Tiananmen Square Research Articles

Performance as Intervention

This article presents a study on the punk phenomenon in China, with a focus on how the punk musicians create new spaces within music production and performances. More importantly, it will examine how these spaces and acts of performance engage with political structures in contemporary China. By analyzing the impact that the political and economic changes of recent decades have had on the nature of Chinese society and culture, the article will first set out to understand the social context in which the punk phenomenon emerged and developed in China. Drawing on interviews with Chinese punk musicians, a discussion of the politics of place will show how a Chinese punk band has challenged a dominated space by performing in the Tiananmen Square. Informed by Attali’s theoretical discussion on “noise”, the next focus will be on an exploration of the process of power negotiation in performing punk music and seeking punk authenticity through non-conforming practices at government/institution-sponsored events. Overall, it is argued that punk performance can carve out a space for alternative political aspirations through interaction with authoritative figures (e.g. in resisting the existing powers), thus challenging state power and institutional oppression in China.

Writing Beyond the Personal: History, Memoir, and Fiction in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Fifth Book of Peace

Simultaneous losses in life left Maxine Hong Kingston to ponder the meaning of existence and move from a personal to a collective level of mourning, which she relates to historical events such as Ch’in Shih Huang’s book burning, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Tiananmen Square massacre, the Second World War, and the Vietnam War. The Fifth Book of Peace rewrites the meaning of silence, reconstructing loss from a perspective of reconciliation and pondering the meaning of existence from a philosophical viewpoint. Kingston intertwines history and personal experience, transforming war and loss into a literature of peace.

Tiananmen Square, Leipzig, and the "Chinese Solution": Revisiting the Wende from an Asian-German Perspective

This article explores the transnational connection between China and the GDR in 1989 and views the student protests on Tiananmen Square in spring 1989 as a consequential precursor to German reunification. The SED's endorsement of the Chinese government's suppression and the East Germans' fear of a "Chinese solution" to looming domestic unrest aggravated the mass exodus in the summer and fall of 1989. Contrary to expectations, Leipzig, the center of protests in East Germany, did not become another Tiananmen on October 9. The military crackdown in Beijing ultimately served as a counterexample that helped to facilitate a peaceful revolution in East Germany.

An Old Man Drew a Circle, and: A Memorial Shed, and: Emperor Penguins on the Square, and: Duckling Dance, and: There Was Planned Work, and: What I Knew, and: Be Good

An Old Man Drew a Circle, and: A Memorial Shed, and: Emperor Penguins on the Square, and: Duckling Dance, and: There Was Planned Work, and: What I Knew, and: Be Good He Xiang (bio) An Old Man Drew a Circle A woman was singing about an old man & his trip south on tv. We laughed at the song, an old man went to the South China Sea & drew a circle. It was springtime, she sang. It was springtime again, she sang, when he returned to behold all that his circle had commanded: cities sprouted up with the ease of a set rolling in at the start of a new act, mountains of gold piled together as if we had never seen gold before (we had never seen gold before). A blueprint for the century to come, a down payment on immortality. Shenzhen was as far as the moon then, as familiar as New York, the fanciest foreign city I could name, no dimension I could tunnel through to in my lonesome, my favorite chair cushion keeping me company, sheets of names for imaginary maids. Now I wonder, did they draw a circle around Tiananmen Square like that old man drew a circle? Did he draw those boundaries too, where roads spat out not money but gunfire? What anchors me as if cinderblock to river homicide, what I can't surface from wishing away is the condition in exchange for living: a pen's arbitrary path, the old man's clever line [End Page 8] about black cats & white cats roiling the short years we have to call ours, a summer night lingering like crushed grapes staining the pavement. The violence chance visits on everyone, how do you cope? Look, my city hadn't stopped trembling after our earthquake, hardly three years before the old man's trip, he could have drawn his circle anywhere but didn't draw it there. His ilk refused aid, altered no course of ours. Whoever let dying bodies prevent their proving a point? Still we gave them the fealty of the punch-drunk to the hit, we knew it'd come harder next time. When it was rebuilt, the new city square could have had anything, but it was a monument to the effort to keep alive in the aftermath & even after that, sleeping in army tents, drinking pool water, burning paper money year after year for the split-second gone. A Memorial Shed If I have run out of ways to mourn you—a white ribbon pinned to my guitar bag aged sixteen, a day of fasting these lastfew years (let me be clear, not a hunger strike: I have no demands, but let every pulseof hunger recall you to me)—do not fear the silence. You must understand: it was youafter all who wanted to barter away the illusion [End Page 9] of having, it was you who didn't trust the blindfoldof moderate prosperity: pork dumplings, a maroon velvet dress, cars, it was all real for the first time but you said it wasn'tenough. Teachers, how do I come and sweep your grave? The trenches of your battlefield the cement fractureson a ten-lane boulevard. Comrades, how do I kneel to you in the Square? When do I tell people to come visitthis memorial shed I am putting up with load-bearing couplets for frames? How do I rest the souls my mother sawon a night hiding amongst the switched-off streetlights so as not to be questioned? I watch over you as you watch overwhat we used your exile to pay for: the ring roads burning chemical flame, bullet trains to ghost cities, the heavysick of smog obscuring the fermented duck yolk of a sun, and all I can say is the prayer of the moderately damned:I am sorry, so sorry, still and still now.Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me. I recite your names hosed off from history, insist on metonymy:Tiananmen, Changanjie, Muxidi.Beloved, beloved, beloved. Emperor Penguins on the Square Have you ever seen emperor penguins on the Square?Maybe a June you don't know...

The Corpse of Chairman Mao

The Corpse of Chairman Mao Mai Wang (bio) On the morning of the massacre, Li Fei biked across Beijing to see his wife Chen Yan in the apartment near Third Ring Road, where she lived with her mother and father. It was a calm, clear day in June, and Beijing was under martial law. Li Fei arrived two hours late. As he walked through the door, he took off his glasses and wiped them with his sleeve. His nervous eyes and bloodless face told Chen Yan something was wrong. She asked for the news. Li Fei shared the rumors he had gathered from the other professors at Tsinghua University. The night before, the People's Liberation Army had encountered civilians blocking Eternal Peace Avenue to stop the advance of the army into Tiananmen Square. The troops were the same age as the student demonstrators gathered in the square who refused to leave. At first, some soldiers leaned over the sides of their tanks to shake hands with the crowd. When everyone heard the first shots, they assumed the guns were filled with rubber bullets. They only realized the bullets were real when blood stained the streets. Angry men and women hurled rocks and bottles at the uniformed boys until gunfire rained down. Many were shot in the back trying to flee, and others trampled on them. Li Fei reported these events to Chen Yan calmly as they sat in the bedroom where she and their daughter Jing Jing lived. Chen Yan had moved out of Li Fei's campus studio with Jing Jing so Chen Yan's mother could take care of the child during the workweek. Li Fei visited them every Sunday with stories of all he had seen and accomplished during the week. Now Chen Yan hoped his latest stories were exaggerated. As they talked, Jing Jing sat on the floor playing with an expensive [End Page 390] blond-haired, blue-eyed Russian doll. Li Fei often purchased toys for his daughter to make up for his absence. Through the wall, a cheerful female voice blasted from the new color television in the living room, where Chen Yan's nieces and nephews watched the broadcast on CCTV. The anchorwoman warned her viewers to stay indoors. Military units were advancing from all four directions to secure the city. Then she discussed national sorghum yields, which only increased year after year. Mahjong tiles clicked as they hit the large circular dining table, where Chen Yan's mother and father, her three sisters, and their husbands sat playing against each other. Her family was not interested in politics. As long as life continued to improve and the government guaranteed their pensions, they supported the Communist regime. "The leaders are turning against the people again," Li Fei said. "There's nothing you can do about it," Chen Yan said. She hated it when Li Fei explained the news to her as if she was incapable of thinking for herself. Sometimes she secretly wished he were not a professor. She laid a hand on his shoulder to comfort him and hoped he would stop talking. Li Fei pulled away. "My students are taking a stand, and I should be there with them," he said. He added that government officials had falsely labeled the students counterrevolutionaries, but the students were right and only wanted to stop members of the Party from lining their own pockets. He, too, wished for change. He had spent his whole life reciting passages from Marx, Lenin, and Mao, but he no longer expected the proletarian revolution to deliver universal health, wealth, and contentment. Chen Yan could not bear to listen any longer. "Don't go running all over the place like a mad dog," she told him. "You're older than the protestors. You have a child." They gazed down at Jing Jing. She looked up at them and offered Li Fei her doll, but he shook his head with a smile. [End Page 391] "I have to see what's going on outside," Li Fei insisted, turning to Chen Yan with a solemn look. "The side streets were quiet, but the action is in the center." "You don...

Love and Sexuality in the Fallen World of Ma Jian

ESSAY Love and Sexuality in the Fallen World of Ma Jian by Elizabeth Fifer Reviewing Ma Jian’s three-decades-long career, Elizabeth Fifer traces the banned and exiled Chinese writer’s deepening critique. A newly translated work of fiction by Ma Jian, China Dream (2018), provides an opportunity for celebration and a reconsideration of his distinguished career. He is one of the most respected and discussed of all contemporary Chinese authors. His work is known worldwide, except in China. His devastating wit and experimental style are used to deconstruct both the history and the political reality of everyday life in China. Now living in exile, he has written fiction on subjects as diverse as Tibetan culture (Stick Out Your Tongue, Eng. 1987), urban life (The Noodle Maker, Eng. 2004), the repercussions of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 (Beijing Coma, Eng. 2008), and China’s one-child policy (The Dark Road, Eng. 2013). Red Dust (Eng. 2001), about his three-year trek across China, gives readers a sharp and thoughtful memoir of rural life. His gifted translator is Flora Drew. After Stick Out Your Tongue, his collection of brilliant and unflinching short stories, appeared, all of Ma’s work was banned from future publication in China and all copies of the book confiscated. One newscast called it “vulgar and obscene”; it was accused of defaming the Tibetan people. The government labeled Ma a “pornographer .” Black-market copies circulated, and the book was widely read. The exaggerated charge of pornography arises from the centrality of love and sexuality in Ma’s work. He arrived in Tibet a recently divorced man who had lost custody of his daughter. The anger and loneliness in the stories spring from a sense of personal loss and political injustice. The characters Miyama in “The Woman and PHOTO: ALEXANDRU ACEA/UNSPLASH 32 WLT SPRING 2019 the Blue Sky” and Sangsang Tashi in “The Final Initiation ” vividly illustrate Ma working at the intersection of love and sexual violence. Both stories concern the abuse of innocent women, forbidden love, and rape. The structures of tradition and religion fail. Sangsang Tashi falls in love with a fellow monk. Forced to marry two brothers, Miyama dies in childbirth. Before Sangsang Tashi can enter her final illumination, the head lama rapes her and she dies in an icy river. The naked bodies of the two abused women, one dismembered to feed the vultures in a sky burial, the other food for fish, are eloquent. The brothers scatter Miyama’s flesh dispassionately. The lamas will verify even a corpse as the manifestation of the Living Buddha. After the feverish nightmare of the Tibetan stories, Ma uses his black humor and critical eye to dissect contemporary Chinese life in The Noodle Maker. It is framed as a discussion over dinner between two old friends, a professional writer and a professional blood donor. One uses his imagination to survive; the other sells his blood. One lives for ideals, the other for profit. The blood donor brings the dinner. Stories follow like strands of noodles fashioned from the dough of the professional writer’s brain. As Mao instructed, the writer goes down among the masses for his subject. The blood donor interrogates each character, such as the lovesick, suicidal actress, the street writer who pens letters of protest and longing, the talking dog who describes how his kind would run the world. The waves of change transform China, forcing people into “reeducation,” self-criticism, and spying. Successive campaigns and party memoranda create a shifting political landscape. In an unsettled atmosphere of suspicion and fear, people struggle to keep up with current trends. Committees can debate reforms, but when a streetlight goes out, a woman is sure to be raped. A picture on a soap wrapper of a blonde woman in a swimsuit teeters between the pornographic and the healthy until Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door Policy approves it. The professional writer calls his “the wasted generation ,” left in a spiritual vacuum, without the means to understand foreign culture or appreciate its worth. He asks, “How can a society numbed by dictatorship find its way in the modern world?” The blood donor says people have become...

30 Years After Tiananmen: Dissent Is Not Dead

In developments that form a stark contrast to the hopes that accompanied the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of thirty years ago, Xi Jinping's Chinese Communist Party regime has devised new ways to consolidate power and crackdown on dissent. Yet despite an ever-expanding surveillance apparatus and a burgeoning social-credit system, the political values and spirit of collective action embodied in the 1989 democracy movement have endured and even thrived. Indeed, while the Xi government may appear all-powerful, political fissures are widening, and there are many pockets of discontent. China may not appear to be moving on the right track-but we have not yet reached the end of Chinese history.

Japan in Asia: Post-Cold-War Diplomacy by Tanaka Akihiko

Reviewed by: Japan in Asia: Post-Cold-War Diplomacy by Tanaka Akihiko James D. J. Brown Japan in Asia: Post-Cold-War Diplomacy. By Tanaka Akihiko. Translated by Jean Connell Hoff. Japan Publishing Industry Foundation for Culture, 2017. 464 pages. Hardcover, no price. The pace of change in Asian regional politics is relentless, with significant developments emerging month to month, not to mention year to year. Given this reality, readers could be forgiven for assuming that Tanaka Akihiko's Japan in Asia, which was first published in Japanese in 2007, is now seriously outdated.1 Even in the English edition, which adds two new chapters, the narrative only takes us as far as the end of 2015, a time when Tsai Ing-wen had yet to take office in Taiwan, Park Geun-hye remained South Korean president, and the prospects of Donald Trump becoming US president still appeared remote. And yet, while this book inevitably cannot cover more recent subjects such as Japan's Free and Open Indo-Pacific vision, the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar, and Trump's historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in June 2018, it does nonetheless have lasting value. Specifically, by surveying Japan's relations with East Asia from the end of the Cold War until just several years ago, this text serves as a useful guide to the recent history of the region's political problems and reminds readers that what may appear a new development is often just the latest turn in a long-revolving diplomatic cycle. [End Page 140] Tanaka, who served as president of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) from 2012–2015, begins the book in an upbeat fashion, writing in the preface that "Asia is becoming one" and that "'Asia,' which includes 'East Asia,' is headed toward integration" (p. xi). Elsewhere, he welcomes the spread of globalization and democratization and celebrates the enduring peace that now prevails in the region. Given recent fears about conflict on the Korean Peninsula and the revival of nationalism worldwide, these passages make the book seem like a relic from the 1990s. However, these themes do not dominate the text, which focuses not on big ideas but on the task of providing a detailed summary of the defining events of post–Cold War Asian politics and the role that Japan has played in them. Chapter 1 establishes the historical context by describing Asia before the end of the Cold War. It includes a helpful reminder of the difference between the bipolar confrontation that characterized Europe and the complex strategic interactions that played out in Asia between the United States, China, and the Soviet Union. Tanaka also highlights the fact that "most countries that belonged to the American camp were not all that liberal or democratic, nor were the countries in the Soviet camp that professed to be socialist" true in all respects to "Soviet-style socialism" (p. 2). Additionally, this chapter provides a short introduction to the Cambodian civil war, in which Japan found itself "in the utterly incomprehensible position of continuing to support the Khmer Rouge, who had committed mass atrocities" (p. 6). Similar summaries are given of the democracy movements in the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Burma (Myanmar). With the scene thus set, chapter 2 concentrates on Northeast Asia at the end of the Cold War, giving most of its attention to Japan's response to the Tiananmen Square incident of June 1989. Tanaka highlights the Japanese government's initial reluctance to take action following the Chinese authorities' bloody suppression of the student protests. In particular, Prime Minister Uno Sōsuke is quoted as telling the Diet, "The imposition of sanctions would be discourteous to our neighbor. … I will not make any protest" (p. 38). Moreover, even when international pressure did cause Tokyo to introduce some punitive measures, Japan's priority remained to prevent the diplomatic isolation of China. Students of more recent Japanese foreign policy may note a comparison with the Abe administration's soft stance toward Russia following the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Chapter 3 turns from Northeast Asia to Southeast Asia. Its main contribution is to describe how the Cambodian peace process served as a...

Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China by Margaret Hillenbrand

Reviewed by: Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China by Margaret Hillenbrand Yiu Fai Chow (bio) Margaret Hillenbrand. Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. xx, 312 pp. 66 illustrations. Paperback $27.95, isbn 9781478008002. Let me start by exposing myself to something negative, as a homage to a book titled Negative Exposures, and as a disclaimer, perhaps. I want to say: how could I write a review that could possibly do justice to this eloquently written monograph? Margaret Hillenbrand’s work deserves to be read in good time—or rather in bad time, in our bad time when thought control, history doctoring, fake news, conspiracy theories, and many other forms of cryptocracy are on the rise, claiming alternative truth, justice, and reality. Scrutinizing contemporary China’s turbulent past and its conspicuous as well as consistent disavowal of that turbulent past, Hillenbrand puts forward a simple but nonetheless elaborately and persuasively formulated argument against dominant ways of reading and explaining (away) such collective erasures of history. The author [End Page 291] takes issue with what she calls “the two-step story about why certain histories have such scant traction in China’s present” (p. 15). First, the state and the (self-)censorship apparatus have been modifying and managing historical expressions on an unprecedented scale; second, this top-down exercise has been so efficient that a discourse of collective amnesia has emerged, as if certain memories have been deleted from people’s mind. While acknowledging the power of the state, Hillenbrand also cautions against assuming its omnipotence. The two-step story, the author sharply points out, is not the whole story, as there are always people who remember. More importantly, the success story has drawn attention away from the popular practice of keeping secret, or, as encapsuled in the book’s subtitle, of knowing what not to know in contemporary China. In that sense, Hillenbrand’s book is first and foremost an appeal to redirect critical examination to what has been escaping scrutiny: “secrecy in public culture, secrecy as public culture” (p. 15). This appeal is relevant and urgent not only in the Chinese context; as Hillenbrand points out time and again, different states and populations across different times and places have been practicing this art of public secrecy to keep the unsayable unsayable, not the least now. In the author’s words, “we may be entering an epoch of renewed public secrecy” (p. 221). But then, if people do remember, how and what do they do with their memories when they are not supposed to speak them? It is this “agential process” (p. 3) in the practice of public secrecy that Hillenbrand continues to foreground after interrogating the potency of censorship and amnesia. In other words, if public secrets cannot possibly find their ways to official records, media reports, and other forms of documentation, Hillenbrand argues that aesthetic works, with their fluidity and opacity, are the perfect sites to listen to the unsayable. For the purpose of this book, she spends the bulk of the chapters on one form of aesthetic works, what she calls “photo-forms.” They are works that work with photographs—in her cases, historical photographs—and, more significantly and poignantly, they also refer to and converse with the source images through myriad ways of repurposing, of appropriation. They open up alternative spaces in territories heavily policed by censorship and amnesia, where spectators form their own alliances with the works and to each other. Hillenbrand elucidates all such delicacy in the four main empirical chapters that follow the theoretical contextualization. She takes us through a rich array of photo-forms—elite and vernacular, professional and amateur, famous and lesser known, online and offline, authored and authorless—to explore how they proliferate and operate in tandem with and against public secrecy, how they hide and expose key aspects of China’s historical milestones: the Nanjing Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, and the Tiananmen Square protests. In her concluding chapter, Hillenbrand revisits the book and questions the political [End Page 292] potentials of photo-forms. While, admittedly, such aesthetic works may not bring an end to public secrecy in...

Understanding Authoritarian Resilience and Countering Autocracy Promotion in Asia

Understanding Authoritarian Resilience and Countering Autocracy Promotion in Asia John Lee (bio) keywords Authoritarianism, Democracy, China, Southeast Asia [End Page 99] executive summary This article examines some of the reasons for authoritarian resilience and democratic erosion in Asia and assesses options for countering autocracy promotion to create more realistic conditions for democratization in the future. main argument Proponents of modernization theory postulate that rapid economic growth in Asia will lead to the emergence of independent and politically active middle classes agitating for democracy in the region. Although Asia continues to enjoy rapid economic advances, democratization has stalled, and in some instances, has gone backward. The reality is that many regional countries take a deeply embedded instrumentalist or pragmatic view of democracy and remain unconvinced about the inherent virtues of universal suffrage. At a time when democracy is on the defensive, China has emerged as a regional and global leader in promoting the apparent virtues of authoritarian approaches and the supposed weaknesses of democracy. This increases the importance and urgency of countering China’s anti-democratic narrative so as to create more fertile ground for democratization to take root in Asia. policy implications • Proponents of democracy must abandon the complacent view that democracy will be the inevitable destination for rapidly growing economies in Asia and accept the reality that China is leading an authoritarian offensive in making the case that one-party rule is a better model for many countries in the region. • Democracies need to enter this debate and contest over ideas and adapt their message to the regional audience. If established democracies seek to create more fertile ground for democratization, they need to better counter Chinese narratives. • Rather than simply promoting the virtues of universal suffrage (which might not in and of itself lead to superior results in some countries), democracies need to focus on building practical institutions that increase accountability, transparency, and protections for the rights of individuals and entities in countries undergoing political transitions. [End Page 100] Almost 50 years ago, Seymour Martin Lipset put forward the argument that citizens who are affluent and educated are more likely to reject the appeal of demagogues and, by extension, dictatorships.1 This was an early expression of what became better known as modernization theory, which focuses on the rise of a middle class and its role in agitating for and entrenching democracy in that respective polity. When the Tiananmen Square protests (which were in fact countrywide protests occurring simultaneously in hundreds of cities) erupted in China in 1989, followed by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, hopes were high that Samuel Huntington’s “third wave of democratization” could endure and advance in Asia.2 The “third wave” references the democratic transitions that occurred in at least 30 countries from 1974 to 1990. Japan provided the lead, even though the ruling Liberal Democratic Party had been in government since its founding in 1955 and did not lose power until 2009. In South Korea and Taiwan, economic reforms and growing prosperity paved the way for the rise of democracy. Thailand has stumbled in and out of democracy since it became a constitutional monarchy in 1932. Although far from perfect, democratic processes were entrenched in Malaysia and Singapore. In Indonesia, by contrast, the transition to democracy did not begin until after the fall of Suharto in 1998. Asia appeared to be the ideal region for the key tenets of modernization theory. The so-called East Asian model continues to do its work, and the ingredients are seemingly all there: economic reforms that create an increasingly large and more powerful entrepreneurial and property-owning class, growing prosperity leading to a rising middle class, and the emergence of educated and socially conscious elites with broad knowledge and first-hand experience of the outside world.3 Using the World Bank definition of the middle class as those with per capita incomes in real terms between $10 and $100 per person per day in 2005 purchasing power parity terms, 1.36 billion people, or 46% of the global middle class, lived in Asia in 2015. This is expected to rise to over 2.23...

Hong Kong unrest and implications for the Hang Seng Index

With the September 2014 ‘Umbrella Revolution’ in Hong Kong, China faced one of the biggest political challenges since the Tiananmen Square events. Beijing’s proposed electoral reform was perceived as a direct attack to democracy, and the ensuing protest triggered concerns amid local and international investors; the financial sector took the hardest hit, with stocks of companies exposed to the Hong Kong market facing significant losses. Volatility continued to increase to a seven-month high over worries that the student blockade in Hong Kong’s streets could drag on for longer than expected. The econometric-based analysis in this paper looks at the implications of the protest and its spillover effect on the Hang Seng Index with a focus on sectoral performance. The ultimate objective is to gain a better understanding of the impact of the protests on different stocks and sectors with the goal of identifying market vulnerability and potential volatility patterns.

Using movement: how Beijing's post-1989 artists capitalized on a city in flux

ABSTRACTThe 1990s are often described as a time of political retreat by artists and intellectuals in China, immediately following the protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989 and their bloody crackdown. The 1990s were also, however, a time of dramatic spatial and social flux in the country, characterized by radical urbanization, widespread demolition of the built environment and mass rural to urban migration.This paper considers the political activities of Chinese artists during the 1990s and early 2000s, yet does so with a focus on their spatial engagements, arguing that these constituted a new, necessary and highly productive mode of political work at this time. Describing a number of relatively self-made artists’ colonies that appeared in Beijing in the early 1990s, and tracing these through to their semi-institutionalization (as ‘creative industries precincts’) by the Chinese Communist Party in the mid-2000s, it demonstrates alternative means by which China's artists continued to intervene in the negotiation of a Chinese modernity, once the possibilities for discursive engagement had been largely foreclosed.Drawing on archival research, personal interviews and literature in art history as well as cultural, urban and policy studies, this analysis thus tells a spatial history of this period often historicized as the development of ‘Contemporary Chinese Art’. Importantly, this paper also seeks to offer new political imaginaries, pressing against expectations that Chinese artists be revolutionary or openly oppositional, and illustrating modes of political intervention that instead work creatively and discreetly with the movements of institutional and physical change.

Physics and human rights

“In 1989 I had the privilege to travel to the International Center for Theoretical Physics at Trieste, Italy. Besides other things, I watched in the Italian television how the China government sent war tanks against the students in the Tiananmen Square. When I returned to Cuba, I discovered that all the Cuban media, totally controlled by the government, lied about what happened in Tiananmen.”The opening quote comes from the personal website of Texas Tech physicist Luis Grave de Peralta. The Cuban government’s whitewashing of the Tiananmen Square Massacre spurred him to resign from the Communist Party of Cuba, an action that cost him his job at the University of Santiago de Cuba. Out of work, he wrote a book critical of the Cuban government, an action that caused him to be sentenced in 1992 to 13 years in prison. Intervention on his behalf by the US National Academy of Sciences, Amnesty International, and Congressman Bill Richardson led to his release and expulsion to the US after he had spent nearly four years behind bars. At first, the Cuban government denied exit visas to his wife and two sons. They joined him in the US in 2008.On page 48 you’ll find a feature-length report by Physics Today’s Toni Feder on physics in Cuba. Despite economic hardship, physicists there do world-class research. A crucial element is Cuban physicists’ professional and economic ties to colleagues abroad. Strengthening those relationships is important. I’m glad that the American Physical Society and other professional organizations are working with that goal in mind. APS grants Cuban physicists free access to Physical Review Letters and its other journals.International scientific collaboration is virtuous, even with physicists who live under regimes that violate their citizens’ human rights. Two years ago, Feder wrote about a collaboration between geophysicists from France, the UK, and the US and a team from arguably the most politically oppressed country on Earth: North Korea. Brokered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the collaboration sought to evaluate the threat of an eruption by Mount Paektu, a volcano on North Korea’s border with China (see Physics Today, February 2016, page 20). On a boat in Russia in 1928 were (from left) Paul Dirac, Yakov Frenkel, and Alfred Landé. (Courtesy of the AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.) PPT|High resolutionShould physicists discount human rights when weighing international collaborations? We are all entitled to set our own personal political limits, as Paul Dirac evidently did. Known for his single-minded devotion to theoretical physics, Dirac was also an enthusiastic traveler, especially to the Soviet Union. In his biography of Dirac, The Strangest Man (2009), Graham Farmelo describes the warm and fruitful interactions that Dirac had with Igor Tamm, Peter Kapitza, and other Russian physicists. Farmelo also noted that Dirac was likely ignorant of Joseph Stalin’s mass-murderous collectivization campaign of 1928–30 and his Great Purge of 1937–38.But there were limits to Dirac’s internationalism. To converse and collaborate with German physicists, Dirac had learned German. In 1933, after Hitler came to power and promptly began persecuting Jews and others, he vowed never to speak the language again. Section:ChooseTop of page <<CITING ARTICLES© 2018 American Institute of Physics.

학생운동으로서의 6･4천안문사건

학생운동으로서의 6･4천안문사건

Towards a theatre of the tragic: a new critical trajectory for Gao Xingjian\u2019s (post-exile) dramaturgy of the riven self

Although the theatre of Gao Xingjian has been widely researched, the tragic potential of his dramaturgy has hitherto received little attention. Scholars have hinted at the possibility of interpreting certain plays by Gao from the perspective of tragedy; however, this suggestion was never developed into a full-fledged theory. Both his pre and post-exile work has been variously categorized as experimentalist, absurdist, grotesque, and Zen, but never as tragic. Existing scholarship focuses mainly on issues of transnationalism and transculturation with regard to dramatic aesthetics and dramatic technique, whereas Gao’s intentional engagement with tragedy as both an art form and a philosophical outlook—which can be traced back to Escape (Taowang1995), inspired by the Tiananmen Square events of 1989—has generally been overlooked. This paper aims to present a new and fresh critical perspective on Gao Xingjian’s (mainly post-exile) dramaturgy of the predicament of modern man through a reexamination of two of its most salient elements: the dramatic technique of shifting pronouns and the performative concept of the “other shore”. By elaborating on Gao’s transhistorical definition of tragedy as the eternal confrontation between the individual and his own Self (“About Escape” 1990), and drawing on selected scholarship on tragedy and the tragic, this paper ultimately characterizes Gao’s plays as “thirdspace tragedies”, owing to the presence—at a subtextual level—of an interstitial psychological field dominated by multiple tensions, lacerations, subjugations and divisions which affect the characters and their relationship to external reality and/or the realm of imagination.

Viewpoint and image schemas in multimodal political discourse

This paper investigates the ways in which multimodal artefacts on social media can infuse a simple object with political meaning. Using a cognitive linguistic framework, I examine the sudden conceptual enrichment of the umbrella, an object that became the defining symbol of the 2014 Hong Kong suffrage protests. The paper contends that the enrichment of the umbrella, which allowed it to represent the political values of the protesters, was enabled by the conceptual integration of cultural frames and viewpoints in artistic illustrations, which retained the shield-like functionality of the umbrella while simultaneously enhancing its symbolic meaning. First I explore the material affordances of the umbrella and the rudimentary schemas that restrict how the umbrella can be depicted. Second, I analyze two popular artefacts disseminated online. One is a cartoon that draws from the iconic “Tank Man” photo from Tiananmen Square. The other artistically alters the Hong Kong flag to look like a configuration of umbrellas. Building on the basic schemas of the umbrella, both multimodal artefacts insert new viewpoints that prompt the re-construal of the original frame. Third, I posit that the new frames and schemas of the artefacts informed how protesters and the Hong Kong government understood the movement as it unfolded.

Out of the Barracks: The Role of the Military in Democratic Revolutions

Why some democratic revolutions succeed while others fail? The scholarly community has sought to address this issue from various perspectives, from rational choice approaches to collective action theories. Too little attention, however, has been paid to analyzing the role of the military. By discussing the different types of interactions played by the military in five cases of successful democratic revolutions—the 1910 Portuguese Republican Revolution, the 1958 Venezuelan Revolution, the 1960 April Revolution in South Korea, the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, and the 2000 Bulldozer Revolution in Yugoslavia—and three cases of failed revolutions, the 1905 bourgeois-liberal revolution in Russia, the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests in China, and the 2016 Turkey’s coup attempt, this study finds out that the key factor in determining their outcome is the army’s response and that the military backing is a necessary condition for a democratic revolution to succeed.

Turning the Tables on Foreign Assistance in Second-Generation Environmentalism in Russia and China

Civil society and environmentalngos in Russia and China have been facing gradual crackdowns from their governments for the past decade and have been accused of being connected to foreign governments. Due to the changes in political and legal environments and the rise of a new generation of activists, the civil society landscape has been transformed in both countries. Drawing on 14 months of fieldwork, this paper aims to provide an updated account of environmental activism in Russia and China—the post-foreign-funding civil society. It focuses on grass-rootsngos and their relationships with their foreign donors and the consequences of foreign grant withdrawal. The paper aims to understand how foreign support has shaped the image of environmental activism for the generation born shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the crackdown on the students’ protests in Tiananmen Square. It argues that young activists in Russia and China see environmentalism as something ‘foreign’, which also makes it attractive to take part in. The paper suggests that, while in some cases foreign funding and international linkages may have endangered existingngos in Russia and China, the opportunity to meet foreigners attracts the younger generation to environmental movements.

Beijing ’89: The Duration of the Event

This article examines the duration of resistance through the framework of the event. It argues that duration is a function of the ways in which the evental encounter grounds a faithful subject. It uses the specific example of the 1989 protests by students and workers in Beijing and their legacies. Performative and petitionary student protest in Tiananmen Square that follows a logic of “communication” is contrasted against unstaged resistance by Chinese workers that operates according to a logic of “rupture” and “surprise,” both spatially and temporally. It is argued that the latter has proved the more enduring form, as grassroots resistance by Chinese workers continues to grow year-on-year. 1989 was seminal to this mode of resistance, marking the point of rupture with an established mode of party politics.

The Rugged Individual's Guide to the Fourth Amendment: How the Court's Idealized Citizen Shapes, Influences, and Excludes the Exercise of Constitutional Rights

Few figures inspire us like individuals who stand up for their rights and beliefs despite the peril that may follow. One cannot help but feel awe looking at the famous photograph of the lone Tiananmen Square protestor facing down a line of Red Army tanks, his willowy frame clothed in a simple white shirt and black pants as he holds a shopping bag. Or who can help but feel humbled by the courage of Rosa Parks, a seamstress, who finally had enough and was willing to be arrested rather than sit in the back of the bus. But while these stories of everyday individuals acting with remarkable courage inspire us, we would hesitate to say that before a citizen can enjoy his or her constitutional rights that he or she must exhibit a similar fortitude. A close examination of the Court’s cases, however, shows that the Court has imposed exactly such an expectation when it comes to the Fourth Amendment. The Court has repeatedly turned to the archetype of an idealized citizen – the “rugged individual” who will unflinchingly stand up to government authority – to define Fourth Amendment rights, and it has had disastrous consequences. The Court’s use of the rugged individual has created an unrealistic threshold for exercising one’s Fourth Amendment rights and is a primary reason why current Fourth Amendment doctrine has proven so impotent in addressing the severe problems with police-citizen encounters that have erupted across the country, from Seattle to Chicago to Ferguson to Baltimore, with each day’s headlines seemingly adding another city to the list. This Article will examine the Court’s use of the rugged individual archetype in its Fourth Amendment jurisprudence and demonstrate how instead of promoting values like dignity and autonomy, the values that the archetype was intended to represent, it has actively undermined those values to devastating effect. Not only does the empirical evidence show that acting like the rugged individual is beyond the reach of most of the citizenry when confronted by the police, it also shows that the archetype when applied to minority communities creates an especially dangerous situation that alienates and effectively disenfranchises a large swath of citizens from their rights. The Article concludes by examining the various reasons the Court continues to rely on the rugged individual and why that reliance must change. In its place, the Article proposes a rights-bearing citizen as an archetype that far better promotes the Fourth Amendment’s underlying values − an archetype that presumes that every citizen, whatever their race, income, or neighborhood, desires to exercise their Fourth Amendment rights and aligns Fourth Amendment jurisprudence with the realities of a police-citizen encounter.