With your stubborn Silence, the party loads the 30. Anniversary of the crackdown of the protest movement at Tiananmen square almost on, says Frank Sieren
The square of Heavenly peace, thirty years after the massacre
A in these days has become obvious: The terrible memories of the 4. June 1989 will be covered in China by the success, perhaps even the noise of a historically unparalleled modernization.
The memory has made it difficult, for a business to arrive, which has grown in the past 30 years, an average of 9 per cent in the year. In the face of a year of income has since increased on average from US $ 200 to 9600 US dollars. Meanwhile, the government in Beijing has almost liberated the whole of China out of abject poverty: at the end of the eighties, 70 per cent of the people still lived on less than two dollars a day. In the next year, the Plan is to give it to almost anyone who has to live in such great poverty. And even if it would take a few years, this is a historically unique performance. This economic rise also means more Chinese have seen the world. Never, the Chinese were able to come to more information than it is today. The government censorship, it is still technically easy to handle. So it is almost possible for anyone to see what happened.
Little interest in memory work
Nevertheless, the interest of the population in the work of memory is low, especially among the young, who were not born in 1989. The memory of the violent freedom movement seems to have for your future, no meaning. Hardly anyone fears, obviously, that there could be a repeat of this event. And indeed, the party’s going on today makes-technically skilled, with diverse potential for conflict deal. Comprehensive High-Tech Surveillance and the isolation of the protests makes it possible to nip protest movements in the Bud. The Communist party no longer has long been shaking every day for their Power.
DW-columnist Frank Sieren
However, it is also the incredible economic success and the powerful surveillance apparatus that makes the rigid attitude of the party towards the protest movement, even 30 years after the event, only even more incomprehensible is just.
That the party has not, nevertheless, the sovereignty, to grieve, to give at least the mothers of the victims of public space, is unwise. The Position to pull back, that the party is so powerful that no one can force you to talk about past events, is probably short-sighted.
There is no doubt: In the West, especially in Germany, is the culture of memory, especially in relation to its own defeats more pronounced than in China.
The more sovereignty is in demand
Long internal sources are known, in which Deng Xiaoping stressed that it was the students that have triggered the bloody crackdown, but at the end of the disunity of the party. It speaks little about it, at least as an official Position.
That would be a start, anyway.
With your stubborn Silence, however, the party invites, the year days. Currently, however, more than intra-Chinese.
However, as the world China is becoming more and more important. The global soft power, the Silence of the KP of the year, 1989, the costs, could use Beijing at the moment, in order to score points in the power struggle for the new world order. Instead, Beijing offers to opponents in the West a good reason to warn against China.
Our columnist Frank Sieren has lived for twenty years in Beijing.