Tiananmen Square

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square incident. I’m doing my own little candle-light vigil kind of a thing, to remember just how good I have it: I can write anything I want to here, and even be critical of my government, and there ain’t jack they can really do about it (as long as I’m not openly advocating a revolution or inciting others to violent riot or something like that). I’m glad I’m allowed to dissent, and that my dissent is considered patriotic because we value free speech.

In China today, the incident in Tiananmen Square in 1989 is a forbidden topic. In publishing this post, I have very likely sealed my blog out from behind the “Great Firewall of China” because of this fact. But I wanted to make some points which I can make no other way.

The laws of any place are important to establishing and maintaining social order. But where that social order prevents an ugly event like Tiananmen Square from being permitted in discussion, even in passing or education, it cannot possibly serve anyone but those who are afraid of the implications of allowing a true democracy to flourish. And in this statement, I’m being critical of China, but I’m also being critical of my own country: the United States. At a social level, we’re afraid to demand our rights be observed. We’re an oppressed people in some ways, and we have it worse off than the Chinese dissidents in a lot of ways. But in every way that counts, we are still clinging to democracy: that dying dream of public participatory government.

The students in 1989 didn’t know what they were in for. They created a scene, and one which embarrassed the Chinese government of the day. But it was ultimately pointless and fruitless. Today, demonstrators are probably trying to assemble again, if only to honor the dead of that day. And these same people are risking arrest and imprisonment for merely implying that anything untoward happened. The United States takes absolutely no stand on the subject—we can’t. The Chinese have shown that the subject is “fightin’ words” and that they’re willing to ignore it all the way to war if it comes down to it. Such an unreasonable posture certainly degrades the culture of beauty and outward serenity by acknowledging that they simply cannot deal with ugliness, even if it’s of their own making. Bold words, and words which might get me arrested if I wrote them while in mainland China. But I’m not in China; and if I was, I would certainly be respectful of their laws, and I wouldn’t even make a passing mention of Tiananmen Square as anything but a tourist attraction.

But I’m not there. I’m here, and here I have the right to speak out on almost any subject of my choosing. It was most certainly a tragedy that occurred 20 years ago today. And it was a pointless one, judging by the amount of people who today join me in my candlelight vigil. Nobody even remembers the ugliness. It took a reminder of the timeframe and a mention of China to refresh one friend’s mind. For another friend, we both remember the young lady who disappeared during the following few months, but he remains unable to say or do anything twenty years later. I have no fear. Whatever might be done twenty years after the fact is minimal, and can hardly be called worse.

We’ve succeeded in tolerance by allowing them to keep to their own business. But we should encourage them to send us their dissidents, because these brilliant people can actually benefit us by helping us to appreciate what we have. They can also give us a much-needed outside perspective: the one thing the Chinese government doesn’t appear to be able to accept. And they don’t have to: it’s their country, and their way. But I sure do wish that they would acknowledge the ugliness, instead of burying it. Suppression lends power to the ideas which surround it. It’s the one thing that guarantees there is no solution, and that the quiet resistance builds in secret. And this means that China is a powder keg, which could go off tomorrow, or next year, or never at all.

Secrets are only useful when the net result is positive.

UPDATE: I had six other people join me, one who was a fourteen-year-old Chinese-American girl who has never seen China, and her parents (I didn’t press for information at the the solemn occasion). She said that her parents supported the movement, though she is the fourth generation born in this country. I taught her how to say “hello” in Mandarin. I’m not sure what flavor of Chinese her ancestors spoke, but the few words of Mandarin which I speak, badly, seemed to make her happy. Of the other three, one was someone I know. It was small, but at least I wasn’t the only one there.