We can be heroes. Superheroes.

The Tiananmen Square Massacre Anniversary always coincides oddly with our own small local litany of heroism: the Queen’s Birthday Honours List. On a day haunted by my most iconic Chinese heroes, the closest we got here this year was the partially Chinese Tana Umaga, and the venerable Anand Satyanand (both sort of ‘Asian’ but more likely to think of themselves as Pacific Islanders). Mature democracies need their heroes, but authoritarian societies seem to generate ones on a grander scale: both to attack dictatorship, and to shore it up. We’ve seen the Mainland Chinese youth here in New Zealand profess adoration of Mao as an unassailable symbol of nationhood – although DC comics have failed to incorporate him into ‘The Great Ten’, their new (fictional, ironic) Chinese government superhero team, which includes such groaning stereotypes as:

Mother of Champions, a one woman population explosion who gives birth to a litter of 25 warriors every three days. Eww.
Socialist Red Guardsman, seemingly reactivated for retro-kitsch value, this year being the Cultural Revolution’s 40^th anniversary.
Accomplished Perfect Physician. As geek-talkboards noted, this Engrish name is too cumbersome to shout out efficiently in the heat of battle.
Ghost Fox Killer: rejected from the Wu-Tang Clan for being a chick?

In the tailwind of this year’s Tiananmen anniversary, I have a few personal suggestions for Chinese anti-government superheroes:

Tank Man, an ordinary Beijing worker with the ability to halt entire columns of artillery armed only with the power of pathos and a dangling bag of groceries.
Supercyberdissident, the whack-a-mole of the World Wide Web – as soon as the government speedily eliminates this hero, s/he immediately appears elsewhere, reincarnated as another blogger.
Peasant Hell, village democrat and one-man farming riot, waging all out war against corrupt local officials and construction consortiums attacking the rights of the rural population.
Evil Cultmaster, hypnotises entire nations with gentle circular breathing exercises.
And in a Charles Xavier-like role, the Human Democracy Wall aka Wei Jingsheng. This legendary dissident sparked the 1978 Democracy Wall movement, coining the Deng Xiaoping-era slogan ‘the Fifth Modernisation is Democracy’.

Crucially, missing from this Chinese democracy coalition are the students who led all the previous democracy movements. Skirting around this issue this week was Wei Jingsheng himself, here on a speaking tour.

He was in New Zealand to do his exiled dissident job: Invoke hope. It was a privilege to see this living piece of history bearing witness to his times, although as I expected, when it came to his view of the present and predictions for the future, I found him short on details, thin on analysis, and overly optimistic about the democratic consciousness awakening in the Chinese public.

Frankly, if anyone has the right to be vague and optimistic, he does. The rest of us though need to deal with the consequences of the overweening nationalism that has replaced other forms of government legitimacy in China, and which he dismissed that evening as not something that Chinese people think (or perhaps more accurately should think) is that big a deal. Well sure, tell it to the New Zealand student media.

That other obliterator of political consciousness among the erstwhile Chinese intellectual/student class – complacency born from material comfort – was also glossed over. The absences in his analysis were embodied in the group missing from the audience. There that night were local Chinese, a few academics, a few Falungong, the pro-democracy factions of the Chinese language media, and the Chinese Democracy Party guys who are always a treat to meet up with. Walking monuments to the idealism of the Tiananmen movement, they haven’t changed their hairstyles or wardrobe since Beijing 1989. But there wasn’t a single young flashy nouveau-riche Mainland international student in the crowd. These two sides of our Mainland community don’t just talk past each other, they occasionally seem unaware of each other.

Wei was unable to acknowledge that life has improved for enough people in China (and the state ideology tweaked enough) for the government to keep getting away with crushing vast numbers of opponents and failing to protect the powerless. Yet, it was difficult not to be charmed by the Chineseness of his alternative explanation of why democracy hasn’t come: “Perhaps we haven’t worked hard enough. We need to work harder.”

A good call – enough preaching to the converted, Super Democracy Team. The current generation of apolitical, brash, proudly Chinese middle class students need to be shown their history by those who lived it. For them to be reached, the conditions that created them have to be acknowledged and confronted head on, like the deliberate, brutal tanks of our past. It can be done – we don’t even need to be heroes.

END