難得丹麥人說了公道話，說了當年的經歷
Christian Havrehed
June 4 at 6:45 PM
Today marks the 31st anniversary of the June 4th 1989 Tiananmen Incident.
I, by chance, was in Beijing at the time as a blue eyed backpacker, staying at Peking University where the students were barricading themselves and making Molotov cocktails in anticipation of the arrival of the Peoples Liberation Army (it did not show up). I was evacuated to the Danish Embassy by a Danish diplomat who braved all to come and get me in his own car dodging burned out army vehicles and busses on the way. On Jianguomen Street I ended up in random tank fire a few days after the incident, when trying to change my flight ticket to leave China for Thailand instead of going on the evacuation plane to Denmark. Scary as hell and completely surreal, but I did run faster than Usain Bolt.
Instead of getting turned off by it all I decided to study a Joint Honors degree in Chinese Language and Western Management Studies at Durham University in the UK and in 1990 I was back in Beijing for one year as an exchange student at Renmin University. (I have lived in China for a total of 20 years). It was a big deal for us foreign students to mark the 1st anniversary of the Tiananmen Incident and we sat outside the foreign student building at night hearing bottles breaking that had been thrown out of the windows from the Chinese student dormitory building. Weird, but there it was: CRACK! To throw a little bottle out of the window and let it shatter on the ground turned out to be a protest. Why? Because a “little bottle” is pronounced “xiaoping” and the students were upset with Deng Xiaoping, so they let him crash. Of course, the actual Chinese characters for a little bottle and Deng Xiaoping’s name are not the same. They just sound the same. In this way the Chinese can protest against many things whilst saying something completely different. Because of this richness of the Chinese language and these clever insinuations even Winnie the Pooh can become persona non grata.
Before I move on to reflect on the Tiananmen Incident and the current trouble in Hong Kong, I want to reflect on the above.
Why were there no burnt out cars when I was evacuated?
Because there were hardly any cars in Beijing back then, apart from a few taxis and embassy cars. Private people did not have cars. They had bicycles. You could drive down the middle of a road in Beijing on your bicycle and see a car every 10 minutes or so, that was how many cars were in Beijing back then. If you drove a car at night with the lights on the police would stop you and ask you to turn them off because you were blinding the people riding bicycles. No one had lights on their bicycles because you did not need them. Nothing was lit up at night in Beijing (no bill boards, light commercials etc.) so everyone could easily navigate by moon light, until they were blinded by artificial light.
Why did we the foreign students live in a separate foreign student building? Two reasons.
One was comfort. As a foreign student we were living two to a dorm in quite a modern building whereas the Chinese students were crammed together six in a much crummier and smaller dorm. It was already a stretch for us foreigners to live in the foreign student dorms:
- The chimney for the university’s coal fired power plant was outside my drafty single pane window, so during winter when I came back from classes, I could practice writing Chinese characters with my finger in the coal dust on my desk.
- We had intermittent hot water – intermittent as in the tap knew exactly when you had lathered up our hair with shampoo and we then had choose to either wait in a freezing shower cubicle for the hot water to return some minutes later or rinse with ice cold water.
- The cleaning lady mopping the floor did not have a bucket, but who needs a bucket when you have the male toilet urinals to clean your mop?.
That was our level of luxury. Now imagine how it was in the Chinese dormitories.
The other reason was that the Chinese were not particularly interested in us mixing with the Chinese. Anyone who came to visit the foreign student building had to sign in. When we finally managed to get a Chinese friend we had little to talk about because we had nothing in common and after a while we became jaded about Chinese ‘friends’ who more often than not really only wanted to exchange Renminbi for USD (or Waihui) so they could buy stuff in special hard currency shops or wanted you to help them get abroad. I once had a conversation with a man on a bus, who proclaimed “America. Excellent country. They all have air condition!”. That was the extent of most Chinese’s knowledge of the outside world.
Now project this onto the protesters in Tiananmen Square.
The protests had started because people were fed up with corruption within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but this could of course not be voiced outright. Instead the mourning of pro-reform Communist general secretary Hu Yaobang was used to convey this message in an indirect manner. This was accepted and understood by both the people and the CCP, but pressure for something more-in-the-face action was building. Gorbachov was instigating large political reforms in the USSR (China’s ideological partner – hugely simplified, I know) and was visiting Beijing. So students like Wang Dan spoke up and went on hunger strike. They even managed to scold the Chinese leaders on TV, something completely unthinkable. They definitely knew what they did not want and they erected a Goddess of Democracy in Tiananmen Square, but they did not have any viable solution for a system change. The focus was on system destruction from which an imaginary phoenix would then rise. Gorbachov allowed the system to crash and became the West’s darling. Deng Xiaoping did neither.
So how have the peoples of these two governments fared since then?
Immediately after the collapse of the USSR, China was flooded with white Russian women offering themselves up as prostitutes for pittance because making a living like that in China was still better than life in the former USSR. And poor, desperate, rough Russian men appeared in China wanting to trade anything to make a living in any manner possible. Since then Russia and the other former USSR countries have recovered somewhat, but nothing compared to China’s development, which at the time was an economic nothing and with hundred of million of its people living in poverty.
According to the World Bank, more than 850 million Chinese people have been lifted out of extreme poverty; China's poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 0.7 percent in 2015, as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day in 2011 purchasing price parity terms.
After 4th June the Chinese government did change because it did hear its people, but it also had to put its foot down in a very harsh manner to make sure the wheels did not come off and China would head the way of the USSR. Unlike the USSR, China did not yield to outside pressure and its peoples are so much better off for this reason.
Is the Chinese Communist Party perfect? No, but is God’s own country? Black on white (white on black?), you cannot always breathe there either. But what is irrefutable is that China has pulled a population the size of Europe out of poverty and made itself a superpower, with some of the best tech in the world, including 5G and landing on the dark side of the moon.
You cannot eat democracy and instead of smashing little bottles, the Chinese are lifting their glasses to Deng Xiaoping toasting him for his open door policy and economic reforms that have taken China this far.
The Hong Kong protests have similarities to the Tiananmen Square protests. The government has again listened to its people and retracted the Extradition Bill, which originally caused the demonstrations, but this time egged on by Trump as opposed to Gorbachov, the young protesters have again not understood when enough is enough and when it is time to return to normal life and let the government regain face (the personality of Carrie Lam does not help).
In 1989 overstepping the government’s very clearly drawn line of when enough is enough resulted in a military clampdown, in 2020 it results in the CCP revoking some of Hong Kong’s freedom to remind Hong Kong that it is China’s sovereign territory (after it had lost it in a war with Britain, which was started by the Brits who felt indignified that the Chinese would not allow them to peddle vast quantities of Opium to the Chinese people for commercial gain, not caring that they turned China into a country of drug addicts in the process).
Unfortunately, this time the Western foreign pressure, like the US’s Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, is likely to send the future of the Hong Kong people the way of the USSR.
The Chinese Communist Party does not fear foreign pressure.
The CCP only fears its own people. If it cannot keep its own people satisfied it will lose its Mandate of Heaven to rule and it will be game over. Chinese history shows this time and time again. Up to now, keeping the Mandate has depended on fulfilling the lowest rungs on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but as China continues its development, peoples’ needs will change and so will the CCP with it. At its own pace.
Western well meaning (?) pressure does not help this process. If anything, it makes the CCP stronger, because there is nothing the Chinese detest more than being forced into being Rule Takers by the Western world. They tried that during the Century of Humiliation and in the end Chinese patriotic blood will run thicker than democratic whims.
Paradoxically, Western interference is long term likely to strengthen the CCP and slow down democratic reforms. Think about that.
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What happened in Beijing before the day June 4 thirty one years ago. Most of the people just know the result, but only few know what happened before that day. (Photos by Getty Images)
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10157765643283717&id=511953716
以前在"政治正確"的情況下，我們接受的教育以及訊息都是只有最後的結果，對先前的暴動幾乎一無所知，當年的訊息不發達，我又還是個高中生，自然容易只接收官方媒體要傳達的訊息，卻沒有把這些訊息拼湊起來思考以及消化，也對我爸那時候所說的不以為然。
後來長大後，語言能力增加了，從各方收集到的訊息多了，慢慢拼湊出事情真相的拼圖。
老實說，雖然這件事的最終結果，在當年是個悲劇，但是這個悲劇阻止了更為巨大的悲劇的發生。
而1970年的美國，某些人心中自由民主的國度，用真槍實彈射殺學生。
肯特州立大學鎮壓慘案：
https://global.udn.com/global_vision/story/8663/4612219
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