Remembering Tiananmen

For more than three decades, the Chinese Communist Party   has tried to erase the memory of Tiananmen. The effort  suggests how deeply the Party remains haunted by it. I know  because I was there. Not in Tiananmen Square itself, but in  Nanjing, where I was a 25-year-old factory worker. Like millions  of Chinese, I watched events unfold with excitement and hope.  The student demonstrations quickly became a broader  movement, drawing support from all walks of life. I organised a  protest by workers from my missile factory in support of the  students. 

Poverty had forced me out of school at sixteen and into a factory  that produced intercontinental missiles capable of reaching  North America. The factory was, in many ways, a miniature  communist state. We lived in identical apartment blocks,  attended endless political meetings and were forbidden from  wearing lipstick or flared trousers. 

Nanjing in the 1980s, a period of economic transition  when everyday life remained tightly structured by  state institutions and work units. 

I spent a decade there but never received a promotion, even after  earning a degree in mechanical engineering. My bosses  suspected I had a perm, a sign of bourgeois tendencies, though I  was simply one of the few Chinese people blessed with naturally  curly hair. Every month, women were required to show  menstrual blood to the ‘period police’ to prove they were not  pregnant. 

A Buddha statue produced by the  missile factory where Lijia Zhang  worked. In 1988, employees were  invited to pose for photographs beside it. 

Desperate for an escape route, I taught myself English. Looking  back, learning English changed my life. What I acquired was not  merely a new language, but an entirely different way of seeing the  world. As my English improved, I began listening to the BBC,  whose broadcasts sounded radically different from the  propaganda I heard every day. Gradually, I became more  politically aware. 

When the student-led pro-democracy movement began in April  1989, my ears were glued to the radio. As it gathered momentum  across the country, I felt compelled to do something. For the first  time in my life, I felt history opening before me. My fellow  

protesters and I believed that ordinary people could help shape  our country's future. 

Then, before dawn on June 4, came the sound of gunfire. The  movement was crushed. The hopes of a generation were  shattered. Like many others, I learned a painful lesson about the  limits of political change in China.

Workers from a missile factory in Nanjing join a  demonstration in support of China's 1989  pro-democracy movement. The bespectacled  woman on the far left is the author, Lijia Zhang. 

What has fascinated me ever since is not only the crackdown  itself but the Party's determination to erase it from public  memory. The campaign has been disturbingly successful. Many  young Chinese know little or nothing about Tiananmen. Some  have never heard of it; others know only fragments. 

In 2013, when the political atmosphere was still more relaxed  than it is today, I gave a book talk attended by university  students. Afterwards, an earnest-looking young man approached  me. ‘Did the government really open fire on the students on June  4, 1989?’ he asked. ‘That was just Western propaganda, wasn't it?’  I have often been struck by the gap between my memories and  their knowledge. 

Personally, I have never regretted what I did in 1989. I was  repeatedly interrogated by the police and suspended from work,  yet it remains the most meaningful thing I have ever done. It  shaped my understanding of China and gave me a lifelong  fascination with politics and power. 

Lijia with her mother and her daughters in front of the city  wall in Nanjing 

Looking back, I do not see June 4 simply as a tragedy. I see it as a  watershed. The movement arose not only from a desire for  democracy and human rights but also from widespread  frustration with everyday life. Corruption was rampant, inflation  was rising, and personal freedom was limited. 

The Party's response was twofold. Politically, it tightened  control. Economically, however, it accelerated reform and  allowed people greater personal freedom. Chinese citizens today  can choose where to live, what careers to pursue and, to a much  greater extent than before, how to live. I have mentioned that I  failed to win promotion partly because of my curly hair. Today,  you can wear whatever hairstyle you like, dye it pink or shave it  off entirely. 

The cage remains, but it has grown so large that many no longer  notice its bars. 

In that sense, the protests of 1989 were not an absolute failure.  Some of the grievances that fuelled them were addressed.  Without that shock, China’s rulers might never have felt  compelled to expand the cage. The Party defeated the  movement, but it has never fully escaped its legacy. It fears  Tiananmen less as an immediate threat than as a memory it  cannot control.

What Tiananmen represents, however, is a challenge to the  Party's preferred narrative. The official story of modern China is  one of stability, prosperity and national rejuvenation under  Communist Party rule. Tiananmen reminds people that there  was another possible path, and another vision of China's future. 

When I was young, the Chinese government encouraged us to  remember past humiliations and injustices. It understood that  memory shapes identity. The same principle applies to  Tiananmen. An event of such magnitude cannot be permanently  erased. It survives in family stories, private conversations,  overseas communities, memoirs and fragments of testimony. 

Lijia Zhang later recounted her experiences as a factory  worker in her memoir Socialism Is Great!, which explores  life inside a Chinese missile factory during the reform era. 

Thirty-seven years later, the Party may have largely succeeded in  making Tiananmen invisible. It has not succeeded in making it  irrelevant. The desire for dignity, fairness and a voice in public  life still persists beneath the surface. When repression becomes  too heavy-handed, people can still push back, as they did during  the White Paper protests of late 2022. 

For me, the events of 1989 remain a reminder of a moment when  millions of Chinese briefly imagined a different future. The tanks  crushed that dream, but they did not entirely extinguish the  questions that inspired it. 

That is why, every year, the censors return to work. Not because  Tiananmen is remembered too much, but because it is  remembered at all.