Jeffrey N Wasserstrom: Tiananmen’s Shifting Legacy
Jeffrey N Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. He writes on the OpenDemocracy.net:
It is three weeks since the nineteenth anniversary of the massacre of 4 June 1989 in Beijing, forty-nine until the symbolically potent twentieth. The routine in advance of the event, by now well established, was again witnessed in full this year: security around Tiananmen Square is tightened, a candlelight vigil for martyrs is held in Hong Kong (still the only part of the People’s Republic of China [PRC] where open discussion of 4 June is allowed); Ding Zilin of the “Tiananmen Mothers” organisation submits an open letter to the Chinese authorities, calling on them to abandon their “big lie” about 1989 and admit that those, like her son, who were slain by soldiers were not “counter-revolutionaries” or rioters but ordinary urbanites; and human-rights activists, former student leaders, and China specialists issue statements or write commentaries assessing the legacy of 1989 or proposing a new way to honour the dead.
“China’s political colours: from monochrome to palette” (14 May 2008)The lead-up to the latest anniversary followed this familiar pattern, but there were some novel twists – “novel” rather than “surprising”, given how unusual a year 2008 had already proved to be and promises to remain.
