Tiananmen and the power of history

By Kyung Moon Hwang

We are about to mark the 27th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pro-democracy protesters in China’s capital city. When I say “we” I am speaking in general terms, but this would exclude the people in China today, who are forbidden from even mentioning this event.

Courageous people in Hong Kong over the years have persisted in observing this anniversary, but they, too, are feeling increasing pressure from the authoritarian Chinese state. In an extraordinary violation of minimal global standards, Hong Kong publishers and journalists have even been kidnapped by mainland Chinese agents, including in foreign countries, for exercising their rights to expression.

Why is the Chinese government so afraid? It has a lot to do with the power of history, and here we find some striking comparisons to what has happened in Korea, in both North and South, as well as in the East Asian region as a whole.

The recent visit, for example, by U.S. President Obama to Hiroshima, the site of the first atomic bombing in August 1945, highlighted the major stakes of historical memory.

Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo used the visit to reinforce Japan’s victimhood, even as many of his own citizens have condemned his ongoing attempts to recast history to minimize the impact of Japanese militarism in World War II. Alas, they have been in the minority within the postwar Japanese population’s broader ignorance, pushed by the government, of Japan’s aggression and atrocities in the first half of the 20th century.

Abe, the grandson of a member of the war-mongering cabinet of Tojo Hideki, is pursuing an agenda of rewriting the postwar pacifist constitution through appeals to a skewed nationalist understanding of history. This is a sure sign of a state’s authoritarian character, when it engages in manipulating, concealing, and controlling history.

The autocratic Chinese government’s official response to the Obama visit, naturally, was to deploy the nationalism card and issue reminders of Japan’s barbarous “Rape of Nanjing” in 1937. But the ruling Chinese Communist Party has itself misrepresented history even more blatantly.

The main problem is what to do with Mao Zedong, the founder of the party, the leader of communist China from 1949 to his death in 1976, and the perpetrator of state actions that killed tens of millions of innocent Chinese people. While some terrible aspects of Mao’s Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 have been officially recognized, acknowledgment of the human cost of this insanity and of the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s have been stifled.

This is because an open accounting of this history would further jeopardize the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party itself. This is what happens in dictatorships, and such an official effort to cover up and fabricate history appears only to be intensifying under the current Chinese leader, Xi Jinping.

The king of historical fabrication in order to sustain absolutist dictatorship, of course, was Kim Il-sung, the leader of North Korea for half a century before his death in 1994. He actually copied Mao in instituting his own rule, but Kim went even further in falsifying history by claiming that he personally brought about Korea’s liberation from Japan in 1945 and single-handedly achieved victory over the U.S. in the Korean War.

The Chinese intervention in the Korean War is what actually saved the North, but beginning in the 1960s the North Korean official account (there is no other) began eliminating even the contributions of their Chinese allies.

Otherwise the autocratic playbook was similar: In order to divert attention away from the people’s miseries, the North Korean regime, like that of China, turned to the politics of fear, based on the nation’s historical victimization by the outside world.

Whether it was the United States, “the West,” Japan, or internal enemies collaborating with foreigners, externally-generated forces constantly destroyed or threatened to destroy the country in recent history, so said the official perspective.

This required, then, a great leader or a heroic party to repel these forces and overturn historical injustices, but only if the people stood together vigilantly to support the leadership. Such was the approach of totalitarian rulers such as Hitler and Stalin, as well as of Mao and Kim. It depended on a militarized regimentation of society under a personality cult, which usually found its logical end in disastrous military adventures and eventually overrode the rationale for empowering these men in the first place.

Before South Koreans rest assured that their country does not follow this course, they should consider what is taking place right now with their current government, which is attempting similar efforts to manipulate and homogenize historical understanding.

This is part of a larger movement over the past decade or so to whitewash the country’s troubled past in order to legitimatize the present structures of privilege.

Openness to the past, however, should stay at the forefront of concerns and hence further contribute to consolidating a democratic culture in South Korea.

Democratization, in 1987, came 27 years after the April student revolution of 1960, which like Tiananmen sacrificed hundreds but showed early on the people’s determination to resist dictatorship. Whatever factors led to the democratic breakthrough ― such as economic growth or a greater awareness of stark inequalities borne of history ― one hopes that China, now 27 years after Tiananmen, can follow a parallel path and finally realize its own democratization.

Kyung Moon Hwang is professor in the Departments of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Southern California. He is the author of “A History of Korea ― An Episodic Narrative” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). The Korean translation was published as 황경문, “맥락으로 읽는 새로운 한국사” (21세기 북스, 2011).