The first page of our Fall 2011 catalog presents No Enemies, No Hatred, a collection of essays and poems by Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Chinese dissident and 2010 Nobel Peace Prize recipient. The second page features Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, an impressively researched biography of the Chinese leader thought to have had as much impact on the world as any other twentieth century figure. The juxtaposition of these two books—the connection between these two men—is not lost on us. The actions of one can fairly be said to have created the conditions for the emergence of the other.
In December 2009, at the close of the trial for his involvement in the drafting and dissemination of Charter 08, a manifesto for human rights, democracy, and the rule of law, Liu Xiaobo read a statement from which the title of this first English language collection is drawn. It began with his declaration that “June 1989 has been the major turning point in my life, which now is just over one half century in length.” It was in June 1989 that the world watched the massacre of demonstrators in Beijing at Tiananmen Square and elsewhere, and it was Liu’s involvement in those demonstrations and their violent end that set his life on a new course.
In the decades since, he has frequently written of the legacy of Tiananmen Square, and has also struggled to come to terms with his own role, and that of other leaders who, though forever marked by their participation, still escaped with their lives. The stories of 155 who died were told in a booklet, Witnessing the Massacre and Seeking Justice, produced by a group called the Tiananmen Mothers. In an essay titled “Listed Carefully to the Voices of the Tiananmen Mothers,” included in No Enemies, No Hatred, Liu details the cold violence of the military crackdown, and the shocking murder of many unaffiliated with the demonstrations. He describes his own reaction to the stories:
Guilt feelings stab at my heart like daggers as I read these transcripts, because it is clear that not one of the people whose lives were so cruelly snuffed out that night was among the “elite.” None of the conspicuous activists—like me—were killed. The victims ranged from a 66-year-old senior citizen to a child barely 9. There were people in their thirties and forties, the prime of life, a youngster of 17, another who was 20-something . . . But they were all just ordinary students and civilians, people who apparently wanted to live ordinary lives and to enjoy everyday sorts of happiness, and on that blood-soaked night they had made the mistake of acting on impulses of sympathy or of justice, and it had cost them everything.
He continues:
I am just trying to remind myself, as one of those “influential” figures, of the true facts of the Tiananmen Massacre. How was it that university students and high-level intellectuals led the 1989 movement, but when the dust settled all the people who were massacred, went out to rescue the wounded, or received heavy sentences were common people? Why is it that we scarcely hear the voices of the people who paid the heaviest prices, while the luminaries who survived the massacre can hardly stop talking? . . . To look squarely at the suffering of the ordinary people whose misery is recorded in the transcripts makes me feel that I am not qualified even to be called a “survivor.” It is true that I was one of the last people to leave Tiananmen Square on June 4th, but I did nothing to volunteer myself during the bloody terror of the massacre’s aftermath, nothing to show that a kernel of my humanity had survived.
It was the violence of June 1989 that politicized Liu Xiaobo, and his grief over the lives lost has animated his writing and activism ever since. And the architect of that violence was Deng Xiaoping, as Ezra Vogel shows in Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China.
The student protests of 1989 had begun in April as public mourning after the death of Hu Yaobang, a twice-purged Deng comrade and Party official who had argued for more Western-style political and economic reforms. When the mourners lingered, the 84-year old Deng crafted a harsh editorial condemning the students for attacking the leadership of the Communist Party and the socialist system. The editorial emboldened the students, helping to turn the mourning into protest. The demonstrators held fast, and Deng refused to back down from the sentiment expressed in his editorial, eventually concluding that force would be necessary to restore order. Some in the party were concerned that foreigners would react negatively, compromising the normal diplomatic relations that were the basis of Deng’s efforts to modernize China. As Vogel tells it, Deng replied that swift action was required and the “Westerners would forget.” From Vogel’s account:
There is no evidence to suggest that Deng showed any hesitation in deciding to send armed troops to Tiananmen Square. At 2:50 p.m. on June 3, he gave the order to Chi Haotian to do whatever was necessary to restore order… Deng’s family reported that despite all the criticism he received, he never once doubted that he had made the right decision. Many observers who saw the dwindling numbers in Tiananmen Square toward the end of May believe it may have been possible to clear it without violence. But Deng was concerned not only about the students in the square but also about the general loosening of authority throughout the country, and he concluded that strong action was necessary to restore the government’s authority.
Vogel, who writes from a position of respect for Deng’s achievements and his unique preparedness to govern China after the failure of the Cultural Revolution, condemns the tragedy and the suffering of 1989. But he sees Deng as a leader whose pragmatism improved the lives of millions of Chinese, and argues that we can’t know the degree to which those achievements would have been compromised had Deng not chosen to put so much emphasis on the maintenance of Party authority in his Tiananmen crackdown:
As much as we scholars, like others concerned about human life and the pursuit of liberty, want to find clear answers that explain the causes of that tragedy, the truth is that none of us can be certain what would have happened had different courses of action been taken. Nor is it possible, only two decades after these events, to make a final judgment on the long-run impact of Deng’s decisions. If Chinese people in the decades ahead acquire more freedom, will the path to that freedom be less tortuous than that taken in the former Soviet Union, and will the events of the spring of 1989 have been a major factor? We must admit that we do not know.
The empty blue chair at Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize ceremony last year tells us that, as Vogel notes, the Chinese people have not yet acquired the freedom for which they protested in 1989. In the face of his persecution, though, it is Liu’s hopefulness that makes his writing so powerful. “I look forward to the day when our country will be a land of free expression,” he wrote in his final statement to the court. “I hope that I will be the last victim in China’s long record of treating words as crimes.”
