Translation, editing : Gan Yung Chyan, KUCINTA SETIA
Remember the Tiananmen Hell!
Special Issue of China Spring (chinaspring.org)
Writer : Ma Jian / Editor : Li Guangsong / Source: China Spring / https://www.aboluowang.com/2025/0604/2228185.html
(Sixteen years ago, the Chinese government let me into China for the Olympics, so I wrote this essay.)
Two thousand years ago, Confucius stood on a high slope and sighed at the river: Time flies, day and night... He watched time flow like water, and his life was soon solidified by history. The Tiananmen incident that happened in Beijing 20 years ago also seemed to be locked in the 20th century and forgotten by the hurried modern life.
However time is still alive, it strongly follows the memory, trying to revive the forgotten history. Whenever I return to China, passing by Tiananmen Square or walking in the streets and alleys, some people and things that happened 20 years ago will jump in front of my eyes for a long time. Especially on the day of the Olympic Games, I took my son to Tiananmen Square through a security check that was stricter than boarding a plane. Looking around, there were huge flower beds and dense police all around. It seems that the Communist Party is the one who dares not forget "June 4th" the most.
Standing at the place where the Statue of Liberty was erected 20 years ago, it can be seen that the Tiananmen Gate Tower has been covered with fake decorations used on sensitive days, leaving only Mao Zedong's face for people to watch and take pictures. My five-year-old son pointed and asked: Who is he?
I put down the camera and said, "His name is Mao Zedong."
"Is he dead?" My son asked with sweat on his forehead.
I replied, "He died a long time ago, lying in that house."
My son stopped asking questions, and he was running in the world's largest square. Twenty years ago, I also ran with a box of popsicles to give to my literary friends from Lu Xun Academy of Literature in the parade. They shouted against corruption and wanted democracy... When they saw me, they all raised their victory signs. That day, five million people filled the square. The sun was still blazing, but the difference was that the wind was filled with the fragrance of green grass and flowers, and the ground was quiet and relaxed. In the past, there was a constant smell of sweat and shouts rolling over the head with the heat wave. The Communist Party spent so much money just to completely eradicate all traces of twenty years ago.
Tiananmen Gate is still heavily guarded to prevent petitioners from jumping into the Jinshui River to commit suicide. Perhaps it is the portrait of Mao Zedong hanging above that makes petitioners constantly regard this place as a desperate cemetery. In the past 20 years, 30 million people have come to Beijing to petition. The struggle between petitioners and defenders far exceeds the scale of the Olympic Games. No one has enjoyed freedom of speech in the past 20 years. For those intellectuals and human rights activists who fight for freedom of speech, they have even lost their personal freedom. The sense of morality and trust established by people 20 years ago no longer have room to grow. More than 10,000 waves of resistance every year have turned the resentful people into mobs. This is also the beginning of a terrorist society, and it was created by the Communist Party. The economic boom that relied on the labor of migrant workers and the sale of land will also go downhill this year. A large number of migrant workers will be unemployed, and riots in various places against enclosure will cause the Communist Party to be tossed by the people. I think that as long as Mao Zedong is still lying in this square, China will never have peace.
In front of the History Museum under the scorching sun, there is a slogan of "One World, One Dream" made of green grass, surrounded by pink, lavender and blood-red flowers. Twenty years ago, in this flowerbed, students and Beijing citizens sat in silence in front of nearly a thousand helmeted soldiers forming a human wall. When a cart was pulling a corpse past, a 15 or 16-year-old child, holding a stone in his hand, wailed to the soldiers guarding the stone steps of the museum: "My brother was shot to death, shot to death, I will fight to the death." My friend Li Lanju hugged him tightly at the time. But not long after, she saw people carrying the bloody child passing by again, and she fainted from fear. Of course, this history museum will not record the history that happened in front of its door.
At that time, I stood here and said to my girlfriend, "If the army opens fire, you run to the history museum with me, it is the safest place." She stared and said, "Shoot, you psychopath!" She was wearing a straw hat on her head at the time, and four brush-written characters were written on it: "Sad, happy!" Twenty years ago, if someone said that the army would shoot, college students would regard such remarks as crazy talk. On the night of June 3, students who ran from Peking University to the square were shot to death on the street wearing cotton coats to protect against rubber bullets.
I had just returned to Beijing and had not even settled down when I received a call from the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau. The plainclothes police asked me to meet with them at the Great Wall Hotel for an hour. The main point was to remind me not to meet with Liu Xiaobo, Zhou Duo and other people they were monitoring, saying that it was for the sake of a harmonious Olympics. Twenty years ago, Liu Xiaobo, Zhou Duo and other friends went to the square to participate in the hunger strike, which led to their imprisonment. I had stayed at Zhou Duo’s house for a few days before that. When I heard him talk about democracy, human rights and freedom, I thought he was crazy and advised him to stay away from Liu Xiaobo. They have different personalities, one is passionate and the other is introverted. They are also polar opposites and cannot get along but Liu Xiaobo once said that he was the most important thinker of the contemporary era, which made him feel comfortable. Zhou Duo’s specialty is philosophy and aesthetics. He usually learns painting from me, and I also learned to listen to classical music from him. When I heard that Zhou Duo followed Liu Xiaobo to the square to go on hunger strike, I really felt that his choice was wrong. Later, I thought that if it was the hot-tempered Liu Xiaobo, not the scholarly Zhou Duo, who negotiated with the martial law soldiers to buy time for the students to withdraw in the early morning of June 4, the Tiananmen Incident might have been even bloodier.
Today, Liu Xiaobo was imprisoned for the third time for taking the lead in signing the "Charter 08", and Zhou Duo is still under surveillance because of the "June 4th Incident". He is often taken to the suburbs of Beijing and locked up in early June every year. He also believed in the Lord, and his residence became a house church. The police who monitored him all year round said that as long as they did not receive foreigners, they would turn a blind eye. He lost his job and his pulpit, and for more than ten years he buried himself in piles of books studying China's political future. I couldn't talk to him too much on the phone, for fear that he would violate the rules and expel me from Beijing, so I said that we would meet when I was free, but I didn't call the monitored phone number again until I left.
The Tiananmen crackdown caused the Communist Party to put aside its belief in communism and quietly move towards a capitalist market economy, even throwing away Marx's class struggle society and building a "harmonious society".
After the Tiananmen Incident, the Chinese people also realized a way out: To have democracy and freedom, it is better to live a rich life and stop caring about human rights and politics. People's energy was also invested in the competition to get rich. The intellectual elites in society also abandoned their ideals, and most of them became vassals under tyranny. Poets and artists also quickly adapted to the market. Zhang Xiaogang, a student elite of the 1989 student movement, became China's richest popular painter, and Kong Qingdong, chairman of the Tiananmen Student Union, became a famous anchor of CCTV. The dead, victims, and students and democrats who fled overseas were quickly marginalized. Tiananmen Mothers Ding Zilin and others who are looking for the families of the victims live under police surveillance every day. Totalitarian dictatorship can have all material wealth, but it is completely unconfident in the spiritual field, and even afraid of people talking and thinking. Therefore, ideological dictatorship is becoming more and more extreme. It can be said that any writer or poet who has written about the "Tiananmen Incident" on the Internet will not escape the disaster of prison.
As time goes by, China has been built up with a new look and has entered an era of extreme power and privilege of "killing the poor and helping the rich". But in China, with a population of 1.3 billion, nearly 100 million people live below the poverty line, and less than 0.5% of the urban rich own 60% of the country's personal wealth. High-rise buildings and private cars are full of modern people's dreams of becoming the richest in the world. At the same time, workers and farmers in rural and remote areas are also full of hatred for being exploited. As a result, the tools of the proletarian dictatorship: the army and the police, have become China's largest power center, and China has become a police power.
However, everyone understands that a society under high-pressure control for a long time will definitely not develop healthily. From the official 2006 "On the Systematic Misappropriation and Embezzlement of Public Funds by Party and Government State Organs", it can be seen that in just one year, the party and government organs spent 2 trillion yuan on eating, drinking, traveling, going abroad, and giving gifts, which is equivalent to 50% of the national tax revenue in 2006. The anti-corruption and bribery bureaus, discipline inspection committees, supervision bureaus, and anti-corruption bureaus that have been established in the past two decades can only make the government more and more corrupt, which is also the inevitable result of one-party dictatorship.
The history of students dying tragically in the streets for fighting corruption has long been suppressed by the more corrupt reality. But I believe that the truth of history will be known to people sooner or later, and China must find hope from historical lessons.
I thought of my brother again. He fell and became a vegetable 20 years ago. Apart from eating, drinking, defecating, urinating and sleeping to prove that he is still alive, he has no emotions, no fear, and even lost his dignity. He can laugh at the TV, laugh like crying, and stare at the ceiling in a daze. He has lost the passion to choose between life and death. In other words, he has lost his spirit and is just a living body. The whole of China is in a numb state of losing faith.
Recently, I took a long-distance bus to Bobai County, Guangxi for an inspection and visited many towns. In 2007, the fine for having more than one child triggered the largest anti-family planning uprising since the Tiananmen Incident. More than 50,000 people in the county surrounded and smashed six township government office buildings, dug up roads to block police cars, and at least seven people died in the incident, including two policemen beaten to death by demonstrators, five demonstrators trampled to death by the crowd, and more than 200 people and more than 100 students were arrested. The incident also exposed the local government's corruption, treating family planning fines as fiscal revenue, and treating women as a money-making village. At that time, the county's official website summarized: ... The county invested a total of more than 5,800 people and dispatched more than 200 motor vehicles to sterilize, insert IUDs, and perform artificial abortions on more than 17,000 women in the county, and collected fines of 7.88 million yuan... but the farmers paid a heavy price for this: some old mothers went to fill in the number to sterilize in order to ask the government to release their sons, some women were sterilized three times repeatedly, and female students who were just 15 years old were also arrested and sterilized while walking on the road. More often, the family planning teams seized valuable electrical appliances, farm tools, iron beds, aluminum window frames, pigs, chickens, cows, and sheep, and smashed all worthless daily necessities such as pots and teapots. Many villagers dragged their children to spend the night in the woods on the mountain. Countless families were separated and their families were broken up. A woman suffocated her child to death because she was afraid that her crying would attract the family planning personnel who were searching her house. Shuangwang Town, where I have been, is a small town with a population of less than 50,000, but it was required to pay a fine of 6 million yuan. After a villager's house was searched, he actually received a fine of 90,000 yuan. The means of suppressing stability copied from the "Tiananmen Incident" have been revived again. These are all the consequences of the original sin of the revolution that has not been eliminated.
After 20 years of suppression, the Communist Party has indeed achieved great economic results, but at the same time, it has also brought about huge environmental pollution. Lakes, rivers, and oceans across the country are all polluted without exception. As long as the autocratic system reaches, it will not escape the disaster.
Guiyu Town in Guangdong Province is a famous e-waste dismantling base. It handles millions of tons of e-waste from the United States, Japan, and China every year. The primitive dismantling handicraft industry almost introduces pollution for the sake of wealth.
I smelled the smell of burnt plastic before I arrived at Guiyu Town on a bumpy motorcycle. I checked into a small hotel and took a quick shower. After the shower, I smelled like I was roasted.
The streets and alleys here are all family workshops that dismantle various electrical appliances, circuit boards, and plastic shells. More than 80,000 migrant workers from all over the country use primitive manual methods such as smashing, baking, sawing, etc. to decompose mobile phones, computers, printers, etc. into gold, silver, lead, zinc, etc., and use sulfuric acid water to wash the circuit boards to remove the electronic tubes. The plugs being cooked in the rice cooker are to classify plastics and copper and iron. Farmers also use the method of processing grains to dry colorful plastic fragments. Really useless materials are burned in the fields or dumped by the river.
The air here is suffocating, the river water is polluted, and the soil is poisoned, as if it has just been through a chemical war.
After the medical school conducted a physical examination on the migrant population in Guiyu, it was found that 88% of them suffered from skin diseases, nervous system, respiratory system or digestive system diseases. Because the chemical liquid used to refine the metal of old electrical appliances was poured into the river, all the water below six meters underground in Guiyu Town was polluted. The drinking water of the local people had to be transported back from the nearby villages and towns by tractors for sale. The daily supply of more than 400 tons of tap water has become a new industry in the town. Doctors in the obstetrics and gynecology department of the local hospital reported that some women workers engaged in the decomposition of hazardous waste found that some babies were soaked in green amniotic fluid during delivery.
The rise of the Communist Party relied on the ownership of land and resources and the cheapest migrant workers in the world. Most of the migrant workers I visited were illiterate and had never used computers. They exchanged their lives for a monthly salary of 500 to 900 yuan, which could not solve their own future. Although the farmers' bodies are alive on the ground, their lives have been buried underground. There is a famous saying in China: Heartless and lungless, live a hundred years! But the development of the past 20 years makes people feel heartless. They have done it, but living a hundred years is not enough. The abnormal development that does not respect people and nature will not live long. The crisis caused by extreme wealth and extreme poverty will even exceed corruption. The combination of wealth and tyranny is the culprit for the loss of conscience in society.
Therefore, the development of society is not only from agricultural society to industrialized modern society, but also from market economy to free democratic system to prevent the expansion of the evil consequences of autocratic monopoly, otherwise it will lead to the extinction of nature and humanity.
In the past 20 years, China has not only lost its humanistic spirit, but also lost its people's hearts and sincerity, and even the value of life. The lying government and contaminated food make us understand that the further we go on the road of pursuing material things, the further we are from happiness, because happiness is a life without moral pollution, inner freedom, and the happiness of not being controlled by others' thoughts or even imagination. We do not have all of this yet. We are rich but monitored by others, so we are not as rich as a free beggar.
Standing in this "Tiananmen hell" like a flower festival, I remembered what Deng Xiaoping said most often in the past 20 years: "Kill 200,000 people in exchange for 20 years of stability." However, the massacre was exchanged for fear, indifference and even disgust towards power, that is, no one dared to repeat the "Tiananmen Incident" again - the "massacre" was hated by the people, and today's Chinese Communist Party dared to use massacre to exchange for 20 years of "harmony".
We are also fortunate to live in time, which gives us the memory of history and makes us respect the victims more. They used their lives and blood to defeat the empire of communism in the 20th century and changed the world's political map, thus giving humans the criteria for judging right and wrong. Even in the era of global economic recession, when everyone's wallet is shrinking, it still reminds people that in the world 20 years later, communism can no longer spread, and this is a safer century.
The "Tiananmen Incident" is the source of this moral power.
Ma Jian
2009.6.3
Uploaded on 1 June 2025
Translated on 4 June 2025 by Gan Yung Chyan, Singapore
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