Never Turn Back by Julian Gewirtz

Author:Julian Gewirtz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

The year 1989 was laden with historical import from the start: it would mark the fortieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) founding in 1949, the seventieth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement in 1919, and even the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. These seemingly unrelated anniversaries “have a common theme,” Su Shaozhi wrote in January, “namely, denouncing feudal despotism and carrying forward the spirit of democracy and science.” Su marveled at the fact that China, the Soviet Union, and many countries in Eastern Europe had all launched reforms of both the economic and political systems. “Modernization is by no means merely economic modernization, or ‘Four Modernizations,’ ” he wrote. “It should be political modernization and the modernization of people.”16

At the start of the fateful last year of the 1980s, Su gave voice to the central question of China’s 1980s: What constituted modernization? His answer was a holistic transformation, from the systemic to the personal, encompassing not only the material realm of economic and technological development but also politics, “democracy,” and the individual spirit. Su held out hope that this vision of modernization could be realized within China’s “socialist system,” so long as it was profoundly reformed.

Activist and physicist Fang Lizhi had a more extreme judgment. “Forty years of socialism have left people despondent,” he asserted. Fang saw a system that could not even correctly implement the “formula” of “political dictatorship plus free economy” because “its ideology is fundamentally antithetical to the kind of private property rights that a free economy requires.” However, he perceived a rising tide of democratization in society, largely driven by anger with corruption: “There can be no denying that the trend toward democracy is set.”17 Fang submitted a letter to the leadership in January calling for the release of Wei Jingsheng and other political prisoners, which was followed by several open letters from groups of scholars—one calling for “genuine implementation of political structural reform” written by Xu Liangying, and another calling for general amnesty for all political prisoners.18

Discussion groups on political reform, known as democracy salons, bloomed in bookstores and on university campuses across the country. Su Shaozhi, Fang Lizhi, and several other intellectuals organized a New Enlightenment Salon at Dule Bookstore in Beijing, while a charismatic student named Wang Dan organized salons at Peking University, describing his mission as pursuing “full freedom of speech and academic freedom.” Wang said that Peking University “should serve as a special zone for promoting the democratization of politics,” a parallel to the special economic zones’ focus on political reform.19 Cultural activity also continued unabated. In February 1989, a sprawling exhibition of several hundred artworks, titled “China / Avant-Garde,” opened at the National Art Museum in Beijing to celebrate the experimental art that had been created in the PRC in the 1980s. Posters advertising the exhibition showed a U-turn arrow crossed out, as if to say, “There is no turning back.” The exhibition was closed down a mere two hours after opening, when artist Xiao Lu fired a gun into her installation Dialogue.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.