Teaching Tiananmen to a New Generation

When the first democratically elected president of mainland China takes the oath of office on the Tiananmen Gate, she or he will take a moment to recognize the sacrifices made on June 4, 1989 that made her/his achievement possible.

Professor He has managed to build an entire academic career on a single albeit tragic historic event. This does not reflect poorly on her; everyone needs a job. It reflects on our nation's academic obsequience to the media's shrill charade of the threat of Chinese communism in a world where global capitalism is the one remaining corosive creed.

To those Western English teachers in China and criticizing China and inciting unrest: Just who do you think you are, nosing in other countries business while you got far more serious matter at home. You are basically insulting the very host who accepted you as a guest, and that is very ill-mannered I say. Seriously, the democracy activists ruined so many countries around the world: Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Tunisia, Iran, Brazil, South Africa and the list goes on and on. Just take a look at the scale of devastation you have created before you criticize Chinese government again.

So here we again have an entire article and still not a word on the military causalities of the incident. Does one call it a massacre when there is significant casualty from the side of the so-called "killers"? I think most reasonable people would call it a riot. In fact not mentioning the military casualties is also not doing the students justice, since the students actively tried to protect the soldiers from the angry mob.

Wonde if those "responsible" for this profoundly cruel, evil event will ever be named and the gov. Will ever be honest about this. The murder of these young people was like Kent State and Jackson State in the U.S.only much bigger. Shame to the elders for such savagery!

When I enrolled in UW Seattle political science class the Chinese students said that despite the heavy censorship of the government the Chinese people know very well what happened in 1989 Tianamen square, and that almost all mainland Chinese have no problems with the government's violent crackdown on those rebels. This is a truth that all Western societies are stubbornly trying to deny: The Chinese people don't really care about that massacre if not satisfied about it. Not only the Chinese, but most of us Koreans, Japanese, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese agree that China managed to survive by suppressing those student rebels, and it is only those in Hong Kong and West are picking the crumbs. So keep mourning all you want, but most of us Asians no longer have any desire to follow the failed experiment of western liberal democracy, which was revealed during the financial crises of 2008.

Teaching history one has to lighten up on the atrocities are loss the interest of the class but
“It’s impossible to understand today’s China without understanding the spring of 1989”as Rowena Xiaoqing claims lays a heavy role on the those demonstrations in the act of what might have been and what followed. There are few sources available as to what was being asked as the protesters formulated their Demands, one good would be Gordon Thomas, Chaos Under Heaven: The Shocking Story of China's Search for Democracy. The students were calling for the separation of Party and state, the decentralization of power, the streamlining of bureaucracy, and the introduction of “full legal standards.” They wanted “a channel for their demands and the voice of the masses to constantly reach the higher levels.” They wanted “social consultation and conversation” with the leadership.
That’s asking a lot, and the protest were being laid down just as there was a break within the politburo as whether to follow Deng Xiaoping’s marketization or retreat to Stalinist central planning. Historical bad timing. Many of those student liberalizing concepts are reappearing today as he CCP attempts to make the government more legally restrained and independent of party control. It would be interesting to see how Ms. Xiaoqing handles those questions.

Tiananmen belongs to all of us. It does not belong to China. It must be understood as a human story. This is who we are and for the sake of our children we must decide who we want to be. We are all here together. We are all Chinese. In our humanity we are all the perpetrators and victims of our My Lai. We are human and for the sake of our children and grandchildren we must know ourselves. Thank you for your work teacher Rowena Xiaoqing. -Rudy

An fair and unbiased account of the 1989 movement would indeed be very important to Chinese history. However, this should be an honest historical account, not part of an integrated American geopolitical strategy to undermine the Chinese government.
The PBS Frontline documentary "Gate of Heavenly Peace" was very good and leave a lot of questions unanswered, but makes one thing certain: it was not the simple narrative of a dictatorship massacring its people. Did the government negotiate in good faith? I think the answer is certainly yes to a fair observer. Did the student leaders negotiate in good faith? Clearly no. They explicitly claim they want to force the use of force and they followed through. How did the movement get hijacked by the most radical elements? How did the student end up in New York, Washington, and Paris just hours after the shots were fired? Clearly, they have planned their exit with the aid of foreign contacts/agents. What was the role of American and other western NGOs? What was the geopolitical context of the incident? Why did it happen so quickly after the fall of the Soviet Union?
When you try find answers to these questions, it's clear the movement did not go as innocently as it's been portrayed in the western media. The only way to prevent yourself from being manipulated is becoming more sophisticated consumers of information.

In the Documentary The Gate of Heavenly Peace which can be seen on Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoqnKuBD5AI leaders of the Tiananmen protest say on camera that in the end they purposely wanted to force the government into committing violence against the students. Open your mind, read the facts, look at the pictures without commentary and you will realize the news coverage of what took place was a fraud. We are still waiting for a list of names of the people who died.

Did the journalist ask the professor if Xi Jinping's daughter, Xi Mingze, enrolled in the class? She went to Harvard around the same time.

Now that it appears that China's economy is slowing drastically, what will the Chinese governments rationale for Tiananmen on 6/4/89 be now?

Chinas banks are hemorrhaging with debt from dead and dying industries like coal, steel and oil, and their economy isn't making the transition to a consumer oriented one very well at all.

The CCP brought this all on themselves, so when future students with negligible job prospects start asking why their government lied to them yet again, what will they say next?

While visiting a university in Dalian, Liaoning in 2008, I observed banners that announced the senior class had achieved a 100 percent pass rate in their political studies final exams. Perhaps this is a clue to the complicated question of how the regime managed to turn a patriotic movement into a "counter-revolutionary rebellion" and truthful discussion into "treason."

My experience teaching English in China is that students are generally ignorant of Tiananmen and not particularly interested in leaning about it when given the opportunity. I often brought up the subject in class and once even accessed Youtube using a VPN and showed a June 4 video. Most students watched fairly intently but others continued looking at their phones. My conclusion is that Chinese students in China (not at Harvard) are politically docile although fairly patriotic. I've had several students vehemently proclaim Taiwan as part of China. I don't know if the level of interest and knowledge of Tiananmen would be greater in top schools versus the middle tier schools I taught at. I imagine that at the top schools there would be more chance of being turned in by a party member student. I had many students who were party members and none ever complained about my subversive teaching.

Very interesting quote from article linked below: According to an international 2016 WIN/Gallup poll, “China has by far the highest percentage of convinced atheists out of all the world’s countries.” A 2013 global Ipsos survey found that China is also #1 in materialism, with 71% agreeing with the statement “I measure my success by the things I own.” As reported by The New York Times, one commentator from the Liaoning Province exclaimed, “A country without faith, worshiping money and power, is not at all surprising!”

Source of Quote: http://www.mbird.com/2016/06/everybody-elses-biggest-problem-living-in-a...

I would love to see this course offered online to paying students here in Canada. Excellent interview and wonderful work on the part of Rowena Xiaoqing He. Thank you.