?COMMUNIST PARTY members love students?, read a banner hung in Tiananmen Square at the height of the sit-ins in May 1989 as student demonstrators sang The Internationale. Weeks later, on June 4, the party showed the demonstrators how much it loved itself. On that day, the People?s Liberation Army had come on as the hired muscle of the party to violently crush the peaceful pro-democracy movement.
Twenty years on, the elegiac note how the real chance for liberty and political openness ended in China is hard to miss. In the same year, the world changed profoundly as the Berlin Wall came down and many Communist states withered away, albeit in a manner more perverse than the authors of The Communist Manifesto had hoped. Today, political dissidents in mainland China exchange coded words to remember the Tiananmen Square massacre. China makes much of its ?peaceful rise?, but its rulers are so angst-ridden that among banal methods of clampdown, it blocked popular social networking and photo-swap websites, and e-mail accounts ahead of the 20th anniversary of the massacre.
In this year of anniversaries, none is more painful for the authorities than what they call the ?June Fourth incident?. All other anniversaries?the 60th of the founding of the People?s Republic, 50th of the Tibet uprising and the 10th of suppression of Falun Gong religious sect?can be put to propaganda use to pump up patriotism and economic nationalism, the two props the Communist Party uses to justify its grip on power. Yet, the very thought of social unrest has bullied the party into setting up a high-level committee nicknamed an Orwellian sounding 6521?a reference to this year?s commemoration of four major events in post-Communist China.
The rulers are perhaps overreacting: in fact, they have no good reason to lose sleep over the Tiananmen Square massacre. Like other unpleasant episodes, they have all but whitewashed this piece of history from post-Communist China, too. You say Mao Zedong committed numerous excesses, including two of the greatest catastrophes in the entire Chinese history. But no worry: in the party?s estimation, Chairman Mao is still judged to have been ?70% good, 30% bad?. You say the Tiananmen protestors were not provoking violence, but demanding fundamental liberties and an end to corruption. No, the party classifies them as counter-revolutionaries trying violently to overthrow the government with foreign help. Today, candid discussions about the topic are swiftly silenced. According to news reports, asked about what happened in 1989, youngsters grope for an answer: ?Did it have something to do with the conflicts between capitalism and socialism?? In the long shadow of the rosy-eyed material churned out by the authorities, history is all about the never-ending struggle between the five red (good) represents and the five black (bad) categories.
What?s striking about contemporary China, apart from economic development, is the popular apathy towards political change. It seems that the passion and fervour that the pro-democracy movement raised in the three months of 1989 simply evaporated, with the visible pro-democracy movement itself. Why not? The radiant future that communism promised lies in economic emancipation, not political freedom. If ?consultative authoritarianism? brings stable economic development, nobody wants to barricade for democracy. To be fair, people are only acutely aware of what went before. They remember the dark days of the Cultural Revolution when overzealous Red Guards raided their houses searching for books, paintings and musical instruments; millions were uprooted from their homes to work in the rural collectives in sub-human conditions. They also remember the disastrous Great Leap Forward in which an estimated 30 million people died of starvation, even though China was merrily exporting grain at the time. No one desires a return to totalitarianism.
As Perry Link, co-editor of The Tiananmen Papers, and Joshua Kurlantzick, a visiting Carnegie Endowment scholar, noted in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, after 1989, the Communist Party has modernised its authoritarianism to fit the times. Now, they say, the party uses an ideological technique called ?thoughtwork? to enforce popular obedience to one-party rule. It comes in many forms, ranging from cynical manipulation of opinionmakers in media and academia, encouragement of Han Chinese nationalism to active promotion of the ?China model? of authoritarian capitalism.
However, obstacles remain. Growing income inequalities reveal that China?s economic miracle is a lumpy stew of disjointed ideas. The democratising powers of the Internet are something the party has found very difficult to contain, despite its deployment of an army of censors. Since December 2008, the party is rattled by the appearance of the Charter 08 movement, a manifesto calling for political change and greater respect for human rights that has been signed by more than 8,000 prominent citizens.
In the Beijing 2008 Olympics opening ceremony, what caught the world?s attention was not just the awesome orchestration on display; also there was a pretty young girl lip-syncing for another girl whom the authorities deemed ?lacking in beauty and stage presence?. Disgraceful, but in the context of one-party state in China, it?s symptomatic of a larger point. The entire population is forced to lip-sync the party?s theme song that to get rich is glorious, and losing some of the human rights is just part of the bargain. Making money is all right, asserting individuality is not. How long can the regime maintain this Faustian bargain is not easy to guess. Yet, with every instance of widening income disparity, every leap of communication technologies and every signature put on the Charter 08 document, the odds are stacking up against the Communist regime.
rajiv.jayaram@expressindia.com