[4Tran]

I recalled the sequence of the Tiananmen Square incident, from the initial protests, to the seeming compliance from the CCP, to the reluctance of the local PLA units to act, to the eventual crackdown and massacre very vividly. It's a very sad moment in Chinese history, and it's an even that colored my views towards the PRC very negatively for over a decade. On reflection, the outcome was all but assured of being a bloody one given the pressures that the central government was in, and their options at the time. Moreover, it's an event that cannot be separated from the events in the rest of the world at the time.

1989 was a year of great upheaval - in Poland, we saw the Solidarity movement and Lech Walensa start to take hold of the people's imagination; in Germany, the Communist party was losing their grip on power, and the Berlin Wall would topple later that year; and even in the mighty USSR itself, the government was engaged in economic and political reforms to little effect. The entire world could see that what once had been a hallmark of stability and power was starting to crumble, and everyone was wondering which Communist country would be the next to weaken. The Chinese leaders weren't blind to this, so they were certain to be sensitive to any events that promised to sow dissent and weakened their power. A spontaneous popular movement like the student protests and the subsequent support from much of Beijing could easily have developed into a much more serious political movement; one that could have sent China onto the same path as the their peers in Europe. There was little chance that the central government could tolerate that, and so they cracked down on what was a peaceful protest. This does not excuse their actions of course, but I think that it helps a lot to see the whys of what happened.

As for the overall effect, the Tiananmen Square incident has a fair number of ramifications; not all of these being the obvious ones. The most obvious to the West is that all speech, record, even thought of those events has been suppressed by the CCP. There's two main reasons for this: the first is that it's an ugly blot to have to be responsible for, and Communist governments are well known for covering up ugly blots. The less obvious is to preserve the legacy of the all-but-sainted Deng Xiaoping. While Deng Xiaoping avoided a lot of the cult of personality of Mao, he is still held as one of the greatest, if not greatest, leader of Communist China. He was responsible for many of the innovations that brought wealth and prosperity to the country, and so any of his glory would also reflect well on the Party itself and on its leadership. Likewise, any smears that are attributed to Deng will also reflect badly. That's probably why, in one of the more momentous decisions to be made - whether to crack down, it was poor Li Peng who was set up to be the fall guy when it's obvious that it had to be the leader himself who made the actual call.

The lesser well-known ramifications are more to China's credit. The central government has certainly not forgotten about the Tiananmen Square incident; and indeed, they have learned a great deal from it. They've opened up liberties in all manner of public life - with the pointed exception of politics and large social gatherings. In everything else, the well being (or more accurately, the perceived well being) of the populace was paramount, and the leaders had to be respected, and be good enough to be respected. That's why there's currently things like a big push to somewhat equalize the prosperity that's been mostly evident on the coastal provinces. where once something like the Great Leap Forward was espoused on ideological grounds, with little care placed on how people suffered from it, there's now plenty of infrastructural work done in the hinterlands where there is yet to be much justification in terms of recouping costs. A lot of this kind of activity is precisely to deter the kind of popular sentiment that drove the students to Tiananmen Square to begin with. End result: the China of now is a very different country from the China of 1989. The amount of wealth visible on the coasts would have been undreamt of back then, as with perhaps the amount of non-political freedoms. Also, it's probably a lot more unified and stable than it has been in centuries, and the central government is very popular. No, China isn't exactly paradise on earth, but it's a lot better now than it was 20 years ago; and it's immeasurably better now than it was 30 or 40 years ago.

Oh, by the way, anyone who thinks that there's going to be some spontaneous uprising in China is being hopelessly naive. Unless things change to the degree where current conditions no longer apply at all, we're more likely to see a civil war in the U.S. first (and that's only about as likely as the Easter Bunny turning out to be real ).

Originally Posted by SaintessHeart

If any of you read about the Warring States or the pugilist world in ancient China, you would probably know that politics and semi-religious ideologies are often the centre of their conflicts.

I would say that Falungong and CCP is just a modern version of such.

You don't have to go that far back. For more recent examples of religious and quasi-religious uprisings threatening the very country we only have to look as far as the Taiping Rebellion and the Boxer Uprising. For non-religious popular uprisings, there's the anti-monarchist rebellions that toppled the Qing dynasty, and the the Communist Party itself. The CCP would have to be blind to not be sensitive to the least threat from this quarter, and Chinese leaders are nothing if not avid students of history.

Originally Posted by SaintessHeart

Most importantly, I think such an issue would boil down the simple human behaviour of pride, not wanting to admit their flaws in the systems they created. It simply stretched beyond the limit to give such a tension (pun unintended).

Pride is certainly one factor, but I think that paranoia and fear are the bigger culprits here.

Originally Posted by Tom Bombadil

That's the place that China found itself in right now: between rocks and a hard place(鸡肋?). There is no easy way out of it. Personally, I think it is in the long term interest of China to let go of the North, its government in the least. It is a failed cause after all. But that would involves dramatic changes. But in the political world, status quo beats dramatic changes every time, think Britain or France at the eve of world war II, for example.

If it could be done to any degree of success, I'm pretty sure that China would done so ages ago. They gain very little from the situation, and it's a constant source of headaches. The counterpoint is that the only way to apply any pressure on North Korea is to have enough dialogue with it for it to care about what you have to say. And it's a lot better for everyone involved if there's at least someone to have some sort of calming influence on North Korea, no matter how limited that influence is.


As for the Falun Gong stuff, if you really want to go in depth discussing it, I suggest that you take it to a new thread.