement for democracy, but a lot of the first posters that went up that got students really angry were criticisms of corruption within the Communist Party and nepotism, and the sense that people
Despite all the talk, I mean, despite the fact that most people seem to be having to study really hard to pass these exams to get good positions in universities, that some of them were being handed out via the kind of backdoor. And that led to a kind of outrage. I mean, that's true in many places, but I think it gives a special...
So in 1989, this massive movement took place. The story of it's largely suppressed within China and largely misunderstood in other places, in part because it happened around the same time that communism was unraveling and ending in the former Soviet bloc. So I think it's often conflated with what was going on there.
And so I think one of the key things to know about the protests in 1989 was that they were an effort to get the Communist Party in China to do a better job of living up to its own stated ideals and to try to support the trend within the party toward a kind of liberalizing trend. liberalizing and opening up form that had taken shape after Mao's death.
And in a sense, the student generation of 89, and I was there in 86 when there were some sort of warm-up protests. there was a kind of frustration with what they felt was a half-assed version of what they were talking about. The government was saying, the party was saying, we believe in reforming and opening up. We need to liberalize. We need to give people more control of their fate.
And the students felt that this was being done more effectively in the economic realm than in the political realm, and that there were a lot of sort of partial gestures that suggested the party needed to be pressed to really, really move in that direction. And it'll seem like a very trivial thing, but I found it fascinating in 86 when I was there in Shanghai in late 86, And students protested.
And this was the first time that students had been really on the streets in significant numbers since the Cultural Revolution, or at least since 76. And the students were inspired by calls for democracy and discussions of democracy by this physicist, Fang Lijue, who was a kind of, often thought, a Chinese Sakharov. He was a liberalizing intellectual.
But one of the things that students in Shanghai, where some of the most intense protests of that year took place, were frustrated about was a rock concert, of all things, that Jan and Dean... the American surf rock band, which was kind of like the Beach Boys, only not as big. And they were touring China.
It was the first time in Shanghai that there'd been a rock concert, and the students were really excited about this because this fit in with what they thought the Communist Party was moving toward, was letting them be more part of the world. And for them, that meant being more in step with pop culture around the world.
And at the concert, some students got up to dance because that's what they knew you were supposed to do at a rock concert. And the security guards made them sit down. And for the students in Shanghai, this sort of symbolized what was, you know, a feint toward openness that really didn't have follow through. We're going to give you rock concerts, but not let you dance.
So the protests went on for a little while in 86, and posters went up. The officials at universities said, no, this is out of hand. We had chaos on the streets during the Cultural Revolution. We can't go back to that. And nobody wanted to go back to that. So there were posters I saw that said, this is new Red Guardism. And the students didn't want to be associated with that.
So it wound down pretty quickly. And they thought, you know, we're not like the Red Guards. We don't want to make chaos. We also are not fervent loyalists of anybody in power. The Red Guards had been passionate about Mao. The analogy partly sort of scared them. And also it meant that the government was really serious about Mao. dealing with them. So then in 1989, the protests restart.
And there are a variety of reasons why they can restart. The space for them, students are thinking about doing something. In 1989, it's a very resonant year, 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. People are thinking about that. But more importantly, it's the 70th anniversary of the biggest student movement in Chinese history, the May 4th movement of 1919.
And the May 4th movement had helped lay the groundwork for the Chinese Communist Party. Some member leading founders of it had been student activists then. It was an anti-imperialist movement, but it was also a movement against bad government. And so the students thought, you know, the anniversary of that movement.
Movement was always marked, commemorated in China, and people took the history seriously. People were reminded of what students did in the past. And so there were a lot of reasons why people were itching to do something. And then a leader... Hu Yaobang, who was associated with the more kind of reformist, more liberalizing group within the Chinese Communist Party.
He had been stripped of a very high office, demoted after taking, partly taking a fairly light stance toward the 86, 87 protests. And so he was still a member of the government, but he was not as high up in power. He had been very high up. He had been sort of Deng Xiaoping's potential successor. And he dies unexpectedly. And there has to be a funeral for him because he dies still as an official.
And the students take advantage of the opening of their having to be commemorations of his death. And they put up posters that basically say the wrong people are dying. Hu Yaobang was younger than some of the more conservative members, they said. So some people are dying too young. Some people are... don't seem like they're ever going to die. And so they begin these sorts of protests.
This is in April of 89. And the government tries to sort of get the protests to stop quickly, and they use the sort of same technique of they issue an editorial in People's Daily that says this is creating chaos, which is a code term for taking us back to the Cultural Revolution. And this time, the students say, no, you know, we're just trying to show our patriotism. We believe that
There's too much corruption and nepotism. There's not enough support for the more liberalizing wing within the party. And so they keep up the protests. And there's a lot of frustration at this point. There are also economic frustrations at this point. The economy is improving because of the reforms, but it seems that people with good government connections are getting rich too easily.
And so there's sort of a sense of unfairness. The students are also really frustrated by the kind of macro managing of their private lives on campuses. So The protests at Tiananmen Square and in plazas all around the country and other cities as well become this mix of things. It's an anti-corruption movement. It's a call for more democracy movement. It's a call for more freedom of speech movement.
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