On June 2, a memorial museum for the Tiananmen Massacre, tentatively called the June 4th Memorial Museum, hosted its opening ceremony in Midtown Manhattan. It commemorates the Tiananmen Massacre, which was a government-mandated crackdown on student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square that killed hundreds, likely thousands, of people. The museum was founded by surviving activists from the 1989 protests and opened its doors two years after officials forced the memorial museum in Hong Kong to close.
The Tiananmen Square demonstrations were a massive wave of protests calling for democracy and freedom of speech and are depicted in the museum through exhibits including photographs of protests hundreds of thousands of people deep, a banner illustrating the infamous Pillar of Shame statue, and the bloodied shirt of an on-site journalist. The protests lasted from April to June of 1989, and at their peak, they amassed over a million protesters in Tiananmen Square at once. However, on June 4th, the Chinese government ended the protests by deploying troops to Tiananmen Square and opening fire on the people present, activists and onlookers alike. The event is now considered taboo by the Chinese Communist Party and discussion of it is strictly banned; the regime imprisons people simply for commemorating it. As a result, the groundbreaking movement and subsequent massacre have been largely forgotten by many young Chinese people, only one generation later.
The artifacts on display were sourced both from a cofounder’s personal collection as well as from the homes of families present at the massacre. One in particular, a mimeograph that protesting students hauled out of the square at the last minute, was kept by one of the students before eventually being transferred to his mother, who shipped it to a cofounder hoping it could educate people about the massacre through the museum. Though these people could not have known in 1989 that the items would be publicly displayed 34 years later, that the artifacts have been preserved and sent to the museum at all is a testament to the collective effort of freedom-loving Chinese people and the continued push for human rights despite government suppression.
After attending the opening ceremony on June 2, I had the opportunity to engage in insightful conversations with two of the museum’s cofounders. To ensure their anonymity, they will be referred to as Cofounder A and Cofounder B throughout this article.
Raising Awareness in the Face of CCP Censorship
The museum’s commemoration holds significance on a global level, as China’s ascent as a major world power amplifies concerns about its human rights issues worldwide. China’s trajectory since 1989 has been determined by the CCP’s ability to survive after brutally slaughtering its citizens in front of the entire world. These circumstances, according to Cofounder B, opened the door to more critical human rights violations, such as the Uyghur concentration camps in Xinjiang. Reflecting on China’s development since 1989, Cofounder B stated that “such a regime that disregards human rights could only be a force of disruption and conflict in the world … That’s why it is so important to commemorate what happened in 1989 because all the important characteristics of today’s China were caused by that crucial moment.” While the Tiananmen Massacre has been erased from much of China’s collective memory, its aftermath, including continued human rights violations and increasingly intense crackdowns on human rights defenders, continue to shape the political landscape of China today. Only through learning about this key moment in China’s history does it become possible to understand China and the current Chinese people’s fight for a free country.
Even within mainland China, such international efforts have the potential to impact the younger generation. Despite rampant government censorship of the Tiananmen Massacre, many young people know how to cross the firewall and get information from outside. Cofounder A remains hopeful that the Internet can provide a conduit through which activists overseas can reach those young people, educate them, and encourage them to speak out. However, as Louisa Lim explains in her 2014 book “The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited,” “the propaganda apparatus has laid the groundwork so well that most students simply have no interest in questioning the government’s version of events.”
Despite being taught about the massacre, a student Lim spoke with was dubious that the government that had brought so much economic growth to China could be wrong. On the other end of the spectrum, Yaqiu Wang, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, described to TIME how seeing photographs of the Tiananmen Massacre online “completely changed her perspective” on the Chinese government. Although the ability to cross the firewall makes it easier to reach young people and fight CCP censorship, it remains difficult to completely convince them of the CCP’s mistake. Hopefully though, with time, activists can influence enough people like Wang who can continue the work started by the demonstrators in 1989, fighting for a free China while spreading the reality of Tiananmen to more young Chinese people.
Mobilizing the New Generation of Chinese People
Although crossing the firewall is possible, the CCP propaganda-based education many Chinese youths receive makes it increasingly more difficult to mobilize them the way students did in 1989. There may be a lot of information available online, but such information can never substitute the impact of being close to and interacting with objects that carry the history of Tiananmen. Sitting with me in the June 4th Exhibit, Cofounder B tells the story of the displayed mimeograph. This object alone “witnessed the tank attack that killed many people, and it experienced the poisonous bombs thrown out by soldiers from the tanks. There is a lot of detail in it that cannot be simply captured by digital information.”
What’s more, the information conveyed by physical items can contradict information online. Even on Wikipedia, the Chinese government has made many efforts to edit information regarding the 1989 protests. Fortunately, Cofounder B states, “physical collections cannot be changed by a keystroke.” The cofounders aim to use the archive at the exhibition, as well as physical newspapers and magazines from 1989, to create a database that not only carries the massacre’s history within each object but that is resilient against distortion and censorship. Beyond the Manhattan exhibition, Cofounder B hopes to expand this archival project by creating a smaller, mobile exhibition that can be transported worldwide and brought to talks and conferences regarding June 4. After all, the Tiananmen Massacre and the suppression of human rights in China is not merely a Chinese issue, but a global one.
Currently, China is experiencing a new wave of peaceful protests through the White Paper Movement, which began in 2022 to protest the government’s restrictive and deadly zero-COVID policies. However, as Cofounder A explains, a key difference between this movement and that of 1989 is organization. While the Tiananmen Square protests were highly organized with designated student leaders, the White Paper protests are quite decentralized due to heightened government repression. Many Chinese people are engaging in grassroots organizing, but it is impossible to form a large and long-lasting group the way students did in 1989. This is not only due to censorship, but a massive increase in surveillance and crackdowns on protests post-Tiananmen. Five days after the massacre, then-CCP leader Deng Xiaoping announced to the troops that “from now on, we should pay attention when handling such problems. As soon as a trend emerges, we should not allow it to spread.” This declaration marked a change in the Chinese government’s strategy regarding protests; any political dissent gets shut down quickly, instead of being given the time to publicly grow like the demonstrations at Tiananmen.
Still, one tool that helps activists organize despite decentralization is the Internet. Cofounder B describes how, although they are restricted from acting themselves, many Chinese people use the Internet to follow along with social movements. “It is very easy to participate if you identify yourself with certain groups. That’s why when the right moment arrives, people come out from unexpected places.” Although the lack of a centralized organization makes it difficult to coordinate, the Internet connects people both across China and internationally, letting them follow the current social movement and act together when possible.
Even then, the Internet is not a perfect solution. A lack of clear organization can be disadvantageous while a movement is in progress, but even more so once it has ended. Cofounder A expresses this worry, explaining that when a movement ends or spreads across multiple countries, decentralization is no longer appropriate because “demonstrators can no longer find one another.” As such, Cofounder B insists on the importance of “complement[ing] the decentralized organizations, which are driven by the Internet, with underground organizations that form real trust over a longer time.”
Learning from History to Influence the Future
Despite differences in organizational structure, the current generation of protestors can still learn a lot from the 1989 movement and the activists who led it. When I asked about the lessons he learned from Tiananmen, Cofounder A replied, “If a social movement is to be successful, it will require long-term enlightenment of a majority of people.” One reason he cites for the failure of the 1989 protests is that the Chinese public was largely indifferent to the movement; mostly only students and Beijing citizens took part. To succeed, “we still need a lot of time to do enlightenment work.” The June 4th Exhibit’s role in achieving such “enlightenment” among the masses thus cannot be ignored. Beyond pushing past censorship to teach people about China’s history, the education it provides can help lay the groundwork for more successful movements to come.
The information provided by the exhibit is not the only way young Chinese activists can learn about their country’s history. Cofounder B plays an active role in working with these young activists through his NGOs, giving them an in-depth view of the state of Chinese human rights and connecting them with prominent rights defenders. To him, “It is our duty to help these young people who are willing to work for a free China. Even if they do not follow our experiences, it is still important for them to know what we have tried and failed. It doesn’t mean that they should not try what we failed to do, just that maybe they can try it in a different way.” We are already seeing evidence of the inspiration that new demonstrators take from the older generation. The man on Sutong Bridge who started the White Paper Movement had been studying carefully, online, what had happened in China in 1989. Through the cyberspace of freedom- and democracy-loving Chinese people, he learned how to take action and speak up.
Even when it seems like nothing can be done on the mainland — for example, the White Paper Movement was dormant for a long time in China while it was active overseas, particularly on American college campuses — Chinese people are using the Internet to watch and learn. So, when protests picked up in China, the people knew what to do and what slogans to shout. The importance of this international connection is why the June 4th Exhibition’s location in the United States is so vital. It is because we have the freedom to act here that people in the mainland can have the conversations that begin a social movement and can subsequently act together when the time is right.
For Cofounder A, “all political transitions in all countries need mass protests.” As one iteration of these mass protests takes shape through the White Paper Movement, it seems increasingly possible to achieve the freedom that these activists were fighting for in 1989. In fact, Xi Jinping began rolling back zero-COVID policies in the face of the White Paper Protests, demonstrating that the CCP is not, in fact, invincible. While Cofounder B is not sure what exactly would be required to attain a democratic China, he believes it is “definitely closer than what most people realize. The fact that the CCP is so paranoid, so afraid, means that they are weaker than people believe.”
Of course, the challenge of defeating this regime is unprecedented due to its never-before-seen levels of global technology and business reach. In response, new movements will have to adapt accordingly, which is a process that Cofounder B believes will require a combination of people both inside of and outside of mainland China. Although people overseas cannot take direct action in China, they are privileged in that they can freely discuss Chinese politics, a factor that facilitates such on-the-ground action. That is why a museum such as this one is vital. Places like it, alongside ideologically-aligned organizations and online communities of freedom-loving Chinese people, keep the narrative of a free China alive. In the face of censorship and suppression, it is this narrative and continued hope, as well as the interpersonal connection such sites create, that allow Chinese human rights activism to continue.
Image byMarkus Winkler licensed under the Unsplash License.
