[Craig Calhoun, New York U., author, Neither Gods nor Emperors, UC Press, 1997] makes the important point that democracy, as many of these young Chinese students saw it, had very little to do with free competitive elections. He quotes one young student who says ‘Oh we have a much more fundamental and radical understanding of democracy than you liberal Americans! We read Rousseau and we care about the general will.’ So Calhoun suggests that although the West really embraced this as a democracy movement, these young students in China really saw themselves much more in the tradition of the May 4th movement, or the New Culture Movement in China: a movement of intellectuals who are speaking out as the conscience of the country, who are very concerned about corruption, and are very anxious to safeguard the sovereignty of China. The student protestors saw themselves as the latter day incarnation of earlier Chinese intellectual protestors and were not necessarily trying to turn China into a kind of blueprint of the US or England or some other liberal democracy. – Elizabeth Perry, Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University
There was a time when the Middle-East countries like Iran shout at America and call it the Great Satan. America shouts back, and the former become in turn the Axis of Evil.
International politics, like kids playing cowboys and Indians, belonged, and still belong, to a certain religious hype. Their politicians and institutions and their hangers-on – reporters, academics, “activists” – grew up in that Garden of Eden tradition, Judeo-Christian, so their language is couched in that space, you are either Good or Evil.
Yet Nietzsche was right. Christianity represents a fake morality; after all, the last Christian had died on the cross. Religion, pushed forward, is mass psychosis, and farther on it is an ideology with a morality to enslave one group and exalt the other, to make a master of them.
Nietzsche is cited here because he offers not only a framework to consider what the West – White people – think but because Tiananmen Day came to past and they have so many judgements to make of it. The number of people, and the range, piling on Tiananmen is astonishing coming from people, even Malaysians with their pathetic institutions.
Take Josh Hong:
As Najib and the Chinese leaders bid goodbye, their minds are preoccupied with the growing demand for democratic change both in Malaysia and China.
You immediately sense something is not right with the entire sentence. “Minds are preoccupied” – how does Josh Hong know? He is some voodoo mind reader? Then this, “growing demand for democratic change” – isn’t Malaysia a democracy? Already? And how does Josh Hong knows that, in China, there is a “growing demand for democratic change”? What’s so good about democracy?
But the one “article” that beats all in the Tiananmen expositions of Good versus Evil is this: and to save you the trouble of reading it, here is the summary, oozing in biblical language
massacre, atrocity, killing, darkness, secrecy, lies, falsehood, disgusting, totalitarian, appalling, injustice, corruption, avarice, corpses, exploited, serfs, sweatshops, squalid, die, killed, shoddily, fraud, corruption, ludicrous, wantonly, squanders, slaughter, unjustly, inhumanity, regime, enemy….
That came from a man named Dean Johns, White man from Australia, drifter, unable to nail down a job, and so he will take one “anywhere in the world”, and he is in Kuala Lumpur. And what work can he do? Copywriting. His intellect is surpassed by only his vocabulary range.
Dean Johns is not atypical, but he is revealing in the sense that Tiananmen offers a bait, and very convenient one at that, for an anti-China, anti-Chinese racist rant (no prizes for spotting those revealing parts).
The reasons White people pile in on a country they once tried to carve up among themselves is because China is not going to come after them, Tiananmen is easy to write, and they may even get paid for it. But, above all, it makes them feel good about themselves; righteous because the Other is evil, just because the Other is unjust, democratic because the Other is totalitarian, upright because the Other is corrupt. Only the Johnses speak the truth, the Other is a liar.
So what were the students after at Tiananmen on June 4? Answer: better student dormitories, end nepotism, lower university fees, cheaper goods, stop police brutality, cut the bureaucracy, limit official privileges, better jobs, more jobs, more land for their peasant families – indeed everything under the sun except liberal democracy. In other words, they wanted better socialism, actually improved communism. These were students of Marxism: a chance to work half a day and spend the other half fishing.
The students and China’s ruling politburo were after the same thing – 以人为本 yi ren wei ben and that is as ancient as is China – only different ways of getting there. But what do the Johnses (or the Joshes) know? They have only the King James dictionary, which is all they will ever need.
If there’s any doubt into what the students wanted then, ask Wu’er Kaixi or Li Lu. These former student leaders have, 20 years later, made a good life for themselves, waking up mornings with some guilt for instigating naivety then, and now making all the money that Dean Johns envies as exploitation and serfdom because Johns could only get little of it. China could have got Wu’er, Number Two on the wanted list, when he turned up in Macau but they let him go to take the return flight to Taiwan. He tells Guernica, Tiananmen is an inconvenience to the world (by that, he means the West) not to China, and there is no right and wrong.
But that, a better China, or truth or falsity, is not what is commemorated on June 4. White people, with the like of yellow skins in Josh Hong lined up behind (America pays, Malaysians perform a five-minute song), play a vastly different tune called democracy. The pull of narcissism to make a Great Morality tale out of a bunch of student demands is so great that even a reporter, such as in the Financial Times, willing to step up to the truth have to apologise before hand. “I don’t deny the atrocity of the event, nor the repression after it,” he says.
To the Johnses, other races, if they are not inferior, they are evil; the two are the same.
Nietzsche was prescient when he said: “There are no facts, only interpretations.”
