Our July Author: Louisa Lim

This month we are reading The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited by NPR China correspondent Louisa Lim. This look back at the events of 1989 and their resonance 25 years later, is my favorite of our selections so far this year. As usual, we have a few supplemental links to help expand our understanding of the book.

Lim has a website for the book which offers up many links to her media promotion for the book and further commentaries on topics such as Hong Kong's recent "Umbrella" democracy protests. Her public Facebook page also provides some good links.

For anyone looking for a shortcut into the discussion, both the Milken Institute and the Library of Congress have good videos of Lim presentations. For a more free-flowing conversation, try the Council on Foreign Relations panel discussion, moderated by Orville Schell, author of the previous book we read about Tiananmen, Mandate Of Heaven.

In a National Geographic interview, Lim details how two of the subjects profiled in the book, artist Chen Guang and Tiananmen mother Zhang Xianling came to be detained at the time of the book's publication in June of 2014.

Additonal interviews to check out:

The Diplomat

The 1989 protest movement remains so potent because many of its demands – for greater political participation, for action against corruption, nepotism and official profiteering – are not just unresolved, but more pressing than ever. In addition to those demands, a constellation of new concerns has emerged including anger over land seizures by local governments, the widening wealth chasm and China’s environmental problems...

The Shanghaist

I was surprised to find that my own book was classified in the Library of Congress cataloguing system under “Tiananmen Square Incident, 1989”, which is the bland nomenclature favoured by the Chinese government itself. To me, calling the murderous suppression of protests an “incident” is not just an act of omission. It’s an act of mendacity.

Voices from Tiananmen, a multimedia presentation on Tiananmen from the South China Morning Post, is a great way to learn about or review the events of spring 1989.  Human Rights in China's June Fourth Overview has comprehensive links including lists of victims, prisoners, oral histories, essays, poetry as well as HRIC's ongoing concerns surrounding accountability for the event and it's commemoration.  The website for the film Tiananmen: The Gate of Heavenly Peace, which is mentioned in the book, also contains some good resources including an old-fashioned print bibliography. It's a great film if you get a chance to see it.

Luckily, PBS Frontline's film, The Tank Man, is available to view online and the associated website has additional resources. The side by side comparisons of web searches in and outside of China are especially interesting.  The New York Times Lens blog has a nice feature about the famous photograph(s) with commentary from the photographers.  For fun checkout Mashable's round-up of Tank Man memes. And PRI catches a few more, including the Angry Bird and Simpson's versions.  Then finish up by comparing the icon to Ferguson Missouri's 'tank man' and Hong Kong's 'umbrella man'. (Bonus: watch Lim try to explain Hong Kong's protest movement to Stephen Colbert.)

Finally, even if Chen Guang's art cannot be shown in China, you can still appreciate it on this blog. You can also sign the Tiananmen Mothers petition and learn more about Amnesty International's human rights concerns in China here. 

Rights Readers Authors on Tiananmen

Now that we've caught up with our authors writing on Tibet, here are three familiar names weighing in on the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen:

Ma Jian (The Noodle Maker) writes a moving account of how Tiananmen has touched him and his friends-- from one whose arm was crushed by a tank to another frightened young army conscript. He even sneaks in a reference to W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz,

Xidan Book Store, a five-minute walk down Changan Avenue from the Zhongnanhai government compound, is the largest bookshop in Asia. A few days after meeting Chen Guang, I went there to buy a Chinese translation of WG Sebald's Austerlitz. Like the protagonist, I too am always struggling to find out how many memories a human life needs. This five-floor bookshop sells 100,000 books a day. A huge poster of smiling President Obama is displayed close to the main entrance. Inside you can buy translations of the latest scientific or economic tomes, and books charting China's 5,000-year history, but you will not find a word about the Tiananmen massacre, or any accurate accounts of the other tragedies that the Communists have inflicted on China since 1949. These missing chapters of the nation's history weaken the power of every other Chinese text in the shop.

Ma Jian also appears in a Guardian "where are they now" rundown of Tiananmen activists. Those who read Mandate Of Heaven(see below) will a encounter familiar names.

Ha Jin (Ocean of Words, The Crazed) offers a reflection in the NYT about how Tiananmen forced him to write in a foreign tongue,

To some Chinese, my choice of English is a kind of betrayal. But loyalty is a two-way street. I feel I have been betrayed by China, which has suppressed its people and made artistic freedom unavailable. I have tried to write honestly about China and preserve its real history. As a result, most of my work cannot be published in China.

Three other Chinese writers, Yu Hua, Yi Yunli and Lijia Zhang (certainly all are on the short list for future Rights Reads) are worth checking out as well.

At the Council for Foreign Relations, Orville Schell (Mandate Of Heaven) contributes to a collection of retrospectives, pointing to the recent release of Zhao Ziyang's memoirs to conclude that no amount of economic success can bury the past. The other views are worth a look too (Michael Anti: the internet is the new Tiananmen square...) For Schell's eyewitness account of the events of spring 1989, see this PBS Frontline interview (and watch the full Tank Man documentary online).

Tibet and Tiananmen

As we commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen demonstrations consider viewing this film about Rights Readers author Palden Gyatso (The Autobiography of a Tibetan Monk) made in 1998 at the time of the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Or try Tibet - Cry of the Snow Lion featuring both Palden Gyatso and Blake Kerr (Sky Burial). Kerr was an eyewitness of the 1987 demonstrations in Tibet that were a precursor to Tiananmen 1989 and kicks off the film with his account:

Travel with Rights Readers!

At long last, the maps of settings of our Rights Readers books have been completed. You can zoom in on Tiananmen Square (Mandate Of Heaven) or Old Anarkarli (The Reluctant Fundamentalist). Asia & Australia can be found here and Africa & the Middle East here. See the sidebar for links to the previous maps of North and South America and Europe.

Bonus peak at cafe life in Old Anarkali here and here! Bon Voyage!

Sunday Meditation: Tiananmen Poetry

Last Saturday veterans and supporters of the 1989 Tiananmen protests gathered at Caltech to share poetry and reflections of their experiences. On the eve of the 18th anniversary of the June 4 massacre we present a little poetry here to commemorate the day. OpenDemocracy has a 2004 interview and poems of exiled poet Liu HongBin. And here is a taste of Bei Dao's "June" from Perihelion,

unending plastic flowers
on the dead left bank
the cement square extending
from writing to

now

An excellent resource on Tiananmen is the website for the Frontline documentary Tiananmen: The Gate of Heavenly Peace and don't forget to leave a bouquet on the square for the Tiananmen Mothers!

Prisoner of Conscience Shi Tao

Amnesty International USA's Western Region has recently adopted Chinese prisoner of conscience Shi Tao as its "Special Focus" case, so its a good time to review with a few links. AI provides an online action and additional background on the writer's ten year sentence for "illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities" when he emailed a US-based website, sharing the details of an internal government directive barring media reports that could fuel unrest during the 15th anniversary of Tiananmen. Yahoo! provided information to the government for his prosecution. Human Rights in China, the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Guardian also have profiles of Shi Tao that include links to the poet and journalist's writings. More on Amnesty's campaign against internet censorhip in China here.

Tags: censorship, Shi Tao, China