June 4th, 1989: A Founding Non-Event, a Breaking Point in Time and Space

• Main Author: Michel Bonnin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: National Sun Yat-sen University 2019-06-01
• Series: Contemporary Chinese Political Economy and Strategic Relations: An International Journal
• Subjects: Chinese contemporary history; democratic movement; June 4 massacre; historical and geopolitical breakpoint; erasure of collective memory
• Online Access: http://icaps.nsysu.edu.tw/var/file/131/1131/img/CCPS5(2)-Bonnin.pdf

The objective of this paper is to reflect broadly on the meaning of June 4 in the history of contemporary China. The main idea is that the violent military and political repression of the 1989 Chinese Pro-Democracy Movement in Beijing and in other cities is not only a tragic event which shocked the whole world, but also, looking at it in retrospect, a breaking point in the history of contemporary China. The fracture which it generated is not only affecting time, by drawing a fault line between the period of the 1980s and the following period, but is also affecting space, because the turn which China took at this time was in total contradiction with the events which started in the communist countries in eastern Europe and Russia in the same year and led to loss of power for the Communist parties of these countries. This means that the June 4 massacre cut China not only from its rather optimistic period of the 1980s, but also from the rest of the (hitherto) communist world. But the paradox is that this fundamental event has been, through the extraordinary efforts of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), transformed into a non-event, which has been almost totally erased not only from all official record including books, textbooks and all kinds of media, but also from the collective memory of the population.