Pauline Chen: Screening History: New Documentaries on the Tiananmen Events in China
wanghx
CINEASTE
America's leading magazine on the art and politics of the cinema
Screening History:
New Documentaries on the
Tiananmen Events in China
Cineaste v22, n1 (Wntr, 1996):18 (5 pages).
COPYRIGHT Cineaste Publishers Inc. 1996. Used in the UCB Media Resources Web site with permission.
For most Americans, the images of the 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement offered a vision of the Chinese people as reassuringly similar to ourselves. The media showed hundreds of Chinese college students hunger- striking in defiance of an oppressive government, and mass demonstrations filling the streets of Beijing. In these images, we saw a moving struggle for democracy and freedom; such a struggle had been pivotal to our own history and identity as a nation. In the subsequent brutal crackdown by the Chinese government on June 4, 1989, the illusion of similarity receded, and we again saw China as alienatingly different. China's army moved against its own citizens; the night darkness was filled with gunfire and tanks; and shattered and bloodied bodies were borne off by screaming bystanders. We were reminded anew that a different set of rules and expectations still obtained in China, and that the reality of democracy and freedom was still very far from being achieved.
The painful disjunction between the two sets of images, the hope for progress embodied in the democracy movement, and the seeming implacability of the government response, lies at the heart of four recent documentaries on the events of Tiananmen, Michael Apted's Moving the Mountain, Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon's The Gate of Heavenly Peace, Iris Kung's Escape from China, and Zhang Yuan's The Square. Since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, China has more than once appeared to be inching towards the political and economic freedoms enjoyed by the Western democracies. Such movement, however, has often been accompanied by widespread conflict and resistance, disorder and corruption. The four films offer widely differing accounts of why China's progress towards modernization, as embodied in the 1989 democracy movement, has come with so much pain.
Moving the Mountain, which of the three films has enjoyed the widest release, focuses less explicitly on examination of the political situation in China leading up to the 1989 events, but rather functions primarily as a tribute to the commitment of the Tiananmen student leaders and the nobility of their struggle for democracy. The film gets its title from a story told by one of the student leaders as a parable for their endeavors. An old man and his sons begin chipping away at a huge mountain that obstructs the way between their home and their fields. When mocked by a wise man for the futility of their efforts, the old man replies that though he himself may not succeed in moving the mountain, his sons and his sons' sons will continue the work, and eventually the mountain will be moved.
An interest in envisioning experience through parable and personal stories underlies the film as a whole; in a sense, Moving the Mountain is more concerned with exploring the personal history of individuals than with chronicling the facts of the movement. Much of the film is taken up by anecdotes and reminiscences by student leaders, especially Li Lu, the main narrator, who was deputy of the Defend Tiananmen Square Headquarters and now lives in New York. The film reenacts his recollections of childhood incidents: his maltreatment by his schoolmates; his brush with a supposedly deadly lizard; his fortuitous absence during an earthquake that destroyed his village. In the stories that he tells of himself, we see the genesis of his present sense of identity and mission, his belief that he 'will again be summoned by history.' As in Michael Apted's earlier documentaries - 28 Up, 35 Up, et. al - we see the self revealed and defined through childhood experience.
Li Lu also offers a recital of the events leading to the June 4 crackdown at Tiananmen, and an account of the political history and climate of China. In giving vividness and concreteness to his narration by footage and reenactments, by providing few facts or opinions from other sources, the film for the most part adopts Li Lu's simplistic black-and- white vision, and succeeds in being dramatic and stirring rather than evenhanded. In Li Lu's vision, the democracy movement was inevitable, unanimously supported, and eminently desirable. His indictment of the Communist regime is comprehensive and unmitigatedly vitriolic. He maintains that the Communist authorities systematically deny fundamental human desires in order to make people political tools. He labels Deng and Mao "cruel and brutal in nature," and unhesitatingly attributes bad faith to the government authorities in their negotiations over the students' demands for democratic reform. According to Li Lu, when Premier Li Peng finally invited student leaders for a televised talk on May 18, he "deliberately antagonized" them so that they would "show their emotional responses on camera."
In contrast, Li Lu's vision of Western-style democracy is rosy in the extreme, and he frames the student movement in terms of the concepts of individualism and freedom so prominent in American political rhetoric. He learns from old postcards from the West that people there smile as Chinese people never did under the repression of Mao's regime. To him, the mass demonstrations for democracy are "more of an individual movement," for each person had his own reason for participating. He calls the hunger strike a "Declaration of Independence" by the students, proclaiming, "We could not let the government dictate our lives any longer." Li Lu's reverence towards the heroism of the students and glowing vision of what democracy can do for China are bolstered by additional interviews with other student leaders now living in the United States; in particular, Chai Ling, the former Commander-in-Chief of the Defend Tiananmen Square Headquarters, speaks movingly of her desire to "do something for [her] country," even to the point of sacrificing her life. To her, even the bloody aftermath of the 1989 student movement is only a goad to fight harder for democracy in China.
Nevertheless, under Moving the Mountain's dominant tone of idealism and hope, generated by the eloquence of the student leaders, runs a disturbing undercurrent of the darker and unexplored complexities of the Tiananmen events. Interviews with Wei Jingsheng and Wang Dan, both prodemocracy activists working in China, hint that the inexperience and perhaps irresponsibility of the student leaders in demanding too much political change too fast may have precipitated the bloody confrontation with the government.
Wei, who had been jailed by Chinese authorities for fifteen years for his leadership in the Democracy Wall movement, remarks that the students as well as the government behaved "foolishly" and "selfishly." Wang Dan, a student leader at Tiananmen who chose not to leave China and was subsequently imprisoned for four years, says of those who died in 1989, "As an instigator, I should have protected their lives, but I didn't. My ability was not enough." Most wrenching is the testimony of Wang Zhaohua, another student leader who came to the U.S. after 1989. While other student leaders who came to this country enjoyed public recognition and prestige from their involvement in the democracy movement, Wang Zhaohua, in contrast, has distanced herself from the movement and has for the most part kept silent about her role in it. Unable to keep back her tears, she says of the deaths in the crackdown, "I won't say I killed anyone...but there might have been many people who died because of me, because of my action, because of the mistakes I made."
The film, in following the lives of the students in the years after the Tiananmen events, reveals a curious dichotomy: those of the democracy activists who speak fluently in English and have assimilated into American life, namely Li Lu, Chai Ling, and Wuer Kaixi, are for more insistent and uncompromising in their cries for democracy in China. In contrast, Wang Dan and Wei Jingsheng (whose interviews in the film were translated from Chinese to English), as well as Wang Zhaohua (who speaks English haltingly and makes a living teaching Chinese in the United States), show more concern for the difficulties and dangers of trying to transform China's political system immediately.
Moving the Mountain shows numerous scenes of Li Lu, in particular, relentlessly pressing the case for democracy in China in various Western forums. We see him, tuxedo-clad, thundering about the responsibility of the "free world" to end the "slavery" in China at debates at Oxford University, and waving victoriously from the platform with Chai Ling at the Democratic National Convention in 1992. Meanwhile, Wei Jingsheng, back in China, worries that the student leaders in the U.S. have become westernized and "alienated from themselves," and Wang Dan wistfully hopes that they will return to continue the groundwork for democracy that must be accomplished in China. But we wonder: Li Lu's brand of rhetoric and idealism seems so well tailored to the ideologies and tastes of Western audiences; how able was he and is he to engineer democratic reform that will suit the realities and needs of China?
Such darker and more complex issues, only hinted at in Moving the Mountain, form the central focus of The Gate of Heavenly Peace. The film's provocative thesis is voiced by the narrator early on in the film: "When individuals stand up to power, they bring to the encounter the lessons that power has taught them and the harm it has done them." As the film unfolds the complex series of events leading to the June 4 massacre, it argues subtly, but ultimately persuasively, that the student protesters in their fight for democracy adopted the same extremism and repression of alternate views that they opposed in the government. Such extremism and repression have consistently characterized Chinese politics of this century; as one former Communist Party member explains, under the value system of the Communist regime, "Revolution is placed at the top, while 'reform' is not a good word." The students themselves, in favoring escalation of the movement over compromise with the government, in demanding further concessions after demands were met, and in allowing rhetorically powerful extremists to drown out more moderate views, both exemplify and perpetuate this political culture in China.
Even in formulating such a thesis, The Gate of Heavenly Peace reveals a vision of history that sharply opposes that of Moving the Mountain. Not content with the myth of a few heroic individuals shaping history, Heavenly Peace's account of the Tiananmen events encompasses issues of collective culture and experience, as well as of individual intent and responsibility. Moreover, to support its provocative and potentially unpopular thesis, The Gate of Heavenly Peace must marshal extensive factual support on a number of key issues which Li Lu in Moving the Mountain leaves in darkness: most centrally, to what degree the government actually addressed student demands in the long-drawn negotiations, and by what process leadership and policies were determined among the student protesters. Even as the film tries to distill and make sense of the complex political and social realities of modern China, its narrator explicitly acknowledges the difficulties of interpreting human experience. Rigorous and critical as to facts and methodology, The Gate of Heavenly Peace seems self-consciously engaged in the act of writing history.
The sources of The Gate of Heavenly Peace's data are primarily contemporary news footage from nine countries, home-videos shot by local Chinese and foreigners who witnessed the movement, and, finally, extensive interviews with various supporters of democratic reform in China. It is in these interviews that the film reveals its strengths. The interviewees, including student leaders, former Communist Party members (who quit the Party after the June 4 massacre), workers, writers, teachers, and a rock star from Taiwan, represent a wide variety of viewpoints and backgrounds. Moreover, interviewed by codirector and coproducer Carina Hinton, an American who lived in China until she was twenty-one, they speak for the most part with a relaxed spontaneity and expressiveness that attests to Hinton's fluency in the Chinese culture and language (all the interviews in the film are translated into English voice-overs).
In the chronology of events established by such interviews and additional footage, the film reveals that the Chinese government, which has been thought of as immovable and monolithic, made several efforts to negotiate with students and to comply with their demands. During the six weeks of demonstrations leading up to the Tiananmen massacre, two of the student demands emerged as the most central: first, that the government retract the April 26, 1989 editorial published in the Communist Party newspaper, People's Daily, accusing the student demonstrators of stirring up unrest in order to overthrow central power; and second, that the government engage in duihua, or dialog, on an equal footing with student representatives. The film penetrates beyond the escalating confusion and emotion that have obscured the facts of this period to find that the government made repeated, though perhaps belated and imperfect, attempts to address these two demands. Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang contradicted the April 26 editorial both at a televised meeting and on the radio, while student representatives had the opportunity to meet with several high-ranking Party officials, including Premier Li Peng himself.
The Gate of Heavenly Peace reveals that some prominent student leaders, determined for radical change, responded to such concessions only by further escalations of their protests. While some students were satisfied by the concessions, and returned to their campuses to elect student representatives for "dialog committees" that would engage in long- term negotiations with the government, others, primarily those who had come to power through the six-day hunger strike in mid-May, pushed for more extreme measures.
Here, American journalist Philip Cunningham's May 28 videotaped interview with Chai Ling, who was Commander-in-Chief of the Hunger Strike as well as of the Defend Tiananmen Square Headquarters, is both instructive and chilling; The Gate of Heavenly Peace shows extensive clips of this little-seen and now controversial interview. "Unless we overthrow this inhumane government, our country will have no hope," she says at one point. At another, she says, "I feel very sad, because I cannot tell [the other students! that what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed, the moment that the government at last has no choice but to brazenly slaughter its own citizens...What is especially sad is that some students and some famous well-connected people are working hard...to prevent the government from taking such measures...[by getting us off the Square]," but, she maintains, "Only when the Square is awash with blood will China be awakened."
The Gate of Heavenly Peace, moreover, casts doubt on the legitimacy of the process by which Chai Ling and some other student leaders came to power. Hou Dejian, an older Taiwanese rock star who participated in the demonstrations in the Square, recalls suggesting to the students gathered there that they hold an election for leadership, but was told that elections were impossible in such a mess. Chai Ling herself announces, "The only requirement to join the [hunger strike] leadership is to be willing to be the first to sacrifice yourself." As the opinions of the student protesters became more divided over the course of the demonstrations, the only means to maintain leadership became the power of rhetoric, and, more importantly, control of the loudspeakers broadcasting in the Square. In Moving the Mountain, Wang Zhaohua related how during the hunger strike she went from student to student, trying to persuade them to leave the Square, suggesting how an opinion distasteful to the hunger strike leaders was not given air time, and was thus relegated to obscurity.
Feng Congde, a hunger-strike leader married to Chai Ling at the time, tells of how there were numerous attempts by other factions to seize control of the loudspeakers so that their opinions could be heard. In fact, a group of students dissatisfied with the leadership unsuccessfully tried to kidnap Chai Ling and Feng Congde. Chai Ling retaliated with accusations that her kidnappers were students bought off by the government. Indeed, the film records how throughout her command, Chai Ling used similar language to attack all who opposed her, calling those students who didn't want to participate in the hunger strike "opportunists," and those who advocated leaving the square "traitors."
Thus, the film sets up its central irony: having come to power through undemocratic means, the student leaders stifled the dissemination of opposing views by monopolizing the loudspeakers, even as the Communist leaders monopolized the national press. They branded their enemies "traitors" even as the Communist Party labeled their opponents "counterrevolutionaries." The students, in their quest for democratic change, had adopted the very instruments of oppression that they were seeking to eradicate.
The Gate of Heavenly Peace, however, instead of condemning the students, focuses instead on finding the seeds of China's present crises in its recent history. It discerns in the 1989 incidents fragmented echoes and reflections of some of the most significant political movements of twentieth-century China: the May 4 movement of 1919, in which university students led a nationwide protest against China's unfair treatment in the Treaty of Versailles; the Cultural Revolution, beginning in 1966, also spearheaded by Chinese youth, in which Mao used anarchy and mass hysteria to purge the Communist Party of his enemies; and the Tiananmen Incident of 1976, in which citizens gathered at the Square to mourn the death of the moderate and humane prime minister Zhou Enlai (the 1989 events strongly resemble this incident in that they were also precipitated by the death of a popular moderate leader, Hu Yaobang).
The Gate of Heavenly Peace illuminates how images of these movements, filtered and refracted through propaganda, emotion, and imperfect memory, provided inspiration and models for the participants, both students and government, in the 1989 events. The students thought they were emulating the May 4 leaders, forgetting that those students returned to school and worked for more gradual social change after successfully drawing attention to China's political and social problems. To some Communist Party members, however, the 1989 mass student demonstrations may have chillingly recalled the chaos and terror of the Cultural Revolution. Both the Cultural Revolution and the 1976 Tiananmen Incident attest to how extremists have used popular uprisings as excuses to get rid of their moderate rivals; the 'reactionary' Deng Xiaoping, who favored greater economic freedom, was blamed by Mao for the 1976 Tiananmen Incident and forced from his position. Unfortunately, today's hard-liners have also learned the lesson from these events. The moderate reformers Zhao Ziyang and Yan Mingfu, China's best hope for democratic reform, were ousted from power following the June 4 crisis.
Compared to The Gate of Heavenly Peace and Moving the Mountain, Iris Kung's Escape from China is much more modest in scope. Secretly shot in China by a Chinese journalist now living in the U.S., it focuses on the personal consequences of participating in the democracy movement for one individual, Zhang Boli, a Beijing University student who was president of the 'Democracy University,' the students set up in Tiananmen for one brief day before the army moved in. Placed on the government 'wanted' list, Zhang Boli escaped arrest by living as a farmer in the remote northwestern province of Heilongjiang for two years, before eventually fleeing to America.
In choosing Zhang Boli as subject and narrator, Escape from China takes an angle on the Tiananmen events that fundamentally differs from that of Moving the Mountain. While Chai Ling, Li Lu, and Wuer Kaixi in Mountain are eloquent, charismatic, and keenly attentive to self- presentation and image, Zhang lacks any aura of heroism or importance. Though only slightly older than they, his experience growing up seems to reflect a much different China. As a child, he was taught to idealize Mao; in adolescence he was sent to labor in the countryside for two years, and there won the favor and support of local Communist Party members. It was only later, disgusted by the lack of freedom of the press and by corruption, that he became less enamored of the Chinese system. Unlike Chai Ling and Li Lu in Moving the Mountain, Zhang Boli does not speak at length about his ideology and the democracy movement, but seems more preoccupied with the movement's brutal consequences for himself. There is no intimation in Escape to China that Zhang had much real importance or impact in the Tiananmen events. The film is all the more pointed in finding the repercussions so great for even so minor a participant.
The structure of the film also contributes to the impression of Zhang's ordinariness and insignificance. Zhang Boli (or rather B.D. Wong's English voice-overs) provides a narration of his thought and movements, accompanied by footage of the landscapes and villages through which he traveled. He never appears on camera, however, until the very end of the film; we know his appearance only from a few faded snapshots from years ago. His narration is intercut with interviews with his mother, brother, wife, and daughter, as well as with the distant relatives and farmers who aided him during his say in Heilongjiang. Hearing descriptions of him and accounts of earlier encounters with him while he himself remains absent from sight creates a powerful sense that he is missing; cut off from his family and friends, he is only memory and history to them.
Lacking both the dramatic power of Moving the Mountain and the historical insight of The Gate of Heavenly Peace, Escape from China is perhaps most interesting for revealing some fascinating and unexpected aspects of life and culture in China today in the course of its interviews with ordinary people. Surprisingly, Zhang's mother, brother, and wife seem hardly to respect, much less applaud, his activism for democracy, and wish that he could have settled down to a normal life.
In contrast, his country cousins in Heilongjiang know little of the Tiananmen events, but figure that he must be in the right, since he is smart and went to college, showing the respect for scholars characteristic of traditional Chinese culture. They, and the farmers who assisted him, display little fear that they will be punished for aiding a national criminal; the iron hand of the Communist Party does not apparently extend to the remote northwest regions. Far from having any conceptions of egalitarianism, the farmers pity Zhang Boli for having to bear for a short time the hard work and harsh living conditions that they endure their whole lives.
Finally, the conflict and distrust between Zhang's wife and mother, and the fact that his daughter returns to his mother's care when his wife remarries, suggest that the traditional system of Chinese family hierarchies is alive and well. Though one of the film's major themes is the relentless and unbending authority with which the Chinese government tries to control its citizens, Escape from China also reveals how neither the Communist nor the Cultural Revolution has succeeded in rooting out the basic habits and conceptions of traditional Chinese culture.
In contrast to the other documentaries, with their long passages of narration and explanation, The Square, by Chinese director Zhang Yuan, has a soundtrack with few words and almost no music. The film observes the seemingly random activities on Tiananmen Square; most of its soundtrack is merely incidental noise and snippets of conversation. In its silence, in its seemingly meandering structure, in its lack of explicit judgment or explanation, The Square seems to revolt against the oversimplification and dogmatism of spoken rhetoric. Whether to avoid censorship or by esthetic choice, the film addresses the events of Tiananmen with an implicitness and indirection uncharacteristic of conventional documentaries.
In its sequence of unconnected scenes and people, the film establishes a number of pivotal oppositions, perhaps most centrally that between silence and speech. The film shows a crew from CCTV, an official television station, making a documentary about Tiananmen Square. Though The Square exposes the mechanics, the cameras and lighting and preparatory work, of the CCTV documentary, its own camera, its very existence as a film, remains hidden and unspoken. The CCTV interviews police and soldiers who work on the square, and though they proudly relate the various exciting incidents they have witnessed there over the years, they make no mention of the student democracy movement. The 1989 events are thus powerfully alluded to in the film by the necessity of being silent about them.
Another central opposition in The Square is that between planned or compelled action, and spontaneous and free movement. When the CCTV film crew shoots children attending a flag-raising ceremony at Tiananmen, the children are not allowed to act naturally, but are coached to simulate joy by waving and singing. The numerous sequences of people relaxing in the square, chatting and walking, flying kites and hawking souvenirs (perhaps an allusion to the increasing capitalism in China), are interrupted by goose-stepping, uniformed soldiers, their rigidly choreographed precision standing out starkly against the flow of ordinary life. These scenes, as well as one in which workers painstakingly wash an enormous and elaborate lamppost in the middle of the square, seem to suggest the ceaseless and draining effort the government must expend to maintain its awesome facade of monolithic power over its citizens.
At times the soldiers in the square seem to disrupt and block the movement of daily life there, as when a squad of soldiers jogging in unison cut across the Frisbee game of two elderly men, or when a teenager on a skateboard seems about to crash into a line of police. By far the most powerful crystallization of the invasive presence of the military, however, comes near the end of the film. A group of soldiers with much pomp and ceremony set up a row of cannons with which to salute the arrival of the Estonian president. As each cannon goes off, the camera cuts to a shot of a civilian's face frozen in unspeakable tension and fear. In these few brief, wordless shots, The Square shows us more clearly than any of the other documentaries what it is to live under the oppressive regime of China.
Film Distribution Sources:
Michael Apted's Moving the Mountain is distributed by October Films, 65 Bleecker Street, New York, NY 10012, phone (212) 539-4000. Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon's The Gate of Heavenly Peace is distributed by the Long Bow Group, 55 Newton Street, Brookline, MA 02146, phone (617) 277-6400.
Iris Kung's Escape from China is distributed by The Cinema. Guild, 1697 Broadway, Suite 506, New York, NY 10019, phone (212) 246-5522.
Zhuang Yuan's The Square does not yet have a U.S. distributor but further information is available from Dragon Films, Inc., GS Heim 303, 1- 22-1 Higashi-Ikebukuro, Toshima-ku, Tokyo 170, Japan, fax 81-3-3971-8975.
Pauline Chen teaches Chinese literature and language at the University of Minnesota.
tophits
不奇怪。
就算同情学生运动的 Philip Cunningham, Ian Buruma，也对柴玲有非常负面的描写，因为他们对于中共国的理解根本不到位，
受到大量的误导和统战欺诈。
柴玲最后的混乱，和学生组织的混乱是直接关联的。除了缺乏有效的组织和领导，更重要的是没有政府内部官员的支援。而政府官员如赵紫阳一派缺乏军队支持，
则是失败的关键。把责任推到柴玲和学生领袖头上是对中共国的无知。比如 Cunningham 因为帮柴玲去找封从德，但是学生组织中没有人接待他，被
他说成是和中共一样官僚主义，把学生领袖说成和漠视学生跪递请愿书的李鹏一样；而事实上那种混乱的衰退局面下，学生们都自顾不暇，还有空来管你？这和中
共的官僚主义，李鹏拒绝接受请愿，根本是风牛马不相及。 Buruma 也对柴玲等学生领袖的激进言辞通过使用贬义词描述来表达不满。而从我的角度看，
那些所谓激进言辞根本错误是太温和了，已经出卖了太多人。比如被送给中共迫害的湖南三君子就是最典型的例子。北京市民阻挡军队，已经彻底被所谓的“温和
派”出卖到肝脑涂地。
侯德健要求进行民主选举，可是早期确实是通过民主选举的，但是到他要民主选举的时候，局面已经混乱到无法进行任何有效的选举的程度，所以发生激烈的争吵
和“指挥权的争夺”。其实，这是恐惧蔓延，时局向危险失败方向发展导致的矛盾激化的自然反应。他的胡扯蛋是对时局的无知的表现。这个人最混蛋，从台湾逃
到中共国，向往中共；然后又因为64逃回台湾。:)
因为刘晓波在知识阶层的地位，因此他在所有主要的同情中共国民主运动的外国人士那里得到相当大的支持和同情。但是我很不欣赏他的理论。他可以按照他自己
想的去做，保持不那么得罪中共，还能拿稿费的状态，前提恰恰是有比他激进的勇士在前头开拓；而被他斥责为太激进的勇士们，则不但受尽酷刑虐待，连家人都
受到连坐。等到激进勇士都被收拾掉了，于是轮到刘晓波被抓。如果按照他对待高智晟被抓的表演，就应该呼吁中共对其“按照法律进行公开的审判”。他当时就
是这样要求的，而不是要求立即释放。极其缺德。虽然他没有公开攻击高智晟，但是他们立场接近的一群人如余杰，丁子霖等，落井下石的态度都是表现得非常清
晰的。
On Apr 27, 6:19 pm, w: