일반 중국인들에게는 잊혀진 6.4를 기억하는 사람들

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In China, the Tiananmen Square massacre is not taught in any textbook, aired on any television channel or marked by any monument. But 30 years on, it remains vivid in the subconscious of the People’s Republic. Why?

This is a question that has followed me since coming to China as a reporter in 1994, shortly after the fifth anniversary of what is known here simply by two numbers, 6/4, shorthand for the date of the crackdown on June 4, 1989. Late the night before and early that morning, government soldiers fought their way into downtown Beijing, using tanks, armored personnel carriers and live ammunition. Their target: Tiananmen Square, where peaceful protesters had been camped out for nearly two months, giving voice to many people’s hopes for a more open society.

Since then, the government has tried its best to make 6/4 a non-date. Every year, in the month or two leading up to the day, it rounds up dissidents, harasses victims’ relatives, silences journalists and stations soldiers on street corners. If pushed to explain its position in 1989, the government argues that the students were radicals who had to be cleared away and that any violence was initiated by them or their defenders, who attacked soldiers, burned tanks and created chaos.

That is, of course, a classic blame-the-victim argument — hardly credible and slightly repulsive. But on some level it has taken hold. As the journalist Louisa Lim describes in her 2014 book, “The People’s Republic of Amnesia,” most Chinese people are unaware of the massacre, and among those who know of it, some see it as a regrettable, embarrassing outlier — perhaps as some Americans might see the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam in 1968.


And yet the memory of that night in Beijing three decades ago hasn’t died away. Many people feel a sense of outrage: There was no justification for using armed soldiers, and decades of supercharged economic growth will not wash away the stain left by that reckless decision, not until there is some sort of apology or reckoning.

This view is not limited to a few dissidents or foreign scholars, people out to make China look bad or who just can’t let bygones be bygones. The memory of Tiananmen is also being kept alive by people in China who believe that a government that uses force to stay in power is illegitimate.

Many are expressing their views through a new trend: unofficial history. People who aren’t professional historians have taken it upon themselves to preserve the memories of the country’s many killings, famines, uprisings and government crackdowns — 6/4 is just one. These are writers, filmmakers, poets, artists, songwriters and public intellectuals. Some create on the margins of society, their works immediately banned and often only shown or published abroad. Others have one foot in the mainstream and try to spread their ideas in China, typically through social media.

In recent years, I’ve written about several of these people, such as the artist Hu Jie or the scholar Ai Xiaoming, who have made groundbreaking documentaries on political persecution. Others, like Guo Yuhua, a sociology professor at Tsinghua University, or Jiang Xue, an investigative journalist, write on social media about government expropriation of farmers’ land or the plight of China’s persecuted human rights lawyers. Many of their posts and accounts are blocked, but they often manage to start new ones and spread their message.


In his new book, “Minjian: The Rise of China’s Grassroots Intellectuals,” the French historian Sebastian Veg describes these 21st-century amateur activists. (“Minjian” means “among the people.”) Mr. Veg shows how Tiananmen caused a historic rift. In imperial China and during the first 40 years of Communist rule, intellectuals defined themselves in relation to the state, sometimes working heroically against it but always while remaining dependent on it in some way.
Minjian historians are less elitist. They earn their own money or benefit from independent think tanks or patrons, and they write about local or specific subjects: migrant workers, victims of the Mao era, targets of religious persecution, dispossessed farmers — “the silent majority,” according to the novelist Wang Xiaobo.

These thinkers are aided by technology. Bill Clinton famously quipped that trying to control the internet was like trying to “nail Jell-O to the wall,” but China, like many other countries, has controlled it to some extent. Yet technology does play a huge role in the persistence of memory. It’s through digitized movie cameras that Mr. Hu and Ms. Ai can make their documentary films at affordable prices, and through the Web that they can upload them. Those films may be blocked in China, but they are accessible to the tens of millions of Chinese thought to use VPN software to bypass government controls.

Simpler technologies are also extremely effective. Remembrance, an independent history magazine, has published widely on some of the most sensitive issues in recent Chinese history using a modern form of samizdat. Its articles are collated into a PDF and emailed to friends and supporters. They, in turn, forward the document by email or via messaging services like WeChat. Issues are archived on websites overseas, accessible to anyone in China with a VPN.

As for Tiananmen, the grass-roots historian Liao Yiwu has just published in English a book of interviews, “Bullets and Opium: Real-Life Stories of China After the Tiananmen Square Massacre,” that challenges how we think of those events. (I wrote the introduction.) While the protests are often portrayed as a quixotic battle by romantic students, Mr. Liao shows that it was working-class Beijingers who made the supreme sacrifice: throwing their bodies in front of the tanks to protect the students and the cause they represented.

On Friday, the Hong Kong-based New Century Press published unseen top-secret documents of a key meeting of the Chinese Communist Party that took place two weeks after the massacre. The documents show how top officials groveled before the supreme leader Deng Xiaoping, promising to support his decision to use force and to depose Zhao Ziyang, a moderate leader.

History is also written with the smallest of gestures. Every spring I make a small trip to the Babaoshan cemetery in the western suburbs of Beijing to pay respects to two victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre: Wu Xiangdong, a 21-year-old fatally shot by troops on the night of June 3-4, 1989, and his father Wu Xuehan, who died of grief six years later.

I never met them, but I knew the vivacious Xu Jue, Xiangdong’s mother and Xuehan’s wife. The police would sometimes escort her to the cemetery, sometimes try to prevent her from making the journey at all. She usually succeeded and in front of her husband’s grave would always place 27 flowers.

Four lines of the poem inscribed on the back of Xuehan’s tombstone explain, in a code of sorts, both the cause of his death and Xu Jue’s ritual:

Eight calla lilies

Nine yellow chrysanthemums

Six white tulips

Four red roses
Eight, nine, six, four. Year, month, day. June 4, 1989.

Two years ago, Ms. Xu died of cancer, at 77. Both years since, I’ve made the trip to the graves, thinking someone ought to put out the flowers. Each time, the 27 flowers were already there, tied in a neat bundle. Someone remembered. Someone always remembers.

Ian Johnson, a Beijing-based writer, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his China coverage. His most recent book is “The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao.”


在中国，天安门大屠杀不会在任何教科书中出现，不会在任何电视频道播放，也不会有任何纪念碑。但30年过去了，那个事件在中华人民共和国的潜意识里依然栩栩如生。这是为什么呢？
1994年该事件的五周年纪念日刚刚过去不久，我以记者的身份来到中国。此后这个问题就一直萦绕在我的脑海里。在这里，人们用两个简单的数字指代这一事件：“六四”，也就是1989年6月4日镇压发生的日子。前一天深夜和当天凌晨，政府的士兵开着坦克和装甲运兵车，荷枪实弹地进入了北京市中心。他们的目标是天安门广场，和平的抗议者已占据广场近两个月了，表达出许多人对更加开放社会的希望。
从那以后，政府一直在想尽办法让“六四”这个日子不复存在。每年，在这一天到来之前的一两个月里，政府会围捕异见人士，骚扰遇难者家属，让记者保持沉默，并派兵镇守街头。如果不得不解释其1989年立场的话，政府会争辩说，那些学生是激进分子，必须清除出场，所有暴力都是由他们或他们的保护者挑起的，他们袭击了士兵，烧毁了坦克，制造了混乱。
当然，这是一个典型的指责受害者的论点——几乎不可信，而且有点令人厌恶。但在某种程度上，它已成为固定的说法。正如记者林慕莲(Louisa Lim)在2014年发表的《失忆人民共和国》(The People’s Republic of Amnesia)一书中所描述的那样，大多数中国人并不知道这场大屠杀，在知道的人中，有些人认为那是令人遗憾、令人尴尬的异常情况——或许与一些美国人对1968年发生在南越美莱村的屠杀(the My Lai massacre)看法可能类似。

然而，人们对30年前北京那个晚上的记忆并没有消失。许多人感到愤慨：使用武装士兵是没有道理的，几十年的高速经济增长也不会洗去那个鲁莽决定留下的污点，除非有某种形式的道歉或清算。
这种观点并不局限于少数异见人士或外国学者，想让中国难堪的人，或是那些不能让过去的事情过去的人。那些认为靠武力来维持政权的政府不合法的中国民众，也在保持着天安门事件的记忆。
许多人在通过一种新方式来表达他们的观点：非官方的历史。并非专业历史学家的人已经承担起责任，来保存这个国家的许多杀戮、饥荒、反抗和政府镇压的记忆——“六四”只是其中之一。这些人中有作家、电影制作人、诗人、艺术家、歌词作者，以及公共知识分子。其中有些人在社会的边缘创作，他们的作品出来后马上就被禁止，通常只能在国外展出或出版。还有些人没有完全离开主流，仍试图在中国传播他们的想法，通常是通过社交媒体。
近年来，我写过一些这样的人，比如艺术家胡杰或学者艾晓明，他们制作了关于中国政治迫害的开拓性纪录片。其他一些人在社交媒体上写关于政府征用农民土地，或中国受迫害的人权律师困难处境的文章，比如清华大学社会学教授郭于华和调查记者江雪。他们经常被删帖，被销号，但他们往往能设法建立新账号，继续传播他们的想法。
法国历史学家魏简(Sebastian Veg)在他的新书《民间：中国草根知识分子的兴起》(Minjian: The Rise of China’s Grassroots Intellectuals)中描述了这些21世纪的非专业活动人士。魏简展示了天安门事件如何导致了一个历史性的裂痕。在中国的各朝各代以及共产党执政的头40年，知识分子对自己的定义总是相对于国家的，虽然他们有时勇敢地反对国家，但总是以某种方式依存于国家。
民间历史学家没有那么精英主义。他们自己挣钱养活自己，或受益于独立的智库或资助者，他们写地方上的故事或特定主题的文章：农民工、毛泽东时代的受害者、宗教迫害的对象、被剥夺了土地的农民——用已故作家王小波的话，他们写的是“沉默的大多数”。

这些有想法的人得益于技术的帮助。比尔·克林顿(Bill Clinton)说过一句有名的俏皮话：试图控制互联网就像试图“把果冻钉在墙上”，但中国和许多其他国家已在一定程度上控制了互联网。然而，技术在记忆的持久性上确实起了很大的作用。胡杰和艾晓明用数码电影摄像机拍摄纪录片，这种花销他们负担得起，数码文件还可以上传到网上。这些片子在中国也许被屏蔽了，但据信有数千万中国人使用VPN软件绕过政府的网络控制，看到他们拍的纪录片。
更简单的技术也非常有效。《记忆》是一本独立的历史杂志，它以地下出版物的现代形式，就中国近代史上一些最敏感的问题发表范围广泛的文章。每期的文章被整理成一个PDF文件，通过电子邮件发送给朋友和支持者。这些人再通过电子邮件或微信之类的短信服务把文件转发出去。每期杂志都在海外网站上存档，中国国内的任何人都可以通过VPN访问这些网站。
至于天安门事件，草根历史学家廖亦武刚刚用英文出版了一本采访集，书名是《子弹和鸦片：天安门大屠杀后中国的真实故事》(Bullets and Opium: Real-Life Stories of China After the Tiananmen Square Massacre)，这本书对我们如何看待“六四”提出了挑战。（我写了序言。）虽然抗议活动通常被描绘成浪漫的学子进行的一场堂吉诃德式的战斗，但廖亦武告诉人们，做出最大牺牲的是北京的工人阶级：为了保护学生及其代表的事业，工人们站到了坦克前。
上周五，总部位于香港的新世纪出版社(New Century Press)发表了以前未发表过的绝密文件，是中共在大屠杀两周后召开的一次重要会议的记录。文件显示了高层官员怎样对最高领导人邓小平俯首帖耳，许诺支持他使用武力、罢免温和派领导人赵紫阳的决定。
历史也是用最细微的动作书写的。每年春天，我都会去北京西郊的八宝山公墓，向两名“六四”大屠杀的受害者表示敬意：1989年6月3日至4日夜间被军队开枪打死的21岁的吴向东，以及六年后在悲痛中去世的父亲吴学汉。
我从来没有见过他们，但我认识性格活泼的徐珏，她是向东的母亲、学汉的妻子。警察有时护送她去墓地，有时干脆试图阻止她前往。她通常会成功地来到墓地，并总会在她丈夫的墓前摆上27朵鲜花。


刻在学汉墓碑后面的四行诗像是一种密码，解释了他的死因和徐珏的习惯做法：
“八枝马蹄莲
九朵黄菊花
六枝白郁金香
四朵红玫瑰”
八、九、六、四。年、月、日。1989年6月4日。

两年前，徐珏因癌症去世，享年77岁。在她去世后的两年里，每年我都去了墓地，我觉得应该有人来摆花。每次，那27多花都已经摆好了，整整齐齐地绑在一起。有人记得。总会有人记得。

张彦(Ian Johnson)是一名驻北京的作家，曾于2001年因其对中国的报道获得普利策奖。他著有新书《中国的灵魂：毛之后的宗教回归》(The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao)。