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To no one’s surprise, there’s nothing more than a quiet breeze on the campus of Peking University twenty years after hundreds of its students were killed. To mark the occasion, a few quick thoughts on the back of a year studying Chinese in Beida (short-hand for PKU) as a foreign student:
- What strikes me in terms of students speaking out openly is the absence not only of the anti-authority voices which identified their predecessors twenty years ago, but the absence of any kind of open engagement with contemporary politics that you expect in a top university, and see in universities everywhere else in the world. Their silence over the Sun Dongdong incident on their own campus is a good example (I blogged about it here).
- It’s not just that they know their futures will be better served in a stable political environment and they have more to lose than previous generations (the obvious point). It’s that the majority has an iron belief in the current administration as working successfully to give them a better life. And it was talking with students on May 4th which made it clear to me the extent to which their priorities have changed from patriotism to individualism.
- This all isn’t to say, of course, that there’s no kind of political discussion going on about the “incident” in Beida. There’s a lot. It just isn’t out in the open air for the world - and it’s reporters - to witness. It’s in quiet dorms and crowded canteens. I think the angle of students being intimidated into silence is wildly overplayed in some of the Western media (not to name names or anything). Yes, students are acutely aware of the risks of speaking up, but our press should stop feeding the misconception that China is something out of ‘1984′ where 1989 is concerned.
- There is a very clear control in China over information about what happened twenty years ago last night (James Fallows discusses this on his blog). As Leonidas put it to me, “sometimes a student won’t talk about it not because he doesn’t want to, but because he doesn’t know about it”. Tony, on the other hand, dismissed off-hand the idea that Beida students are in the dark: information seeps easily enough onto the internet.
- But it’s apparent that their dorm discussions are in a different ballpark to those of their counterparts two decades ago. While democracy is still an appealing model, Western ideas no longer hold sway for them purely on merit of being Western. Most consider themselves less naive than their predecessors, and believe that radical reform or protesting simply isn’t the way to fix China’s problems - just as some think of their futures as brighter for the failure of 1989 and the economic miracle which followed it.
All in all, two points: PKU today is as far from 1989 as it is from Orwell’s 1984. I’ll leave the final words with Tony on how fast the game is changing:
I recognise that the government now just does not want to mention [the incident], only to escape from it. … Ten years in the future [they] will probably just need to publish a conclusion on the 80s, mentioning ’something really bad in 1989, which was the only choice we could take’. And then the problem is over.
My thoughts go out to the families of those who were killed that day. We will not forget it.
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P.S. While I’m on topic, Tony tells me from a friend of his doing an internship with CNN Beijing that CNN will be coming onto PKU campus today to conduct interviews with students. What exactly do they expect the students to say? Surely not anything … oh I don’t know, mildly interesting? Expect lots of Communist Youth League members smiling into camera.
And to those kind folks who have recently blocked Twitter and Flickr in China: besides my twitter-box top-left, I use Flickr to display all photos on this blog, now invisible to anyone in China without a proxy until I move them. I see you are branching out into web design, internet police. Thanks for your constructive criticism: I really did need more white space.
The China Digital Times has picked up on a little story which caught my eye, given that it relates to my old university. Bo Guagua, the son of Bo Xilai (a high-ranking party official), studies at Oxford and has scooped a spot in 2009’s top ten “outstanding” young Chinese in Britain: the curiously named Big Ben award. Read CDT’s posts here and here (they’re blocked in China if you never got that proxy for Christmas).
Now I’m as much a fan of CDT as the next China-watcher who wants 17 unread RSS items a day reminding him of how much CDT’s editors hate China’s government. But I thought it was a little unfair to portray Bo Guagua - in my eyes - as an undeserving playboy, through publishing a handful of (obviously facebook) pictures of him in that first link (see below) with no more in prelude than “while a series of photos of Bo the younger have become hot items in the Chinese blogosphere”. (In which case, by the way, I’d love to see this topic on chinaSMACK…)
I know CDT is only passing on the internet word here: I’m not criticising them but the online trend of hand-picking facebook pictures to ‘represent’ a life. It’s lazy. It’s not representative (of course facebook pictures are party pictures! how many photos of yourself studying alone in your room have you put on the internet?!). Most of all, it’s pissing young people off. And we may be deciding the rate of your pension scheme one day.
There is a lot of discussion going on these days as to whether netizens (be it bloggers, tweeters or BBS-ers) can fill the ever growing journalism gap as more and more papers will fold. I sincerely hope they can. Well, one way to win over the disbelievers is for no netizen to be so sloppy as to use facebook pictures like that.
And for the record: I believe it’s clear from his accomplishments listed the second CDT link I gave that Bo Guagua deserved this award. I didn’t know him at Oxford, but I emailed a friend who did. He replied:
From what I knew of him , he was very hard working, loyal to his friends, and - to your question - absolutely entrepreneurial enough to win such an award. I agree with you - the photos do him a disservice. We’re going to see more of this misuse of facebook photos in years to come as we, the first facebook generation, grow up and step into the real world. I don’t think people have fully thought through the consequences.
Too true. Well *yawn* it’s late, I’m off to … bed. That’s right, bed. I won’t be hurriedly deleting any of my old facebook pictures at all. Comfy bed.
 Along with the great honour, the material award for winning the prestigious Big Ben award is a couple of brunettes in lipstick Note: If you can’t see some of the above pictures, it’s because they’re on Flickr, which has just been blocked in China.
With enough on our minds already about the day after tomorrow (and I don’t mean the film), here’s a little something on the day before yesterday. May 8th was the ten year anniversary of NATO missiles destroying the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, sparking big protests over here. For more, go no further than the China Beat’s reading list …
So I put three 10-years-on questions to Jack (whose previous essay on this blog has attracted some heated comments). If there were one sentence in the below I had to highlight, it would definitely be this one in his answer to question two:
On the economy, [the West] have been chanting free trade and free market all the time without recognizing China’s full market economy status, but what they really like are protectionist policies and nationalization of banks.
So now it’s the West who are hidden communists?! How things change. Obama, you have your first Chinese criticism for being too left-wing…
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1. Do Chinese still remember and are offended by this bombing? (Also, do they believe now it was accident or intentional?)
Yes, we will always remember this bombing. In fact, it has been one of the biggest, if not the biggest humiliation to the Chinese people since reform and opening-up.
It was by no means an accident. In my opinion, it was masterminded by the military perhaps without the knowledge of the Clinton administration. Facts speak louder than words. In 1999 NATO bombing of Belgrade, only seven bombs out of more than 5,000 “missed” their targets, and five of the seven were thrown at the Chinese embassy. The five bombs hit the embassy from different directions, destroying the compound. The pilot also paid special attention to the residence of the ambassador, with one bomb precisely hitting his residence. Fortunately, that bomb did not explode. The U.S. was claiming that they had the best pilot, the best weapon, and the best intelligence, so how could they make such a “mistake”? The explanation given by the American side was not convincing at all. They said they used an old map on which the Chinese embassy was not marked. But the truth of the matter is at that time the embassy was marked even on a tourist map of Belgrade. Anyone with a common sense would not believe in their explanation.
After the incident, President Clinton apologized for five times and wrote two letters of apology to President Jiang Zemin. So many apologies made some Chinese people think that maybe it was carried out by the military without the knowledge of top U.S. decision makers. The truth has not been revealed, and perhaps will never be. But based on facts, Chinese people believe it was absolutely intentional, and the only thing unknown is who was behind the attack.
2. What do you believe has changed now in the attitude of young Chinese (like those who protested 10 years ago against the USA) towards America?
Over the past decade, I think the young Chinese have gradually dropped their illusion of the U.S. and begun to view it more objectively.
After reform and opening-up, to be more specific in the 1980s and 1990s, the Chinese people began to know more about the outside world. The prosperity of the west attracted the young people so much that all of a sudden everybody wanted to go abroad. At that time, we had a popular saying, “Moon of the west is even more beautiful than that of China.” Experiencing the sharp contrast between China and the west, many Chinese people became critical of China, perhaps in a cynical way.
However, when the Chinese embassy was bombed, many people began to think: is this the kind of democracy and human rights that we want to pursue? A number of other incidents followed suit, for example, the Iraqi war, Guantanamo Bay, biased report on 3/14 Tibetan incident, which compounded young people’s negative attitude towards the U.S. in specific and the west in general. Many young people tend to believe the west is very hypocritical and has its own weak links. On human rights and democracy, the West does not care about democracy and human rights in other countries at all, and what they care about most are their own interests, for example, oil, geopolitics. And they will bully the weak if the latter do not obey their orders. On the economy, they have been chanting free trade and free market all the time without recognizing China’s full market economy status, but what they really like are protectionist policies and nationalization of banks.
Disillusionment aside, the Chinese have been fully aware of the strength of the west, especially in terms of science, technology and education. Today, still many young Chinese are going abroad for study. And more and more of them are coming back. China is short of qualified professionals. For example, recently the government has adopted a policy to build Shanghai into an international financial center by 2020, but one of the biggest bottlenecks is the lack of talents. Therefore, we still need to learn from the west for our own development.
Generally speaking, the young people in China have gradually turned to view the west, particularly the U.S., in a more objective way. We have become more aware of the hypocrisies and weakness of the west while better understanding their strength. I think this is one of the biggest changes over the past decade.
3. What might happen now if something similar happened again?
First of all, I think the probability of similar incident is very low at present given the higher recognition of China by the west and broader engagement with the west by China. This is a period of transition, from one that China was criticized on many fronts to one that China is expected to take more responsibility as a “responsible stakeholder”. It is vital for China to manage the transitional process by reducing misunderstandings, concerns, or even fears in the west, and it is equally significant for the west to adjust their attitude towards China and “see China in light of its development”.
If something similar happened again, the government and the public would respond in a resolute, serious and rational way. On the one hand, the government would use the diplomatic channel instead of military force. It might impose pressure on the U.S. government for apology and bringing those responsible into justice. It might also stop cooperation with the U.S. in some areas, such as trade, investment, foreign exchange reserve, and so on. Meanwhile, the Chinese government needs to strike a balance between giving the public some space to vent their anger while maintaining social stability and preventing the spread of nationalism. On the other hand, the public would become extremely angry and protest against the U.S., hopefully in a more rational way without throwing rocks at the embassy.
 Beida students arrested in the aftermath of the May 4th protests, 1919 It being the 90th anniversary of the May 4th uprising, I spent my lunchtime today sitting in the heat on Beida’s (PKU’s nickname) campus, chatting with students to see if they felt May 4th spirit was still alive in Beida today. I arrived just in time to see two men on a ladder unfurl - with distinct lack of pomp and circumstance - a banner reading, in Chinese, ‘Peking University commemorates the May Fourth movement’s 90th anniversary’. Besides them and a dozen lazing security guards, noone seemed to care.
Here are two representative comments from a young guy and girl (respectively) I talked with:
“Nowadays, students want to earn a lot of money, live a better life … gain knowledge to make themselves famous and rich. They’re not concerned too much for their country. Now society’s advantage is in harmony with individual advantage. If they fight for themselves maybe they will also benefit society.”
“Now, on the one hand because of economic development, on the other hand because of control of speech and failure in 1989, college students pay less attention to politics, are more individualistic, and pay more attention to their own career … I think [May Fourth] should be celebrated more publicly, but it is treated with indifference.”
This, remember, is the very campus where the May 4th movement was born (we won’t let technicalities like the fact that the university switched location from downtown Beijing to the far North-West in 1952 bother us, right?). Beida students - even a brief stay here backs up their self-diagnosis above - have changed from the likes which produced the politically outspoken activists of 1919 (as in the picture) and 1989. There is more to lose than ever before from shouting, more to gain from silence. The class of ‘09 will be changing China from within its system, not from outside it with a banner in their hands.
First, the quickest of skimable summaries: Professor of Law (a ’specialist’ in mental health I hear) at Peking University Sun Dongdong (that last bit means ‘East East’, so no sniggers), in a recent interview with a Chinese magazine (their homepage here), called 99% of petitioners (with their troubled history) mentally ill. This sparked protests by petitioners outside both Beida’s West and East gates (picture from boxun.com). He’s since apologised, but still… I feel ashamed to be a student at a university at which Professor Sun still teaches.
I asked a couple of my friends at Beida what they thought. One of them witnessed the protests outside the West gate himself last Tuesday morning: he confirmed it was a completely peaceful protest of 30 to 50 petitioners, one holding up a sign ‘Fight for Human Rights’. They looked more despondent than insane to him. Here’s what he writes:
l have just checked some other responses about this event from the internet. There are more than 99% of them against Sun. So l do not think l need to write any word about him. If anyone would like to consider him as somebody, then they must be crazy.
From last year, especially because of the well-spread wrong expectations from so-called experts opinons about the finacial crisis, there are common opinions about the disvaluation of any experts. So, Sun would be just another case for that. You might call it the Experts’ Crisis.
Secondly, there is another common opinion which has lasted for a long time (many many years): you do not need to care so much about some experts’ statements, especially when he/she claims they come from Peking University.
Thirdly, l agree with such an observation: if more than 99% of petitioners are mentally ill, that must become true simply because the system makes it so. That is, the petition system in modern China makes originally normal petitioners become crazy one day.
Finally, in my eyes, those elder petitioners l saw that day are just a hopeless, peaceful, calm, and pure or even naive older generation who must be disadvantaged because of the rapid transformation pace of modern China. l can not see any wild behaviors they would make at all. They need help. That is all.
And Tony’s liang juzi:
Yes, I read the articles on the web about Sun. He is too careless with words, as many people (and even him himself) have pointed out. And it is a dangerous judgment. More petitioners will be forcefully sent to mental hospitals because they “interrupt the public order” under his logic.
But there could be other incentives for Sun to say those stupid things. As soon as I heard the news, what directly came to my mind is Sun, just like many other PKU professors, was making use of the media and public debate to make himself famous (or notorious, as it turned out). chao zuo …… these things DO happen around us. Many teachers in the university are respectable. But there are some professors who dream to be popular overnight. And the rising of mass media in China provides them with a great opportunity.
About the Chinese xinfang/petition, it is a “decent” way for people to challenge the government according to our law. But the institution is not effective enough. Petitioners’ appeals are often ignored by local government officials, who concern about their personal interests all the time. Many petitions become insane because they get refused from time to time by the county government. They want to go upper to the provincial or even central government (in China, people trust the central government in Beijing rather than their local ones, exactly different from the United States), but are sometimes blocked and threatened by county officials.
So far, I’ve heard no wind of any kind of protest by Beida students themselves - however much their sympathy lies with the petitioners (I’d consider the two opinions above pretty representative of more liberal students at PKU). But I’ll bet even more officials in Zhongnanhai than foreign observers will remember that the May 4th coming up is ninety years on from 1919 and twenty from 1989 - two days when Beida students rose up for what they believed is wrong in the society they would soon take a leading role in. And this time, with graduate unemployment rising, there’s a grumble rumbling.
On a lighter note … happy Easter everyone!
 A lonely police presence inside Beida's West gate - and outside the gate, over 30 policemen and another half dozen cars. I took this pic on Friday morning: I got the wrong gate! 40 or so petitioners gathered outside the East gate shortly after my class began. Shucks. UPDATE: The first friend I quote above has since written me an email in response to my final paragraph above:
Each year, May fourth and June fourth comes around, and for students, their major concerns are just employment. So they are not political but economical animals right now. But do not assume that they would go on strike this year because of financial crisis. Because they are patriotic,too. That means they know their country are better than others. And they have a duty to make it as stable as possible. In sum, they know they would have a better future (especially compared with foreign countries), but only in a relatively stable environment. And they believe this administration tries so hard to make them have better life already. They are satisfied with current administration so much.
I agree with this - my experience of Beida students has been entirely in line with the above. The absence of student outrage over Sun Dongdong points most of all to an off-hand dismissal of his ridiculous comment, but also to a tendency to keep quiet rather than risk
anything by speaking up. My argument, to clarify, is that prospects of unemployment only make it more likely students may argue for reform within, not of, the system. And my hope is that no student ever takes it for granted that such a comment from a representative of their university is so out there as to not bother to condemn it openly.
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