Gate of Heavenly Peace

“Tiananmen” means “gate of heavenly peace,” which may seem ironic in the context of the student protests of 1989.  Unless, of course, you believe that peace is somehow the end result of struggle, in which case, the “Gate of Heavenly Peace” would be a perfectly appropriate portal to Chinese politics.

The gap between these two perspectives is the chasm that underlies my feeble efforts, then and now, to understand the events I witnessed twenty years ago.  I like irony as much as the next guy, but the older I get, the more I begin to think that irony is the outcome of our (meaning western) inability to appreciate the weird mysteries and happenchance that so often structure events.  “Gate of Heavenly Peace—how ironic!” might be a classically western response.  But what do we know of “Heavenly Peace?”  And not knowing, how can we proclaim it ironic?  Doing so is easy and lazy, it means we don’t have to dig deeper or ask more penetrating questions, of ourselves, of our memories.

 

New Taiwan Dollar, from Wikimedia

For the past few days, I’ve been reflecting on how my months of living in Taiwan prepared me to comprehend the complexities of Chinese politics in general.  My complete and utter ignorance of Taiwan’s political “situation” when I arrived in the winter of 1988 underwent a series of quick challenges as complete strangers would often engage us in political conversation.  One elderly gentleman invited Eleni and I up to his office for tea, “gave us chiclets, talked about history, economics, politics, communism.”  Another guy took me out to dinner at the Grand Hotel, where I learned “about ROC [Republic of China] politics—the KMT and the DPP, and whether or not reunification is still a viable option.”  Through various encounters of this sort, I learned “that one must be very careful about what one says” in terms of politics there.  Especially when the “one” in question was a left-of-liberal graduate of a Portland, OR liberal arts college, a devoted reader of Mother Jones, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky.  In the Reagan era, I was pretty used to swimming against the mainstream of politics, but I was not interested in getting into political battles as a guest in another country.

 

In 1989, Taiwan was still under the martial law erected by the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) back in 1947.  Taiwan, or “Formosa” as it was known to Westerners, was first settled by Han Chinese in the seventeenth century (there is scholarly controversy as to whether those settlements constitute “colonies”).  In 1895, Taiwan became a Japanese colony and remained such until 1947 when the Chinese Kuomintang government, facing defeat by the Communists, fled to the island under Chiang Kai-Shek.  The resulting Legislative Yuan, comprised of representatives from various districts around mainland China, positioned itself as the legitimate, if exiled, ruling government of all of China and so remained the single-party government of Taiwan for over 40 years.  But in the late 1980’s, the logic of KMT rule was coming under increasingly critical scrutiny, as the aging—and dying—population of legislators began to force the issue of electing Taiwan residents into positions of political power. Wikipedia notes that “The primary political axis in Taiwan involves the issue of Taiwan independence versus Chinese reunification,” making for a strange tension between intense hostility toward the People’s Republic, and longing for the homeland, strengthened by cultural bonds of language, religion, and familial ties.

 

In one of those odd coincidences of fate, my own hometown of Marysville, California played a role in this history.  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Marysville was home to a

   

Marysville historic Chinese district

thriving Chinese population, and at the turn of the century was home to Sun-Yat Sen, founding intellectual and president of the KMT, as he worked among the Chinese diaspora to build support for the 1911 overthrow of the Qing dynasty.  As a child, I enjoyed the annual Bok-kai festival and opening of the temple to the general public, so that in Taiwan the sounds and scents of temples and festivals reminded me of my childhood home.

 

Twenty years ago today, on 4 May, “approximately 100,000 students and workers marched in Beijing making demands for free media and a formal dialogue between the authorities and student-elected representatives. A declaration demanded the government to accelerate political reform.” [Wikipedia:[2] At the time, I was almost as clueless about the modern political history of the People’s Republic of China as I had been earlier about Taiwan’s.  I did not know about the tradition of student protest in Tiananmen square, and the importance of those movements in Chinese political memory.  Ninety years ago today, in 1919, the May Fourth movement was launched in Tiananmen square as students, merchants and workers protested the government response to the terms of the Versailles Treaty and called for replacing traditional Chinese values with increasing openness to science and technology.  The 1989 students and their supporters interpreted their own actions through the lens of the 1919 movement, as patriots struggling for transparent governance and modernizing economics.  Deng Xiao-ping’s Communist Party faced a no-win situation, with the imminent historic visit of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in mid-May and all the international visibility that would bring, over against the widespread popularity that the students were gaining among Chinese people in every province.

 

And so, in an odd twist, both Chinese governments faced challenges to their hegemonic power at the same time in 1989.  In Taiwan, the Democratic Progressive Party was gaining ground in its challenge to the one-party rule of the KMT, which would result in the lifting of martial law and open elections within a few short years.  On the mainland, the student challenge would take a different route. 

What did I learn about Chinese politics, entering its history through the portal of Taiwan in the sunset years of the Kuomintang?  Only that the animus behind those politics are deeply, complexly different than those at work in the western world, that I could never fully understand it.  I learned that the surface impression was never—could never be—the full story.  This lesson gave birth to an ambiguity—or to an ability to entertain, if not embrace, paradox that has never left me.