Post tag: Tiananmen Square
Retreat from the Future

Retreat from the FutureThe Marlowsphere Blog (#133)

There we were in the second half of the 20th century, having experienced the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan that ended WWII, and watched in the late 1970s a pivot towards the west by Communist China following the 1976 demise of dictator Mao Tse-tung (Zedong), and in 1989 even as we watched the horror of Tiananmen Square, we also watched the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. We saw the creation of the European Union, the death of South African Apartheid, the shrinkage of nuclear weapons on a worldwide scale, the expansion of democracies, the diminution of illiteracy to about 15% of the world’s population, and the increase of global trade, so-called globalism.

We also saw a further exploration of space and the rise of a few non-governmental organizations investing in the exploration of space. The Higgs Boson, the so-called “god particle” was confirmed and the “repaired” Hubble Telescope peered closer and closer into the origins of this universe. The future of generations to come appeared to be bright.

But here we are in 2016 and the reverse appears to be true. In 2001, on 9/11, Al Qaeda terrorists took over two commercial airplanes and destroyed the Twin Towers in New York City (this wasn’t their first attempt). There are now terrorist groups in BREXITAfrica, e.g., Boko Haram, and in Russia, and in the Philippines, and in France, and in Belgium, among others. It has taken over eight years for the United States and other contingent countries to recover from the “mortgage crisis of 2008.” Britain has just voted to leave the European Union, the so-called “Brexit,” and in the United States the upcoming national election pits a politician, Hillary Clinton, with decades of regional, national and international experience, against an entertainer, real estate magnate Donald Trump, who has decades of experience on reality television. His vision of the future is to retreat from it by building walls between the United States and Mexico, to undo our trade agreements with other countries, and to (possibly) use nuclear weapons against our enemies (whomever they might be).

Elsewhere in the world, terrorists’ attacks have governments and peoples nervous about open borders and immigration issues resulting in the loss of jobs in one place only to turn up for less pay in other places. Local and regional wars have made millions of people homeless. The disparity between the so-called 1% (the haves) and the rest of the world (the have nots) grows deeper with every year. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the middle class is getting screwed.

Further, the Internet is not creating a level playing field. It is allowing those with the technical know-how and marketing imagination to create platforms wherein users create content for free and the owners of the servers housing the platform very rich.

It is a gross irony that while some countries, like the United States, parts of the European Union, Japan, and China are exploring space both within and without our solar system, several tribal cultures, such ISIS and the Taliban, are more concerned with what women should wear in public, women’s subservient role in their society, and a strict adherence to the word of Allah. Also, in the Middle East extremist Jews and extremist Palestinians are at war over who should own what territory. In Saudi Arabia, despite their ostensible acceptance of western trade, there is an adherence to an anachronistic extreme form of Islam, so-called Wahhabism. The so-called Kingdom funds this form of Islam with millions of dollars and proselytize their point of view wherever possible.

Headline: Civil Rights Bill Becomes LawAnd in the United States, the chasm between predominantly white police forces and young mostly unarmed African-Americans appears to have exploded into the headlines and into television and radio news broadcasts in the last several years. The Civil Rights Acts were passed decades ago, but the blatant racism expressed by the shooting of unarmed black males by white police officers appears to have become a common occurrence, even in the historical context of an African-American president in the White House.

Q: Is America, is the world retreating from what seemed to be a        brighter future a generation ago?
A: Yes, it is. Or that’s the way it seems.

My view is that the world is experiencing a period of retreat from the future into a period of tribalism. And it is not recent. It has been building for some time, perhaps ever since the commercial introduction of the telegraph in 1844. This was the world’s first electronic communications medium that could transmit information from one point to another at the speed of light. In the mid-20thcentury photonic technologies were introduced (these are technologies based on photons as opposed to electrons). These combined technologies have bumped up the speed of communication and transport of goods and services and with them cultural values on a global basis. Cultures around the world where the literacy rate is lower and much lower than it is in more developed nations are repulsed by this invasion of outside cultural values. It is anathema to their entrenched cultural values. And, in turn, we are repulsed by their reactions, such as when we hear about honor killings in remote parts of India, and the mutilation of female genitalia in parts of Africa.

Even in places that are so-called developed nations there is a retreat into tribalism. The Brexit vote is one example, the rise of neo-fascism in Germany, and the increasing rejection of Islamic leaning peoples in France are other examples. It is a retreat borne out of deep fear—a fear that one’s family and community values are being tested, challenged, upended, and revealed as untrue or unfounded.

People don’t want change even when it is beneficial in the long-run to the greater whole. The speed of light technologies that now are increasingly circling the planet have thrown opposing cultural values into the same economic pot and have created such fear among the members of opposing tribes that it is engendering violence.

Global DiversityAnd this phase of planetary cultural evolution will not go away quickly. It will be with us for a while, perhaps a generation of two. Until peoples of different cultural stripes begin to accept that the future is about the integration of cultural values, even the loss and rejection of some values—such as religious and political beliefs—there will be a retreat from the future. Accepting that change is the constant, that change is the way of the universe, a universe we are just beginning to learn about, is a deeply painful process.

This view parallels the structure of scientific revolutions. First, there is rejection of facts that contravene the prevailing view, then there is anger and battles over what is true and what is not true, then ultimate acceptance of the new factual context. We are looking at a generation or two of battles over what is true and what is not true. If world history is any arbiter, progress will prevail, but only after many more have died for their antiquated beliefs and many more have died defending the values of the future.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
September 5, 2016

© Eugene Marlow 2016

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Tiananmen Remembered

Tiananmen RememberedThe Marlowsphere Blog (#101)

The following blog is excerpted from Marlow’s forthcoming book Jazz in the Land of the Dragon.

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June 4, 2014 people in several parts of the world overtly demonstrated their remembrance of the massacre at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China that took place on the same day in 1989. In China itself, any overt expression criticizing the Chinese government’s so-called crackdown on “counter-revolutionary” dissidents on June 4 25 years ago was suppressed. There were no news announcements and any reference to that event on the Internet was shut down.

June 4, 1989 in Tiananmen Square was a demonstration of the pro-democracy movement, mostly by university students. The Chinese government could not tolerate this overt expression of the younger generation’s desire for change and reform. It sent in tanks. Hundreds died. The actual number is not known.

I visited Tiananmen Square in the summer of 2006. Its size is mind-boggling. It is filled in places with statuary glorifying the 1949 revolution. It was created as a square for the people. On June 4, 1989 it became a battlefield perfect for tank warfare.

In my forthcoming book Jazz in the Land of the Dragon two Americans—Mary Ann Hurst and Dennis Rea—recount their experience of that time in Chinese history: Ms. Hurst in Shanghai, Rea in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in Southwest China.

Jazz Singer Mary Ann Hurst:

Mary Ann Hurst, Jazz SingerThe first time Ms. Hurst was in China was as a student in 1981-82, just five years after the death of Mao and the beginning of the opening of China. She arrived in Shanxi Province in Taiyuan in the mid-central part of China, about 12-16 hours on the train south of Beijing.

The second time Hurst went to China was in 1985 as a commercial tour guide for Pacific Delight Tours. She took American tourists over in the summer. And then from 1986 to 1989, she went over every summer with the University of Minnesota. She administered an arts program in Hangzhou. It was the only program in the world at the time that had a study abroad program in China for credit.

The program ended in 1989 because of Tiananmen Square. She described the sequence of events as it affected her:

It was ’89, the night of June 4th. We flew into Japan. We were taking a group in and we were in Japan when Tiananmen Square happened. The television was full of news on what was going on in China, and we couldn’t get out of Japan because they weren’t letting flights into China. Finally there was a JAL pilot who flew us in the next day. There were seven people on a 747 going into China, and my boss let me go in because we had one student who got in there before everyone else did. I went in to get him out.

There were, what they called dazibao, big character posters everywhere. Whenever there’s a tragedy or a death or some huge undertaking in China, they pull out the calligraphers and people make these huge signs out of Chinese characters and hang them from buildings. Dazibao-Big Character PostersThere was calligraphy everywhere hanging from buildings, announcing what was going on in Beijing. This is in Shanghai.

They were saying, ‘Do you believe what Li Peng is telling us about our brothers and sisters in Beijing?’ Li Peng was the leader who allowed the tanks to go into Tiananmen Square. There were people with megaphones on corners in Shanghai—it was amazing—announcing what was going on in Beijing. The whole city of Shanghai was covered with posters like that.

What was the feeling among the people there?  Pro‑government? Anti‑government?  Neutral?

It was a mix. I think people didn’t know what to think. The TV had constant news coverage of what was going on in Tiananmen, but it was all from the government perspective. A lot of people were getting the news from outside of China in the five-star hotels that had fax machines. That’s why people say that it was really due to this technical revolution of fax machines in hotels that the news got in. People were taking paste pots and taking these faxes from the hotels and copying them and then pasting them on walls all over the city. People could read in foreign news coverage what was happening in their own capital. That was pretty phenomenal to watch.

Rock/Jazz Guitarist Dennis Rea
       
Live at the Forbidden City by Dennis ReaOne of the significant revelations of Dennis Rea’s recounting of his travels in China in his book Live at the Forbidden City is that the pro-democracy movement–usually reported as only happening in Beijing, China’s capitol, in June 1989, culminating in the massacre of hundreds of people at Tiananmen Square–actually occurred all over China, particularly of university students. Rea’s description of what happened in Chengdu could easily be a description of what happened in Beijing on June 4, 1989.

He writes:

“On April 15 1989, my students excitedly informed me that one-time senior Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang had succumbed to a heart attack. Once pegged to succeed Deng Xiaoping as China’s supreme leader, the relatively liberal Hu had been cashiered by Deng for his tacit support of pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing and other cities in 1986, earning him martyrdom in the eyes of many students and intellectuals. As the news of Hu’s death spread, spontaneous memorial gatherings materialized in cities throughout China, including Chengdu. This nationwide gesture of respect for the popular Hu was widely viewed as a rebuke to China’s current leadership.”

The classic, literary picture of a college or university student is usually one of many books and little money. Rea’s description of his students in 1989 provide a microcosm of the dramatic economic inequality extant in China at the time, not only among students, but also in the populace generally—a condition that gives rise to the student demonstrations in June 1989:

The benefits of China’s vaunted economic boom certainly did not extend to my students, who led lives of sobering austerity. Three times daily, the young academics would troop down to the campus commissary with their dented tin bowls for meals that made American prison fare seem like the chef’s special at Delmonico’s—grisly meat of indeterminate origin, pale, overcooked vegetables, and a couple of scoops of coarse rice that often concealed shards of tooth-breaking stone. Most of the students wore the same clothes to class every day, quite possibly the only ones they owned. And these were the lucky few that actually gained admission to a university, in a Dennis Reacountry where less than one percent of the population was privileged to move on to higher study. Even if a student did manage to make it through college, he or she still faced the depressing prospect of working for woefully substandard wages in China’s financially strapped educational system while their budding capitalist peers laughed all the way to the bank. Was it any wonder that demoralized Chinese students would rise up and demand fairness and an end to corruption at their first opportunity?

June 4, 1989 was the day of the foreign teachers’ annual field trip to the dragon boat races in the small Yangtze River port city of Leshan. Just minutes before they were to board the bus at 10a.m. an American teacher who had been listening to BBC World Service on her shortwave raced up to Rea’s apartment and blurted out the news of the world-shaking massacre at Tiananmen Square. Following, in part, is the BBC report:

Several hundred civilians have been shot dead by the Chinese army during a bloody military operation to crush a democratic protest in Peking’s (Beijing) Tiananmen Square.

Tanks rumbled through the capital’s streets late on 3 June as the army moved into the square from several directions, randomly firing on unarmed protesters.

The injured were rushed to hospital on bicycle rickshaws by frantic residents shocked by the army’s sudden and extreme response to the peaceful mass protest.

The protests began with a march by students in memory of former party leader Hu Yaobang, who had died a week before.

But as the days passed, millions of people from all walks of life joined in, angered by widespread corruption and calling for democracy.

Tonight’s military offensive came after several failed attempts to persuade the protesters to leave.

Throughout the day the government warned it would do whatever it saw necessary to clamp down on what it described as “social chaos.”

But even though violence was expected, the ferocity of the attack took many by surprise, bringing condemnation from around the world.

At a nearby children’s hospital operating theatres were filled with casualties with gunshot wounds, many of them local residents who were not taking part in the protests.

Meanwhile, reports have emerged of troops searching the main Peking university campus for ringleaders, beating and killing those they suspect of coordinating the protests.

Rea’s description of the situation in the center of Chengdu City could just as easily been the story in Beijing:

. . .the crowd has swelled to at least 100,000 citizens in my estimation. We continued to encounter people with frightful wounds, including one poor old fruit vendor who had had his head split open simply for parking his cart in the wrong place at the wrong time. Everywhere we went protestors greeted us with loud cheers, grateful that a few foreign observers were putting themselves at risk to witness their struggle. The official media’s claims that rioters were attacking foreigners were nonsense, for the demonstrators plainly viewed us as sympathizers. Not surprisingly, we later discovered that photographs taken of us that day by plainclothes officers were posted prominently in police headquarters.”

The contemporary impression is that the Chinese government, more specifically, the Chinese Communist Party is probably more afraid of its people than outside attack.

Please write to me at meiienterprises@aol.com if you have any comments on this or any other of my blogs.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
June 16, 2014

© Eugene Marlow 2014

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