Tiananmen generation rises – so Wen’s the Party?

On the 19^th of May 1989, two Party men walked into Tiananmen Square to meet the massed demonstrators. Days later one was illegally purged from his post – and died sixteen years on, still under house arrest. That was General Secretary Zhao Ziyang – he of the famous, faltering, weeping apology to the students in the Square for coming “too late” to save them from the military crackdown ahead, and who is remembered in the Democracy Movement as Tiananmen’s highest-ranking victim. “We all used to be young,” he said to them through the megaphone, “we took to the streets.” He got life for that.

The other survived, the one who stood silent and grim at Zhao’s shoulder as his then Chief of Staff. That was our heralded visitor this week, Premier Wen Jiabao: now the head of Government. Like President Hu Jintao, he is one of the new generation of uncharismatic, competent, diplomatic technocrats – suspected to be democratic reformers at heart, but biding their time to outmanoeuvre or even outlive the hardliners. Now that this former ‘proto-democrat’ who escaped the post-Tiananmen purge through claiming he was just following Zhao Ziyang’s orders, is the one in charge - where’s the Party?

Oh yeah, and why do you care? You’re probably not Chinese.

I could be forgiven for thinking that trade, ESOL enrolments and Zhang Ziyi are all the ‘mainstream’ cares about when it comes to China. At the ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Banana’ Inaugural New Zealand Chinese Identity conference last year, we sat through a lengthy seminar by an MFAT official who explained the importance of overseas Chinese like us, to the building of the New Zealand-Chinese trade relationship. Good to know we’re …useful to you, mate. Thinking only of overseas Chinese cash investments, not emotional, moral and ethical investments, in the economic and democratic development of that country seems strange to me. Many of you are interested in what New Zealand can get out of China. Don’t forget that so far, what you’ve got out of China includes… us.

When Hu Jintao visited Auckland in 2003, the Consulate bussed in patriotic Mainlanders draped with flags to meet him. They jostled on the sidewalk with the Falungong, Amnesty International (white), the Taiwanese Democratic Progressive Party, and the Free Tibet people (white). I had made a placard of my own. A Free Tibet hippy was confused about the English side, which said ‘Free China’. “Free China from what?” he said, slightly hostile. I sighed, and went and hung out with the Taiwanese instead. Meanwhile, the Mainlanders were a little confused at the Chinese side of my placard, which quoted Wei Jingsheng, instigator of the Democracy Wall movement. ‘The Fifth Modernisation is Democracy.’ The younger ones didn’t recognise the quote. A middle-aged lady smiled and supported the sentiment. She believed that Hu Jintao was a democrat and a reformer who would follow through on that extension on Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Four Modernisations’ mantra. I’d like to believe that too. But we can hardly take it on faith.

Here are some questions I wrote for Helen Clark’s Human Rights dot-point she said was ‘on the agenda’, for her to ask Wen Jiabao last Thursday. Even though I put in a whole lot of FTA keywords, I’m not sure she ran with them all.

Mr Wen. When you’re done with your Campaign Against Public Intellectuals, can you export some of them over to us? We only seem to have op-ed writers and bloggers.
China has the highest number of imprisoned bloggers, webjournalists and cyberdissidents in the world. Oddly, like our local Falungong adherents, our internet-users and journalists seem to be able to avoid ending up in prison. Some sort of skill-exchange programme seems appropriate, with perhaps our journalists and bloggers training yours to be less troublesome, and yours teaching ours how to steal their cellmates’ toilet rolls to use as pillows.
Does your position on prioritising the ‘right to life and development’ over civil and political rights, extend to shooting dozens of farmers dead in Dongzhou last December so that developers could seize their land?
How much is a liver going for on the black market these days? And on the legal market?
Now that the US has come around to openly torturing its prisoners, complete with fancy caMerA woRK, do you gET the sense that your pro-torture position has been vindicated?
Can you free Rebiya Kadeer please? And Ching Cheong, Hao Wu, Su Zhimin, and the Panchen Lama? Or at least promise not to torture them without taking pictures of it so you can trade techniques with the CIA?

And finally:

Do you remember when you were young, Wen? When you took to the streets?
Will you and Hu Jintao democratise China?
Will you rehabilitate Zhao Ziyang?
How late will you leave it, Wen?
How late?

There was a popular praising pun on Zhao Ziyang’s name when he reformed China’s agricultural system after the Cultural Revolution: yao chi liang, zao ziyang, which has been translated for English rhyme to ‘Want to get grain? Ask Ziyang to obtain.’ For his former Chief of Staff, we could rather say: you chidao? wen jiabao. Why so late now? Go ask Jiabao.

END