As someone who spent a month in China in 2012, Claire Moran’s Feb. 3 article is quite problematic. She writes in a fashion that mimics the all too prevalent chauvinist discourse that dominates the portrayal of China. She describes the silence about the so-called ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre’ that took place in 1989 as “surreal” and “unacceptable” censorship. However, if she were to research the history of the country that she was going to spend two-weeks studying abroad, she would discover that there was no bloodshed in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Many U.S. news sources from 1989 shows that there was no such massacre. In fact, one of the leaders of the Tiananmen demonstrations, Chai Ling expressed to U.S. reporter Philip Cunningham that the demonstrators wanted to provoke the government to “butcher the people,” to help gain support for the real goal of the movement: to overthrow the Chinese government, and fully restore capitalism.

It is important to remember that at that time the student population only made up only 0.2 percent of the country’s population of 1.1 billion. It is clear the group of students that participated in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations did not represent the interests of China’s vast majority of poor and working people.

While in China, I had a drastically different interpretation and experience of China. The Chinese people do not sit in massive lines every day to see Mao Zedong in his Mausoleum because they are brainwashed. The portrait that overhangs the Forbidden City is not “infamous” to the Chinese people. They see Mao as the great revolutionary hero who founded their country and improved the lives of millions. Many people who I talked to in my month in China, ranging from university students to people living and working in the countryside, all had positive things to say of Mao Zedong. The people talked extensively about Tiananmen in 1989; they are not blinded or masked to what happened. They know of the Western portrayals of it and of the class character of that movement. To suggest that the Chinese people are “censored” or are misinformed of what occurred is pure arrogance.

This defense of the Chinese government does not mean that the government is outside of criticism. However, a critique of the Chinese government must be contextualized within historical and global processes that shape what occurs in China.

Collin Chambers—Geography, MA
Syracuse ANSWER Coalition