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Big 2010 Stories Hushed, but Not Forgotten

Sophie Beach — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 06:45:33 +0000

China Media Project’s Ying Chan summarizes the major news stories in China in 2010 and the limits on Chinese journalists’ ability to reflect on the news:

The first hints of trouble for news retrospectives and similar lists came in early December, as Time Weekly, published by the Guangdong Provincial Publishing Group, invited a group of scholars to select a list of “100 Most Influential People of Our Time” (最有影响力的时代100人). The list included the recently jailed food safety activist Zhao Lianhai (赵连海) and several signers of the Charter 08 political manifesto, including Beijing Film Academy professor Cui Weiping (崔卫平) and renowned scholar Xu Youyu (徐友渔).
Time Weekly‘s list of 100 influential people included artists, grassroots activists, educators, lawyers, officials, public intellectuals, scientists, entrepreneurs and journalists, all seen as having, as the newspaper wrote, “an irreplaceable influence on public life this year and on the development of our times.” The list was received well in China and drew attention from international media as well, all surprised at the publication’s boldness. But an order quickly came down for the recall of copies of the newspaper in circulation, and the list and related coverage was deleted from the Time Weekly website. Peng Xiaoyun (彭晓芸), the chief editor of Time Weekly‘s opinion section, who had been in charge of the list, was placed on involuntary leave.
While these are worrisome signs that must be closely watched, restricting open reflection on the major news and issues of 2010 cannot prevent Chinese journalists from pursuing the truth — nor can it erase their memories of major news events.

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Post tags: 2010, Cui Weiping, journalists, press freedom, xu youyu, Zhao Lianhai
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Xu Youyu (徐友渔): The Spirit of Tiananmen is Strong

Jenny Leung — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 06:37:46 +0000

Xu Youyu (徐友渔), professor and researcher at Philosophy Institute of The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), who has spoken about the democracy movement in China recently this year, writes for the Guardian about the June 4th movement:

For China to leave behind authoritarianism and totalitarianism, there needs to be a deep change. The 4 June incident at Tiananmen Square was the catalyst the Chinese people needed.
The 4 June oppressors had heavy weapons, but no sense of history. They never thought the movement with Tiananmen Square at its heart embodied by college students was, like the 4 May movement, in possession of a natural legitimacy and a quality of “patriotism and democracy”. To suppress the students was not only to become an enemy of the people, but also to earn the scorned epithet of “reactionary”. They didn’t even think of the fact that, only 13 years ago, in the same square, they were among the Chinese people who formed a similar mass movement, who were mercilessly suppressed by the “Gang of Four”. And that previous bloodbath paled in comparison with this one.
From 1989 to 2009, the psychology of China’s society has undergone an enormous change. Yet the standard of thought and knowledge of the leaders who took the political stage after 89 has not changed. They have not absorbed any lessons from the 89 incident; they took no direction from the process of democratisation in Taiwan.
By contrast, the Chinese people who experienced and inherited the spirit of 89 never stopped learning, thinking and probing. They become more mature by the day. They use their strong will to suffer through the darkness, and use the light of their thought to welcome the future.

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Post tags: 1989 20 years, 1989 protests, Tiananmen, xu youyu
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Xu Youyu (徐友渔): From 1989 to 2009: 20 Years of Evolution in Chinese Thought (2/2)

Xiao Qiang — Wed, 27 May 2009 13:27:20 +0000

During Mother’s Day weekend on May 10th, a number of intellectuals in Beijing organized a seminar discussing 20 years of the democracy movement in China. The seminar started with a moment of silence, paying tribute to the Tiananmen Mothers.

Xu Youyu (徐友渔), professor and researcher at Philosophy Institute of The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), presented the following text at the seminar, from peacehall.com, translated by E. Shih. This is Part II of his talk. Part I is here:

Ideological Fantasy is Shattered by the Sound of Guns
In order to explain the severity and deep ramifications of the June 4th gunning, I would like to say that the old ideology has such a long history and such a strong, tough hold that the people would never have been free of it without the fresh blood of June Fourth. In order to demonstrate the ideology’s insidious, barely perceptible powers of osmosis, I will add boldly an observation of 1989 that will most certainly be controversial: In fact, a significant portion of the spiritual resources supporting the 1989 student movement came from the Chinese Communist Party’s ideology. The effectiveness of this ideology was destroyed in its self-massacre.
It’s not that the students did not know how serious the consequences could be for rushing out of the school gates into the streets and squares for a mass protest under Communist Party rule. That’s only one side of the story. The other side of the story is that the CCP has been indoctrinating students on campus with teachings on “May Fourth,” “January 29th,” and “the Patriotic Students Movement,” and these movements became a mobilizing spiritual force. They seeded a deep belief in the students of their own legitimacy and of justice, so that they truly believed that the connection between the values of “patriotism, democracy” and the movement was natural.
As a revolutionary party, the CCP knows well how to wield the resources of ethnic history. It incorporated “May Fourth” and “January 29th” into its own ideological system, but it did not fully understand the double-edged nature of these resources. In reality, students in the “August Ninth People’s Movement” thought of themselves as the successors of the “May Fourth” and “January 29th” spirit. During that time, I heard directly and indirectly of CCP officials passing on their past revolutionary experiences to the students. The spiritual resonance on both sides was very natural. I should also mention that, out of ideological habit, the regime for the most part endorsed the students’ “passionate patriotism” in abstract terms. This, no doubt, made the students feel that their actions were continuous with and not rebelling against the heritage of recent Chinese revolutionism. Not until the guns sounded were they shocked by the regime’s sudden about-face.
After the June Fourth suppression, the regime fabricated a theory of “liberalized intellectuals” being the grand “puppet master” behind the students’ actions: the black threads ran from Fang Lizhi to his wife Li Shuxian to student leader Wang Dan to regular students. Even if we put aside the fact that this theory is extremely far-fetched, and assume for a moment that there was such a black thread in addition to the influence of the general intellectual atmosphere of the time upon students, we could not explain why tens of thousands of students—who had passed through political background checks in order to enter college in the first place—would become “anti-party and anti-socialism.”
I remember clearly going to Tiananmen Square in May of 1989 and trying to persuade the Beijing Steel and Iron Institute (now the University of Science and Technology Beijing) students who were meditating there in protest to go back to school. I said the troops were about to enter the city, and the suppression was about to start. Two doctoral students said without a second thought, “Why would the people’s army suppress us?” The students’ naiveté and earnestness make me sigh even today.
The students were as such, and civilians were generally not far off. Beijing citizens blocked military vehicles and martial officers from entering the city, while simultaneously bringing food and drink to the troops in support of their men. When the guns were fired, the people’s first reaction was shock and hurt, followed by rage.
During the 1989 Tiananmen Incident, a student movement leader said, just before the violent suppression began, that they would use fresh blood to awaken the Chinese people. These words were unfortunately prescient. Using such methods and paying such a price to obtain an understanding of Chinese history and political reality is particularly unfortunate; but the kind-hearted Chinese people could not have woken up with a jolt if not for this cruel blow.
From Democracy to Human Rights and Legalization

The heart of the 1989 student movement’s demands was democracy, and it brought with it a strong sense of justice-seeking within the system. We can see this from the seven demands of the April 18 petition that the students sent to the standing committee of the People’s Congress. The first demand was a fair evaluation of Hu Yaobang. The second was a disavowal of the “spiritual purge” and “anti-liberalization” movements. The third was the disclosure of property records for leaders and their children. The fourth asked for the end of media censorship and a new media law. The fifth asked for increased educational funds and a salary raise for intellectuals. The sixth asked for the annulment of Beijing’s anti-demonstration rules. The seventh asked for unrestricted reporting on student activities.
This is a clear reflection of the demands for human rights and legalization that came 20 years later. We could say that “Charter 08” has distilled the demands for human rights and legalization.
To start with fundamentals, democracy and human rights are universal values that are sought after by peoples across the world. However, in China’s specific situation, democracy has actually become a familiar mainstream ideological concept. The Chinese Communist Party is a bad match for democracy, whether in terms of structural principles or in executed action; yet it has inherited the May Fourth concept of “democracy” in name. Furthermore, it successfully wielded this concept in the battle for legitimacy with the Kuomintang, using the slogan “We Want Democracy.”
To the current regime, “human rights” is a more sensitive term than “democracy,” and to Chinese people who are fighting for democracy, it is also a bolder concept. Only with that meaning in mind can we understand the scene described by Bao Zunxin in his memoire, June Fourth Behind the Scenes: an Incomplete Nirvana: On January 28, 1989, a group of intellectuals gathered at the Doule Bookstore in Beijing. Fang Lizhi made a speech calling for human rights, and the response was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop. The whole gathering fell into an awkward silence.
After 20 years, the clearest change and contrast in thought is that 20 years ago, everyone was focused on culture; and now, the focal point is on political system. The atmosphere that dominated society in the 80s was “culture fever,” and at the heart of it was “aesthetics fever.” Other hot topics—such as humanism, alienation, subjectivity and an East-West dialectic—all had metaphysical abstractness. As for the sensational political debate television series, “River Elegy,” that was even more clearly using a discourse of civilizational and cultural type—the so-called yellow civilization in contrast with the blue civilization—to analyze China’s practical choices in the real world. This situation has shown itself to have limits, and refracted the frustration. Because of censorship, the people had no choice but to turn their practical anti-authoritarian criticism into a criticism of feudalistic culture. The limitation of this approach was that the intellectual circles were stuck in a rut, discussing problems of “ultimate compassion,” and had no interest or psychological strategies for facing the large-scale changes in society. It is very clear that the intellectuals were at a total loss for strategy in 1989, whether it was in terms of thought or in terms of knowledge.
20 years later the situation is fundamentally different, because for these 20 years the core of Chinese thought has had a momentous turn: from abstraction to the concrete, from ultimate compassion to scrutiny of policy arrangements. The core of knowledge has also had a momentous turn: from a humanities spirit towards social science, from philosophy and aesthetics towards economics, law, sociology, political science, etc. The legislative demands embody the thinking of current Chinese thought apropos of future nation-building principles and policy arrangement for China. Recently, the emergence of various events in support of rights shows that the demand for human rights has deepened and become more concrete in the past 20 years.
Persisting in Logical and Gradual Change
In the 20 years from 1989 to 2009, the Chinese people have had something continuous and stubbornly unchanging: a non-violent, logical, and gradual mode of change.
Non-violent protest was the unchanging principle of the 1989 democracy movement. The identification with, advocacy of and loyalty to this principle was a special characteristic of that movement, and it was not easy to come by. In several thousand years of Chinese history, the unchanging rule was that of one tyranny replacing another. Among civilians, the idea of taking “the justice of heaven” into ones own hands was very deeply rooted, as well. As for this generation of young people, the influence of “classics” such as Mao Zedong’s “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan” taught them that it took brains and courage to abandon their arms, to seek dialogue, and to consider compromise. This “89” generation achieved this stance as a result of the ideological tradition of self-examination and critique.
In the past 20 years, the people’s understanding of the principle of non-violence has continued to become clearer and deeper. The generation that has experienced the christening of “89” have advocated and remained loyal to this principle as they aided the base level of human rights activism. Combined with the methods of legalizing human rights, this has in recent years had a positive effect on the development and success of human rights activism, as well as China’s legalization.
After “89,” the outstanding change in China’s thought has been an abandonment of zealous revolutionary ideology. This kind of change has far-reaching ramifications for China as it moves towards modern political civilization. However, in the development of thought, another tendency has also been spawning, and that is a growing cynicism.
On top of the suppression of mass movement and the purge that quickly followed in the wake of a mass social movement, there was an encroaching get-rich-quick opportunism and trend of going private in the 1990s. This environment led many people to quickly change their mindset from one of grief and anger to one of obedience. Others, in defense of their current way of life, began advocating a certain kind of historical and life philosophy on the level of thought. Their concepts implied that a definitive rupture with the old radical ideology entailed writing off all mass protest. Some even advocated a “paycheck philosophy” in the name of “saying farewell to the revolution,” which was a philosophy of obedience and cynicism.
Clearly, abandoning radicalism is not equal to not demanding any sort of change; insisting upon a logical and gradual method is not equal to accepting the present situation in a total absence of critique and resistance. Rejecting a totalistic philosophy does not equal not taking no responsibility for society. Currently, the regime relies entirely upon lies and terror to maintain a status quo; today’s Chinese society exists in an atmosphere and ethical situation of no truth-telling and no justice-seeking. The Chinese people who experienced and inherited the spirit of “89” are strongly advocating a kind of assertive civil society consciousness, civic ethics and civic duty. They insist that everyone should say what they really think, and work diligently to change the status quo; that no one can simply accept a life of terror and alienation, and be satisfied in self-preservation and personal benefit.
From 1989 to 2009, the face and social psychology of China’s society has undergone an enormous change. Yet the standard of thought and knowledge capability of the leaders who took the political stage after “89” did not change. They did not absorb any lessons from the “89” incident; they took no direction from the process of democratization in Taiwan. By contrast, the Chinese people who experienced and inherited the spirit of “89” never stopped learning, thinking and probing. They become more mature by the day. They use their strong will to suffer through the darkness, and use the light of their thought to welcome the future.
Posted： Friday, May 15, 2009

Please also read Cui Weiping: Why Do We Need to Talk About June 4th? on CDT.

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989 20 years, Charter 08, Fang Lizhi, June 4th, public intellectuals, xu youyu
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Xu Youyu (徐友渔): From 1989 to 2009: 20 Years of Evolution in Chinese Thought (1/2)

Xiao Qiang — Tue, 26 May 2009 12:25:04 +0000

Xu Youyu (徐友渔), professor and researcher at Philosophy Institute of CASS, presented the following text at the seminar, from peacehall.com, translated by E. Shih:

From 1989 to 2009: 20 Years of Evolution in Chinese Thought (conference paper for “2009, Beijing, and the June Fourth Democracy Movement.”)
The events of June 4th, 1989 shocked China and the world. It was a watershed within Chinese history and politics, as well as a watershed for thought. June 4th did not change the Chinese political system, but it changed the basic conditions for thought, and it was a foundational starting point for changing the political system.
Advocating “people’s democratic dictatorship,” China’s political system have already been comprehensively exposed as anti-citizen, anti-humanity and fundamentally out of sync with human civilization. This is evident in the so-called “land reform” and “anti-counterrevolutionary movement” of the 1950s; the anti-rightist movement, the Great Leap Forward, and the commune movement. It reached its peak in the Cultural Revolution. But the Chinese people are a people accustomed to suffering through authoritarianism and hardship. On top of that, the regime in charge has created a seamless trap of fantastic ideology. Over the years, with the exception of those with foresight such as Lin Zhao, few have reflected critically on the level of system and understood the necessity for a fundamental change. The June 4th incident (at Tiananmen Square) caused the situation to change. The knives, bullets and spilled blood cultivated a tragedy that awakened and educated the people to much more effect than any Enlightenment movement, a hundred Enlightenment thinkers or ten thousand Enlightenment books. (...)
Read the rest of Xu Youyu (徐友渔): From 1989 to 2009: 20 Years of Evolution in Chinese Thought (1/2) (685 words)
© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989 20 years, CASS, June 4th, Lin Zhao, tiananmen mothers, xu youyu
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The Democracy Movement since 1989

Sophie Beach — Tue, 19 May 2009 05:16:37 +0000

Global Voices translates excerpts of presentations by intellectuals who gathered in Beijing to discuss the past twenty years of the democracy movement, posted by Oiwan Lam. The seminar started with a moment of silence, paying tribute to the Tiananmen Mothers:

During the last mother’s Day weekend on May 10th, a number of intellectuals in Beijing organized a seminar discussing 20 years of the democracy movement in China. This is a very significant event in breaking the long silence among intellectuals on the June 4th student movement, as well as in countering the official position on the incident as a ‘riot.’
The speeches at the conference were published online in the past few days via China in Perspective. An anonymous article on ‘China in Perspective’ gives a detailed account of the discussions in the seminar.
There were about 19 participants in the seminar, including: Xu Youyu (徐友渔), Mo Zhixu (莫之许)、Cui Weiping (崔卫平), Hao Jian (郝建), Xu Xiao (徐晓), Zhou Duo (周舵), Liang Xiaoyan (梁晓燕), Qin Hui (秦晖), Guo Yuhua (郭于华), Li Hai (李海), Liu Zili (刘自立), Qian Liqun (钱理群), Teng Biao (滕彪), Tian Xiaoqing (田晓青), Wang Junxiu (王俊秀), Xu Yinong (许医农), 、Yan Yusheng (殷玉生), Zhang Boshu (张博树) and Zhang Yaojie (张耀杰). The seminar began with 3 minutes silence showing the participants’ respect for the Tiananmen mothers and the victims of the June 4th incident.

(...)
Read the rest of The Democracy Movement since 1989 (177 words)

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Post tags: 1989 protests, Cui Weiping, democracy, Liang Xiaoyan, Mo Zhixu, Qin Hui, Teng Biao, xu youyu, Zhang Boshu
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Is There Any Point in Taking on the Communist Party?

Xiao Qiang — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:10:01 +0000

Richard Spencer writes in his Telegraph blog:

Prof Xu [Xu Youyu (徐友渔)] said he was deeply pessimistic about the future. He acknowledged the point that there were leaders now in high office who had very similar experiences to his own – disillusionment with the Cultural Revolution, adoption of a reform agenda, study abroad – but, as he put it, “it is the seat that is important, not the personal view”.
In other words, the very act of joining the apparatus removed any scope for personal opinion to emerge, and by the time you reached the top, it was too late – your mast was firmly attached to the (single) sail. He saw little chance for reform from within.
In these circumstances, the only position for intellectuals such as him was to stand apart and hold on to their personal truths, such as those espoused in the Charter.
In fact, elsewhere in the interview he was less bleak. He rightly located some of the arguments about the Charter in the very lively debate in China’s intellectual world, including newspapers, between those who believe that notions of human rights, freedom of speech and democracy and so on are “universal values” to which China should ascribe, or whether they are Western values which West-friendly academics (such as him) are trying to impose on an unwilling and unready nation. Prof Xu, needless to say, argues for the former, and wonders whether those who argue against are really serious. What world do they believe in?

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Post tags: Charter 08, Mao Yushi, xu youyu
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Contemporary Chinese Society’s Ideological Splits – Xu Youyu (徐友渔)

Liu Yong — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 11:50:09 +0000

Translated by Michael Huang, from China Elections and Governance:

China is currently experiencing a period of rapid social transformation. On the one hand, its social economy has scored tremendous achievements; on the other, various kinds of contradictions have also gradually accumulated and become ever more conspicuous. China’s intellectuals have not looked on these problems unconcerned; in fact, the liberals and the New Left have been engaging in debates since the 1990s. How should we see and understand these debates?
The change in Chinese social thought since the 1990s
Beginning in the 1990s, the transformation of Chinese society has engendered intense debates among Chinese intellectuals. Most intellectuals in the 1980s held identical views”supporting reform and opening up, identifying with values of freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and believing that they were carrying on the spirit of the May 4th Movement. However, development after 1990 has caused differentiation among them. One school of thought has continued to adhere to these basic values and tried exploring how to transfer ideas into institutional arrangements; they believe that human beings have universal values. Another school of thought more or less has criticized these basic values and held that they were only manifestations of the West’s ideological hegemony. [Full Text]

Xu Youyu (徐友渔) is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

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Post tags: cultural conservativism, intellectuals, liberalism, nationalism, new left, xu youyu
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There Would Be No Saddam’s Trial without Outside Forces – Xu Youyu

Xiao Qiang — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 14:57:38 +0000

Translated by Flypig, from Anti’s English Blog – AEB:

AEB: Liberalist Xu Youyu is a professor and researcher at Philosophy Institute of CASS. On Oct 20, 2005, he wrote a column on The Beijing News, entitled “There Would Be No Saddam’s Trial without Outside Forces”.
The Iraqi Special Tribunal begins the first trial of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on Oct. 19, 2005. This event attracted strong attentions from Chinese people. Shortly after news being released, lots of Internet users write their various opinions on line. The discussions have an obvious characteristic: warm-working. Some consider Saddam as a dictator and murderer, while others persist in the viewpoint that Saddam is a president elected by the people and an Anti-America hero.

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Post tags: public intellectuals, Saddam Hussein, xu youyu
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