The Chinese Communist Party and Google
THE CCP regime has brushed off Google’s complaints about hacking into the Google email accounts of Chinese human rights activists, imposing political censorship on Google’s search engine, and seeking to steal invaluable Google codes. The Beijing government responded that it did not hack into Google and that Google should respect Chinese law—that is, the commands of an authoritarian regime that are intended to preserve its monopoly of arbitrary power.
Ever since Hu Jintao became the paramount leader in 2002, he has intensified repression and behaved with more hostility toward t... More
Two Decades After the Fall: Patterns of Chinese Protest--1919,1989, 2009
CHINA HAS a long, rich tradition—or, rather, multiple overlapping traditions—of dissent. For centuries prior to the 1949 Revolution, which culminated in the founding of the People’s Republic of China, aggrieved villagers and urbanites employed an array of tactics, ranging from rioting over tax rates to going to the capital with petitions detailing the failings of local officials. This varied repertoire continually evolved, and whenever new complaints arose or novel technologies of communication became available, innovations were made and familiar forms were updated. Since the revoluti... More
Two Decades After the Fall: Visions of the Pro-democracy Movement
THE POPULAR movement in 1989 marked the peak of the Enlightenment project in modern China. Chinese struggles for Enlightenment started in the iconic May 4 movement of 1919. Like the movement in 1989, it was led by students and it started in Tiananmen Square. It celebrated the Enlightenment ideals of democracy and science, even as it attacked western imperialism and Confucian culture. The protesters in 1989 proclaimed themselves to be the true heirs of the May 4 Movement and fought for the same ideals.
The military crackdown on June 4, 1989 shattered their dreams. Disillusionme... More
Ten Days in Tiananmen Square
In 1989, I went to China out of personal interest and believed the events in Tiananmen Square would be over by the time I’d arrived. The protest in Tiananmen had been in progress for some weeks prior to my arrival and in the ten days I was there, I moved freely ... More
The Day After: Obama and China
OBAMA-MANIA IS gripping much of the world, and there are high hopes that an Obama presidency will restore faith in the American dream. In China, that dream was crushed by tanks in Tiananmen Square nearly two decades ago. Can Obama bring it back?
What we can say here in Beijing is that Obama’s victory hasn’t killed off the dream. As one graduate student in my department put it shortly before the election, “If Obama loses this game, I don’t know what I will say about democracy.” He was thrilled with Obama’s victory, drawing the implication that the change of guard shows “the importan... More
A Visit to a Confucian Academy
In a moment of wishful thinking, I once speculated that the Chinese Communist Party might rename itself the Chinese Confucian Party in the next decade or two. Marxism is dead as a legitimizing political philosophy. The CCP is not about to embrace liberal democracy, and Confucianism seemed like the obvious alternative. Over the last couple of years, the “Confucianization” of the party has intensified and the gap between the is and the ought may be closing. The Confucian classics are being taught at party schools, the educational curriculum is being modified to teach more Confuc... More
Debating Democracy Promotion in China
SHOULD FOREIGN politicians and critics participate in the promotion of democracy in countries like China and Burma? Or should liberalization and pro-democratic change come from within? Daniel A. Bell and Michael Walzer debate the role the international community should play in China.
Daniel A. Bell - Michael Walzer - Daniel A. Bell’s Response
Tibet in Exile: An Interview with Pico Iyer
BORN IN Oxford, raised in California, a resident of Japan, Pico Iyer has captured his itinerant life with books and essays that document his journeys to Nepal, Cuba, and most recently, Tibet. He speaks with Dissent’s Jon Wiener (“The Weatherman Temptation,” spring 2007) about his new book, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.
Jon Wiener: There are six million Tibetans. But you write in your new book that Tibet today is “slipping ever closer to extinction.” Those are chilling words.
Pico Iyer: I wish they ... MoreOlympic Boycott: Beijing and Berlin
Almost everywhere the Olympic torch goes on its 21-country, 85,000-mile relay from Athens to Beijing, it runs into demonstrators protesting China’s occupation of Tibet and its role in the genocide in Darfur. In London, thirty-five demonstrators were arrested by the police after numerous clashes, and in Paris, the Olympic flame was extinguished five times before those carrying it canceled their relay run.
A similar set of events took place in San Francisco, the Olympic torch’s one stop in America. The day before the torch arrived activists unfurled “Free Tibet” banners on... More
Debating Tibet: A Reply to Michael Walzer
Let me add a few thoughts to Michael Walzer’s insightful comment “The Tibetan Intifada.” As Walzer says, one clear difference between Tibet and Palestine is that a two-state solution is not possible in China, nor is it requested by the Dalai Lama. But there are other differences. The Chinese government has been pumping money into Tibet rather than driving it into poverty: GDP has been rising an average of 12 percent per annum since 2000, and incomes have also been rising with double-digit growth recorded for both rural and urban residents (see Ben Hillman, “Money Can... More
The Tibetan Intifada
What happened in Tibet and the neighboring provinces might best be called an intifada. I won’t attempt a comparison with the first and second Palestinian intifadas (the first is closer to the Tibetan uprising, though it lasted much longer and probably involved a larger proportion of the population). But I want to tell the Tibetan story with the Palestinian story in the back of my mind.
We don’t have much detailed information about the recent demonstrations or about the repression. Accounts from Tibetan sources tell of peaceful marches broken up by police and soldiers w... More
Back to the Future: 2008 Olympics
CHINA’S ECONOMY IS booming like never before and its social fabric is being ripped apart and knit together in novel ways. State-of-the-art sports stadiums, a renovated airport terminal, and a new financial district have been built or are under construction in pre-Olympic Beijing, where there’s even been talk of seeding rain clouds to limit pollution... More
On the New Turn in China
[This article appeared in Dissent’s Fall 1989 issue]
This may hardly be the ideal moment for general reflections on the significance of the present tragic turn in Chinese affairs. The brutal repression in Tiananmen Square was a decisive event, but the shape of things to come is still not entirely clear even though the signs are increasingly ominous.
Before I deal with the recent events, I want to say some... More
China!
What strikes one most of all about these remarkable events is the sudden upsurge of energy and flowering of... More
Beijing Spring: An Eyewitness Account
[This article appeared in Dissent’s Fall 1989 issue]
THE CLIMAX OF China’s spring 1989 student protest movement is well known, at least outside of China. Troops acting to clear Tiananmen Square of protesters and enforce marital law succeeded in their charge, firing automatic assault weapons on unarmed citizens and sometimes wildly into neighboring buildings. People were crushed under the tracks of armored personnel carriers as they moved in to smash the statue of the “Goddess of Democracy” that had come almost overnight to symbolize the movement. Some students tried non... More
