Tian’anmen Square, 25 Years Later
To this day, no one is sure who he was – the man who stood, eye to barrel, before a convoy of Chinese tanks on a street outside Beijing’s Tian’anmen Square.
But that image – taken by AP photographer Jeff Widener just after the government crackdown that claimed the lives of as many as 1,000 democratic protesters and civilians – has become known worldwide as an enduring depiction of courage.
There is more to the story. On Nov. 14, Boston University commemorated the 25th anniversary of Tian’anmen Square with a lecture and discussion on the aftermath of the violence which erupted when Chinese soldiers attacked protesters in Beijing in June of 1989.
“I spent last year on leave living in China. I remember speaking with a colleague who was working on an oral history, learning stories she could not publish,” said Robert Weller, professor at the Boston University Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs. “She said, I haven’t told the truth since 1989. No one in this country has.”
The talk was moderated by Eugenio Menegon, Director of the Center for the Study of Asia, and presented by Weller, Joseph Fewsmith of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, and Rowena Xiaoqing He of Harvard University.
The event was part of the Boston University International Education Week. It was sponsored by Santander Universities and attended by around 50 audience members. It was hosted with cooperation from Boston University Global Programs and the BU Center for the Study of Asia.
“The Tian’anmen Square crackdown truncated the conversation between society and state about how to open up China,” said Joseph Fewsmith of the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. “As more and more Chinese people enter the middle class, this is a conversation that needs to happen.”
The roots of the Tian’anmen Square protests are found in the the years after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. As the country became more economically liberal, the intellectual class, particularly university professors and students, began agitating for democratic reform.
By April of 1989, as many as 100,000 students had taken to the streets in support of democracy. Martial law was declared on May 20, and army began its advance into Beijing. On June 3, soldiers opened fire, beginning one of the worst civilian massacres in Chinese history.
“It has been a war of memory against forgetting, a struggle between the power and the powerless,” said Rowena He. She spent eight years working on a book, called ‘Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China,’ telling the stories of those whose voices that were silenced after the massacre. “We didn’t take to the street in 1989 out of anger, we did it out of trust that the government would reform itself. But our hope were crushed by guns and tanks.”
In the aftermath of the massacre, thousands of students were arrested, and moderate members of the Communist Party were expelled and put under house arrest. China’s economy suffered from international sanctions, including an arms embargo that remains in place today. And its culture was forever changed, with dissent met with harsh reprisals and imprisonment.
“Tiananmen can remind us of repression, but it also symbolizes people’s power and human beings’ struggles for freedom and human rights,” He said. “As the desire for freedom is deeply human, and our longing for basic rights is universal, history will witness the Tiananmen spirit, as the power of the powerless, again and again.”