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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But it's also a kind of has some counterculture elements that are like there are rock concerts on the square. The most popular rock musician, Sui Jian, comes to the square and is celebrated when he's there. There's a sense of kind of a variety of things rolled into one. And I brought up how it sort of gets conflated with the movements to overthrow communism in the Eastern Bloc.
It was actually in many ways, I think, more like something that happened in the Eastern Bloc 20 years earlier. It was more like Prague Spring and other 1968 protests in the Communist Bloc, which was about... moving toward socialism with a human face, more like trying to get the parties in power to reform rather than necessarily doing away with them. So there was a kind of disjuncture.
Happened at the same time as moves to end communism. But of course, I would say there was a possibility when all the protesters were on the square, it seemed that for a time that this might be seen as an acceptable kind of movement to just have a kind of course correction.
But then there's also an internal struggle within the Communist Party leadership and clearly the people who are more political conservatives, even if they believe in economic reform, are clearly getting the upper hand and this is not gonna be tolerated. And the students stay on the square when signals are given to try to get them out.
Students from around the country are pouring into Beijing to join this movement. They don't want to end the movement when they've just arrived. So it's actually one thing that keeps it going is new participants are coming from the provinces. And even if some moderates want to leave the square, people want to stay.
And then workers start joining in the movement as well and form an independent labor union. And that really, the Chinese Communist Party, to a certain extent, they might put up with student protesters, but they know from past experience that sometimes student protests lead to members of other social classes joining them because they look up to students as sort of
potential intellectual leaders of the country and admiration for scholars is part of this that people turn out when students protest, something very different from the American case where there's a kind of often suspicious of student activists being necessarily on the same side as everybody else. But in China, there had been from the history of the 20th century, a sense of
students as potentially a vanguard. So once there are labor activists joining the movement, then troops are called in and there's a massacre near Tiananmen Square on the middle of the night of June 3rd and early June 4th.
And the army just moves in and begins behaving very much like an army of occupation, which is something the People's Liberation Army is supposed to be the one that saves China from foreign aggression. And they're acting like an invading force.
The tanks roll in, and I think also you have that famous image of the man standing in front of the tank that's a banned image within China. And I really think the reason why it's considered so toxic by the regime is because it just shows the People's Liberation Army looking like an invading force, not like a stabilizing force.
It's an amazing symbol. You know, he's on this boulevard near the square with this long line of tanks. And it's unquestionably this act of incredible bravery. And there's some interesting things about it, some that are forgotten. One is that in the end, he climbs up on the tank and the tank swerves, you know, it doesn't run him over.
And the Chinese Communist Party initially showed video of this and said, look, the Western press is talking about how vicious we were, but look at the restraint. Look at this. He wasn't mowed down. And they tried this whole story with Tiananmen initially of saying, look, The students were out of control. Everybody should remember what happened during the Cultural Revolution.
And the army showed restraint. And there were a small number of soldiers who were actually burned alive in their tanks. Once the massacre began, people got outraged and they attacked the soldiers. But by selective use of footage, the Communist Party could say, look, actually, look at this. The heroes, the martyrs were these soldiers.
And they try for the first months after it to try to get this narrative to stick. They talk about Tiananmen a lot. They talk about these things. They show images of the tank man. The problem with it is that lots and lots of people around Beijing had seen what happened and knew that, in fact, there had first been the firing on unarmed civilians with automatic weapons.
And there had been many, many people some students, but a lot of ordinary Beijing residents and workers who were just mowing down. So lots of people knew somebody who had been killed. So that story just didn't work. And then I think
The claim had to be made to try to suppress discussion of the event, and particularly to repress that visual imagery that was that image of the man in front of a line of tanks, whatever the tanks did to him or not. The main takeaway from it would be this idea that there were lines of tanks in a city that the image was of the government as having lost the mandate to rule.
And they really didn't want to have that image out there in the world.
Yeah. And it's probably not a student. It's often described as a student, but he probably was a worker. And it is a powerful, powerful image of bravery. And I brought up the 1968 parallel for Eastern and Central Europe. There was actually a very powerful photograph. of a man bearing his chest in front of a tank in Bratislava during what we think of as Prague Spring.
That was a famous image of bravery against tanks. And in 1968, in Czechoslovakia, then still Czechoslovakia, the tanks that rolled in were Soviet tanks sent down there. But that was an image, what was so powerful in that was saying, we're not going to put up with this invasion. Again, I think you have the People's Liberation Army looking like an invading force.
And that's what the Chinese Communist Party, in a sense, can't can't deal with now, even though sometimes they could tell a story about 1989, and they do tell a version of this, and some people believe this, I think, is that in 1989, China went one route of not having the Communist Party dramatically change or relinquish control, and the Soviet Union and the former Soviet states went another.
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