The burden of being young and Chinese
Protests on campuses throughout China have striking similarities to the lead-up to the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations.
It was my first encounter with the strong arm of the Chinese state and solely a verbal one, yet the thing I remember most clearly about them was their hands. We could not see their faces because it was at night, and even though it was Beijing Normal University (one of the top 10 universities in China) it was winter in early 1987 and there were rotating planned outages to conserve power in a planned economy infrastructure struggling to keep up with a small but rapidly growing private sector. Their faces were masked in darkness, but they held large, heavy flashlights, and the light of these revealed the thickness and coarseness of their hands. My own hands, and those of the other foreign English-language teachers, were tiny and dainty in comparison. These reminded me of the hands of my grandparents who worked in factories, drove trucks and plowed fields all of their lives. We never did find out just where these men came from, but it was clear they did more than wield flashlights for a living.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?” they barked at us in Mandarin accented
from the northern countryside. We lied and told them we were simply out for a stroll. On a moonless night. In near complete darkness. One of them said to the others, “Ah, they are the foreigners who live in Building 20 over by the northern gate.” Another told us, in a firm voice and a gravelly tone: “Go home and go to sleep.” They did not threaten us. But they knew exactly who we were and where we lived. And they didn’t seem to work for the university. We went home but could not sleep.
Watching the videos and images of Chinese citizens and
students protesting on campuses and in city streets this past week in China has caused me to lose sleep again. I find myself replaying scenes from the 1980s again and again, wondering what has happened to my students. Some of my current Chinese American students and colleagues at
Rice University are the children of young Chinese who found political asylum here after the events of 1989.
What were the students protesting in 1987 Beijing? There were so many things for them to protest about back then. There was their poverty, a product of a failing planned economy. Unlike the more elite Beijing University or Tsinghua University, where many of the students were the sons and daughters of high-ranking government and Party officials, Beijing Normal University’s students were mainly from the countryside. After graduation they would either be assigned to a high school in the area they came from, or sent to an even less developed area that desperately needed teachers. They had no control over the assignment, and it was meant to be permanent: unlike the Soviet Union, where employees regularly switched jobs, in China you belonged to a state employer for the rest of your life. My students did not have to pay tuition, or housing, and they received a stipend, but it was barely enough to cover the not-very nutritious food from the cafeteria. Inflation in urban areas was running at nearly 20 percent, and their stipends were only adjusted annually. While these students’ hands were not as rough as the men’s who stopped us that winter night, they had also struggled to survive in an unforgiving economy. I would sometimes see students borrowing eye
“Hope can be neither affirmed nor denied. Hope is like a path in the countryside: originally there was no path — yet, as people are walking all the time in the same spot, a way appears.”
Lu Xun
glasses from others in order to read my notes on the blackboard. New spectacles might cost a month’s stipend.
And there was a desire for more freedoms. The endless class struggle of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution had ended in 1976, a decade earlier, and universities had reopened, and my students were reading essays by Aldous Huxley and Bertrand Russell in the new state-approved English textbooks. There were periodic purges of “bourgeois liberal” thinkers, but there were also think tanks devoted to studying liberal political and economic reforms, and these had newspapers that translated many Western academic works on democracy and on capitalism. My students were excited about the potential for reform, and increasingly frustrated about the slowness of it. They talked about it in their dorm rooms — often with eight of them cramped in one small room — and around campus. They appropriated brush and ink and paper and put up long handwritten manifestos on the notice boards, layering them on top of each other day after day until cleaning staff took them down and the menacing men from outside stopped them from putting up more. In the days before personal computers and the internet, there were no text messages or social media apps. If I wanted to buy carbon paper to make copies of my assignments for my students I needed a note from my department authorizing me to do so. In 1980s China, as with today, protests were common, but back then they were necessarily very local.
In January 1987 some of my students managed to join up with maybe 100 students from other universities in Beijing to stage a protest near Tiananmen Gate, the principal entry to the former Imperial Palace, in the plaza that had been the site of mass protests going back to the beginning of the century. They shouted for democracy, the right to find their own jobs, and for higher stipends. It is likely their voices were lost in the vastness of the great square. Startled capital police encircled them, there was some pushing and shoving, and then they were all arrested. “They held us all day, and finally let us go when the university sent a bus to pick us up. It wasn’t so bad. They gave us tea,” one student told me.
The student protest in Beijing, as with those in other cities and on campuses, was de facto symbolic and was quickly shut down, but its impact on Chinese politics was far-reaching. Hu Yaobang, protégé of retiring senior leader Deng Xiaoping and the reformist general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, was forced to step down for not anticipating the demonstration at the heart of the
capital, and Zhao Ziyang, the reformist premier took his place. At the 13th Party Congress in the fall of 1987, senior statesman Deng Xiaoping finalized his retirement from CCP and military positions, but took with him his Sovietstyle opponents among the Party elders. He was forced to accept Li Peng, protégé of those hardliners, as the new premier to work under Zhao, setting the stage for policy conflict at the highest levels in China. More student protests occurred in 1988, growing larger and more organized, and when Hu Yaobang died in spring 1989 it gave students the opportunity to protest that his simple state funeral was not respectful of his service to the nation. This set the stage for the dramatic and violent massacre of 1989.
Fast forward 33 years, and one can be forgiven for feeling déjà vu. This week has seen protests on scores of college campuses throughout China, and even on the streets of Shanghai, calling for freedom of speech, human rights for Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and the end of draconian zero-COVID policies. The Chinese student diaspora — numbering in the hundreds of thousands in the United States alone — has carried cries of “Xi Jinping Step Down!” and “There is No Emperor in a Republic!” to campuses around the world, including my own. I am once again in admiration of the eternal optimism of young Chinese friends. It’s a time of great excitement and great
potential for young people in China once again, but unfortunately that also means it is a time of great overtime pay for those faceless men with heavy, coarse hands. There was a major Party Congress a few weeks ago. A senior leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Jiang Zemin, has just passed away. International media pundits are asking: will student protests around his funeral lead to Tiananmen Redux, perhaps with the regime change toward democracy that occurred elsewhere in the Socialist world in 1989, or after Arab Spring?
The faceless men of 2022 are not just wearing hazmat suits with respirators, and carrying riot gear, they are backed up by dense camera networks covering campuses and intersections in major cities and feeding images in to facial recognition and personal identification software, with geofencing of cell phone data, and a legion of bots and trolls commanded by artificial intelligence surveilling all social media. Their boss, Xi Jinping, just recently cemented his control over the Chinese Communist Party at the 20th Party Congress in October, where many leaders chosen by his predecessors retired. With no term limits on his leadership and no heir apparent placed in the wings to replace him, not since Chairman Mao has a single Chinese Communist Party leader held so much control over the government and the military. It seems very unlikely that political reform
and regime change will happen while Xi Jinping runs the Chinese Communist Party.
On the other hand, the Chinese people have more resources than ever before, and they are very clearly fed up with the zero-COVID policy that proved successful in the first year of the pandemic, but recently has locked up people at home for months on end and hobbled the once-thriving Chinese economy. The Chinese people clearly enjoyed the fact that, before omicron, they had much more freedom to walk around in China without masks even as the rest of the world went in and out of lockdown. And they certainly enjoyed a vastly reduced mortality rate than other countries, self-reported at just above 5,000 for a population of 1.3 billion. But with Xi’s determination to use domestic vaccines with much lower efficacy than foreign ones, and a high vaccine hesitancy among older people in particular, there is potential for a disaster of epic proportions if China opens up before increasing immunity in the general population. The fate of Hong Kong may be illustrative here. Hong Kong loosened its COVID policies earlier in
2022, and has seen more than 10,000 deaths for some 2 million infections among its 7 million population. If China were to experience the same mortality rate as Hong Kong has in 2022, there would be roughly 1.8 million deaths, more than any other country. Local governments in China
have already begun announcing both some looser restrictions, and also stepped-up vaccination programs. It seems very likely history will judge Xi Jinping’s command of the Chinese government by its success in this perilous transition to a safe reopening of Chinese society.
Talking to one of my Chinese students here I am once again reminded of the burden of being young and Chinese. Instead of studying for final exams, he’s sharing political reform slogans and manifestos, because he feels a responsibility to his fellow Chinese, even though he knows reform is likely still a long way away. He is also making long phone calls to his grandparents back in China, pleading with them to get vaccinated.
In 1921, during the tumultuous period of student protests and the surge of Chinese nationalism and patriotism that also led to the creation that year of the Chinese Communist Party, the writer Lu Xun wrote, “Hope can be neither affirmed nor denied. Hope is like a path in the countryside: originally there was no path — yet, as people are walking all the time in the same spot, a way appears.”
A century later, yet another generation of youth are shouldering the enormous responsibility of moving China toward a more hopeful future.