American Anthropological Association

Today marks the 20^th anniversary of the violent military suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Cornell anthropology grad student Kevin Carrico (kjc83 [at] cornell.edu) has shared with us a commentary in recognition of this day. Comments are welcome.

Tiananmen Twenty Years Later: Massacre Economics

The numbers six and four alone do not seem particularly subversive, but they are not to be spoken together in today’s China, where an internet search for these digits will produce only a blank screen. These numbers represent today’s date, June 4^th, when 20 years ago the incongruously titled People’s Liberation Army rolled into Beijing, killing civilians in their path; the blank screen that they produce represents the attempted erasure of memories of this event in China, where this anniversary will predictably go largely unmarked.

Officials in Beijing would rather draw the world’s attention to other numbers: GDP figures, market volume, growth rates, gold medals, and forecasts for the next quarter, year, decade or half-century that proliferate throughout the official media, heralding the arrival of a “New New China.” Although nations are inevitably composed of people, pride is much easier to find in depersonalized abstractions and grandiose figures of economic development.

With the dramatic takeoff of China’s economy in recent years, these two sets of numbers are not unrelated. The latter figures are to erase the looming specter of the former: 6/4. China since Tiananmen has become a nation of numbers over people.

An increasingly common rationalization of state violence in June of 1989 incorporates these events into a narrative of national development, asserting that “drastic steps” were necessary to protect “national stability” and maintain momentum for economic growth. Dehumanizing protesters, it is alleged that their continued presence on the streets of Beijing would have brought chaos to the nation and stalled economic development, thus calling for the adaptation of “resolute measures”; by stepping in and “resolving” the issue, the government was not acting in its own interests, but rather working for the interests of the broader populace, not unlike an exterminator ridding a home’s foundation of termites.

The people’s purported interests, according to official discourse in the reform era, are limited solely to economic growth, to be followed by more economic growth. The transcendent position of Maoism, once capable of justifying anything, is now occupied by GDP-ism, similarly capable of justifying anything. Appropriating the concept of human rights for its own suppression, official publications since the 1990s cite the rights to “stability” and economic development as the fundamental rights of citizens, purportedly in accordance with China’s national conditions and traditions. Discussions of further rights are recast as a Western conspiracy designed to sow chaos and slow China’s rise. The hyper-politicized ideal citizen of the Maoist era, devoid of “bourgeois” economic considerations, now becomes the economically-driven ideal citizen of the present, units of GDP growth, devoid of any contaminating “bourgeois liberal” political considerations.

Behind these official abstractions, however, the much-heralded nation is inevitably composed of people. And no matter how much they may be lost in the fog of economic forecasts or self-congratulatory official pronouncements, these people continue to live, day by day, with their own personal experiences and emotions. One such person is Ding Zilin, a Professor of Philosophy at People’s University who lost her teenage son Jiang Jielian in the government violence of June of 1989, an event which would drastically change her life course. In the early 1990s, Ding worked with Zhang Xianling, who also lost her teenage son in 1989, to found the Tiananmen Mothers, providing an unofficial space for those who lost loved ones to share memories, and to press for reversing the official verdict on Tiananmen. Despite continuous political pressures, harassment and arrests, Ding has not only compiled lists of those lost in the events of that June, but also recorded the stories of these victims and their families; while seemingly immensely personal, such work has vast implications for the nation as a whole, bringing these suppressed tragedies to life so as to recapture personal experience from the calculations and abstractions of “national development.”

In her most recent work, “In Search of the Victims of June Fourth” (Hong Kong: Open Publishing, 2005), Ding Zilin tells the story of Du Guangxue, whose life literally became a number. Born and raised in a poor family in Beijing, Du was forced to drop out of school as a teenager to support his family after his father died. Du was not actively involved in the demonstrations in Beijing in the spring of 1989, and spent the evening of June 3rd chatting with a friend in Dongdan Park until nearly midnight. Caught in the crossfire on his way home, a single bullet struck Du Guangxue’s head, and he fell immediately to the ground. Du was taken by civilians to the nearby Union Hospital, but he was beyond help.

Du Guangxue’s distressed family did not find him until two days later, lying on the floor of the hospital morgue. Union Hospital was literally overflowing with bodies that week: victims were piled to capacity throughout the morgue, specimen rooms and laboratories, to be found by their loved ones. Du’s family, upon finally discovering their son, took a photograph of the scene that day. Shirtless and covered in blood, his head leaning back, lying amidst a pile of bodies that fell victim to their own government’s vendetta, Du had a slip of paper taped to his chest which read: “#30.” All of his life, his efforts and his future potential were erased in that brief second, and turned into nothing but a number. Ding Zilin reflects on this image and this tragic transformation: “All of those bodies lined up across the room, blood stains coating the entire floor: each and every one of them was once a living, breathing human being, now dehumanized by bursts of gunfire into one number after another… I wonder: who were number 1 through 29? How many more bodies were there after number 30? And who were they?”

Ding Zilin’s stories of victims and their families remind us that some things in life simply cannot be quantified. Amidst the tensions of the spring of 1989, Deng Xiaoping reportedly asserted that he would be willing to kill 200,000 people in order to ensure 20 years of national stability and development. Behind the seemingly cool calculation of China’s maintenance of “stability” and its rise as an economic powerhouse, one cannot help but cringe at a state that views its citizens as nothing more than numbers, to be added or subtracted, and that treats its critics as speed bumps on the path to economic glory, to be mowed over by tanks without looking back. Rather than finding glory in the accomplishments and beautification of the nation through a falsely sanitized history or grandiose economic forecasts, the efforts of the Tiananmen Mothers and others like them (such as artist Ai Weiwei and the currently imprisoned Tan Zuoren, both of whom have compiled unofficial data on schoolchildren lost in the Sichuan earthquake of last spring) recover the people behind the numbers, seeking hope in the dignity and respect of every lost individual, and in concern and assistance for the loved ones that have been left behind. So today, let us not only remember the abstract numbers “six” and “four,” which are still forbidden to be discussed in China, but let us also remember the stories behind the numbers, and the stories of all of those who have been left behind under the rationalizing guise of stability and development.