Six on Tiananmen Square, 30 years ago this week: The Tiananmen Square protests in pictures, 1989; Xi looks to stoke nationali
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"BEIJING — Chinese President Xi Jinping celebrated the anniversary of a student protest with great fanfare and an hour-long speech in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Tuesday. But it wasn’t the student protest that took place in front of that majestic hall in Tiananmen Square 30 years ago in June that he was commemorating.
It was, instead, the anniversary of a lesser known student protest that took place in the same square decades earlier: when students demonstrated on May 4, 1919, against a plan to give Germany’s concessions in China to Japan.
Xi used Saturday’s commemoration, and the specter of the much more sensitive anniversary in June, to exhort China’s young people to rally around the Communist Party of China and lead a patriotic life focused on the collective.
“Chinese youth in the new era shall love their great motherland,” Xi told the 3,500-odd young people gathered in the Great Hall of the People, including students dressed in brightly colored jackets from Beijing’s four most prestigious universities — the same universities that were involved in the 1989 protests."
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"In the first week of January 2016, a vast golden statue of Mao, rising up out of frozen brown fields, was unveiled in the middle of the Henan countryside in central China. More than 36 metres high, it cost £312,000 and was paid for by local people and businessmen. Tourists gathered to take selfies, but a few days later, the monument was demolished, apparently for violating planning regulations. Several locals wept as it came down, among them probably descendants of the multitudes – one analyst puts the figure at 7.8 million – who died in Henan during the famine in the 1960s caused by Mao’s policies.
The golden colossus of Henan evokes the strange, looming presence of Mao in contemporary China. The People’s Republic (PRC) today is still held together by the legacies of Maoism. Although the Chinese Communist party (CCP) has long abandoned the utopian turmoil of the Cultural Revolution in favour of an authoritarian capitalism that prizes prosperity and stability, Mao has left a heavy mark on politics and society. His portrait – six by four and a half metres – hangs in Tiananmen Square, the heartland of Chinese political power, and in the middle of the square, his waxen, embalmed body lies in state. “Mao’s invisible hand” (as one recent book puts it) remains omnipresent in China’s polity: in the deep politicisation of its judiciary; the supremacy of the one-party state; the intolerance of dissident voices. And in 2012, the CCP under Xi Jinping began – for the first time since Mao’s death in 1976 – to publicly renormalise aspects of Maoist political culture: the personality cult; catchphrases such as the “mass line” (supposedly encouraging criticism of officials from the grassroots) and “rectification” (disciplining of wayward party members). At the end of February 2018, Xi and his Central Committee abolished the 1982 constitutional restriction that limited the president to only two consecutive terms; like Mao, he could be ruler for life.
The western commentariat has been wrong-footed by Mao’s resurgence. Many perhaps assumed that, as China turned commercial and capitalist since the death of Mao, the country would become “more like us”; that Mao and Chinese communism were history. The opposite has happened. Maoism is the key to understanding one of the most surprisingly enduring organisations of the 20th and (so far) 21st centuries – the CCP. If the party is still in charge in 2024, the Chinese communist revolution will have exceeded the 74-year lifespan of its Soviet older brother. And if the Chinese communist state survives much beyond this point, historians may come to see October 1949, rather than October 1917, as the game-changing revolution of the last century."
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As I pedaled, I passed hundreds of Beijing residents fleeing on foot and bicycle away from the square and the main body of troops approaching from the west.
Soon a single armored personnel carrier came hurtling around a corner, headed toward the square. As it clambered over red-and-white concrete traffic barriers placed by protesters, I nearly kept up with it, weaving my own way around the barriers — which might stop trucks and cars but not tanks and bicycles. Finally the driver stopped when he encountered too thick a crowd on a side street at the northeast corner of the square. It seemed he was unwilling to start killing masses of people by running them over. Once the armored vehicle stopped, someone thrust a thick metal bar into its treads.
The furious crowd threw burning blankets and Molotov cocktails onto the vehicle; a few young men got on top and began banging the hatch. They managed an opening and started throwing burning objects inside. Three soldiers jumped out, scattering into the crowd. I followed one, and watched as he ran in a zigzag pattern while being severely beaten with pipes and sticks. Blood dripped down his face, which held a look of terror. Then two or three students grabbed him away from his tormentors, who almost certainly were not students, and put him into a nearby ambulance."
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