This week, we looked at the death of Mao Zedong, and how China flirted with democracy before eventually stamping down on protesters at the Tiananmen Square massacre. For Wednesday, I read the Attempts at Democracy exploration pack. One of the most interesting things mentioned in the readings for that pack was the democracy wall. To me, it seems that the presence of the wall would have indicated a certain degree of flux in the direction of the Chinese government. In order for anyone to feel safe putting up texts on democracy, I would suggest that they felt that some disorder or disunity was present in the government. Beyond simply hoping that Deng Xiaoping would be more reform minded than Mao, it strikes me that the people might have also felt that his grip on China might not be as tight as Mao’s had been. If power seemed a bit more centralized, I would expect people to worry about a swifter crackdown. In any case, the arrests and silencing of information surrounding the trial of Wei Jingsheng proved that Deng had indeed centralized his power and was not willing to let the democracy conversation get too far. The text raised several other questions for me. First, what happened to the democracy wall after the arrests? I would obviously expect activity around it to curtail, but the impression that I got from class was that the problem with Wei was that his article went too far. Did all democracy talk get censored or was it just the most “inflammatory”? The other question is a bit of a non sequitur, but the discussion of disunity within the CCP makes me wonder what the reaction to the rapid decline and fall of the USSR was. We have not quite gotten there yet, but it makes me wonder if any major reshuffling or reassessments happened in the wake of the Soviet Union’s fall.
For Friday, we looked at the Tiananmen Square massacre. One of the things that I had not realized was the degree of resistance that the citizens of Beijing put up against the PLA forces. One of the things that kept coming up in the images was the burning armored personnel carriers; actually setting military vehicles on fire is a considerably confrontational level or resistance. Indeed, the scope of the support for the protestors makes me wonder if the government was ever at all seriously worried about them.
Liu Qing. “Sad Memories and Prospects: My Appeal to the Tribunal of the People.” In The Search for Modern China: A Documentary Collection. Third ed. Edited by Janet Chen et. al. W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.
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