jeff wasserstrom on tiananmen

It’s been 20 years since the Tiananmen movement. There’s much interesting commentary, but I’d like to draw your attention to Jeff Wasserstrom’s article in The Nation. He makes a number of good points, such as how we now misinterpret the movement:

One reason to keep dwelling on 1989 is that common misunderstandings about that year persist, in China and in the West. For example, many Americans still think protesting students were the main victims of the massacre, even though the majority of the dead were workers who had turned out to support the educated youths. Many Americans also misremember those students as people who wanted to bring Western-style democracy to China. The reality was much more complex.

The students did celebrate the virtues of minzhu (democracy), but they spent even more energy denouncing corruption. And while their outlook was cosmopolitan, they were intensely patriotic. They presented themselves as carrying forward a longstanding Chinese tradition: that of intellectuals speaking out against selfish officials whose actions were harming the nation. In addition, the students’ grievances were not all purely political. They complained about the party’s interferences in their private lives and about its failure to make good on economic promises (Wuer Kaixi, a leader of the student movement, noted that a desire to be able to buy Nike shoes and other consumer goods was among the things that inspired members of his generation to act).

Definitely worth checking out!