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The Tiananmen Vision The slogans from 1989 were only slogans. That is, the students did not publish extensive essays about what political reforms they wanted. You could read their slogans in different ways. "Down with old-man government": That means "Get rid of the Elders." "Allow free press." "Eliminate corruption." "Have elections. " What was their vision? I think that to interpret it you have to place their words and actions in context, keeping in mind the political background we have been discussing and the writings of those intellectuals in the 1970s and 1980s who were influential among the students. Those intellectuals were the students' patron saints—Yan Jiaqi, for example, who was head of the political-science institute in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; and Fang Lizhi, an astrophysicist at Beijing University, who had promoted the idea of democracy. He has been called China's Sakharov. When you compare the students' vision with what intellectuals like these men had written in the 1970s and 1980s, you see that the students' ideas are in the mainstream of Chinese democratic thinking. At one point Fang visited the United States. (He now lives in the United States.) While he was living here as a visitor, the congressman for the district in which he resided sent a newsletter to every postbox, including Fang's. Fang wrote something like, "You see how the public servants in the United States are so interested in serving the public? A congressman sends to me a report on his work, and I'm not even a citizen." Of course, from an American's perspective, the congressman was just abusing the franking privilege, sending his newsletters everywhere for public relations. Fang appreciated this, though, seeing it as evidence of the loyalty American politicians have for their constituents, of how a government can work hand in hand with citizens and create this energy. |
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