The Collective Memory
Say for nearly a month, students and citizens alike in your country rose up to occupy the most prominent landmark of your country's capital city, to remember a deceased leader, and to protest the corruption and injustice of your nation. The students made massive signs, threw eggs onto the most prominent painting of your country's founder, constructed a massive statue imitating the Statue of Liberty, ordinary citizens were inspired to join, and news of this echoed across the globe. Finally, after numerous pleads, your country's leaders decide to hold talks with the student, seemingly reminiscing a history from nearly a century ago with the imperial government, and like that same history, talks broke down. Then some days later, the whole world sees the nation's military forces—tanks, soldier, heavy weaponry—converging around the capital. Surely they wouldn't let soldiers fire at ordinary citizens, you thought. But then, they marched in and opened fire on armless civilians. The international community was outraged, and the nation was shocked. Everyone poured onto the streets decrying the same things the students once did in your capital city. Your liberal president was ousted by the conservatives and those wimps in the government, and the country falls back on a course of conservatism.
If this happened anywhere in the world, this megalith of history, I'm sure everyone in the country would still remember it, that the collective memory would preserve this event. But this, this happened in the People's Republic China in 1989, and I assure you, today, more than 50% of the population does not know or speak about this. Generations of people wiped out of this memory. To put it simply, 1989 never happened.
The preservation history once seemed like a rather simple procedure, you witness it, you write it down, and you pass it down. Yet both the worst and the best of us have gone after ways to distort those records, to hide those records, and to destroy those records. But I still assumed the indestructibility of the public memory, the memory of the people and their ability to transcend written records. Clearly, I have been proven wrong. The memories of the Tiananmen Massacre have slowly faded out of the minds of the Chinese people, those that know do not speak about it, those who do not know do not seek it. And those who find out about it? Well, their frightful souls have already made up their mind about it before the truths were revealed.
I reckon the truth always surfaces at the end, like the violent white supremacist past of Wilmington, North Carolina. But If a government is able to suppress such an influential event in the collective memory for this long, will it eventually disappear? What if, one day, the Chinese government manages to wipe it out of existence completely? Unlikely as it seems, the world today seems to suggest otherwise.
Li Peng's death comes in a rather timely year, I suppose—the same year as the 30th anniversary of that fateful event. The man who backed Deng's decision to fire on the students and then proceeded to defend it in his journal as a move to prevent a second Cultural Revolution; the man who pushed through the Sanxia Dam project and dislocated hundreds and thousands of families; and the man whose children continue to wield massive wealth and influence in Chinese politics and commerce. That's China, really—those who are the bravest in pursuing the harshest policies, you will have your place in the pantheon of the Communist Party, and your children will prosper as long as the party stands. Your crimes? Well, they get erased, they become forgotten. Other times, they become glory and are enshrined in the books of your children, planted deeply in their minds.
If this happened anywhere in the world, this megalith of history, I'm sure everyone in the country would still remember it, that the collective memory would preserve this event. But this, this happened in the People's Republic China in 1989, and I assure you, today, more than 50% of the population does not know or speak about this. Generations of people wiped out of this memory. To put it simply, 1989 never happened.
The preservation history once seemed like a rather simple procedure, you witness it, you write it down, and you pass it down. Yet both the worst and the best of us have gone after ways to distort those records, to hide those records, and to destroy those records. But I still assumed the indestructibility of the public memory, the memory of the people and their ability to transcend written records. Clearly, I have been proven wrong. The memories of the Tiananmen Massacre have slowly faded out of the minds of the Chinese people, those that know do not speak about it, those who do not know do not seek it. And those who find out about it? Well, their frightful souls have already made up their mind about it before the truths were revealed.
I reckon the truth always surfaces at the end, like the violent white supremacist past of Wilmington, North Carolina. But If a government is able to suppress such an influential event in the collective memory for this long, will it eventually disappear? What if, one day, the Chinese government manages to wipe it out of existence completely? Unlikely as it seems, the world today seems to suggest otherwise.
Li Peng's death comes in a rather timely year, I suppose—the same year as the 30th anniversary of that fateful event. The man who backed Deng's decision to fire on the students and then proceeded to defend it in his journal as a move to prevent a second Cultural Revolution; the man who pushed through the Sanxia Dam project and dislocated hundreds and thousands of families; and the man whose children continue to wield massive wealth and influence in Chinese politics and commerce. That's China, really—those who are the bravest in pursuing the harshest policies, you will have your place in the pantheon of the Communist Party, and your children will prosper as long as the party stands. Your crimes? Well, they get erased, they become forgotten. Other times, they become glory and are enshrined in the books of your children, planted deeply in their minds.
And this it’s our job outside the mainland to ensure that its not erased from the global conscience. Great read as always man
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