Far Eastern Economic Review

May 14, 1998

Battle for History

Key Chinese anniversaries attract competing claims

By Matt Forney in Beijing

Yu Jie is a student who doesn't drink, smoke or lay claim to radicalism. Yet this Beijing University graduate student just published his notes from the underground. Yu has for years written articles lamenting abuses of power and the sad state of Chinese intellectuals. Classmates passed around his eloquent and scathing "desk-drawer essays," but until now no publisher would release them.

Yu's book, Fire and Ice, is now selling quickly in bookstores. It strikes at the heart of two topics much on the Communist Party's mind. On May 4, the party celebrated the centennial of Yu's Beijing University, and also the anniversary of demonstrations by patriotic students in 1919 that became known as the May 4th Movement. The party attached itself to both, lauding the university as the birthplace of Chinese Marxism, and itself as the torch-bearer of May 4th-style patriotism.

In an essay called "The Lost May 4th," Yu, a Chinese-literature major, disagrees. He writes that the movement was about more than patriotism. It was "about the people's will, their rights and waking up their consciousness. False patriotism makes use of the May 4th Movement." In so writing, Yu joins the struggle to interpret history--specifically, that connected with the two events whose anniversaries are being marked--that has raged in the capital for several weeks. (See interview on page 30.)

To the Communist Party, history matters. With unelected leaders, the party must continually reinforce its claim to represent the masses. Interpreting the past is a time-tested method. Thus, the 20 million-plus peasants who starved during the commune period of the 1950s become victims of bad weather. The Gang of Four catch all blame for the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution so that others are exonerated. Chairman Mao's policies are officially 70% right and 30% wrong.

So in a continuing exercise to underscore its legitimacy, the party claimed the legacies of Beijing University and the May 4th Movement, and used them to underpin its right to govern--even as others challenged those interpretations. If such challenges gain currency, they could seriously undermine the Communist Party. If access to history is thrown open, it won't be long before somebody attempts to reassess the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre.

Beijing University was founded exactly a century ago in the Qing dynasty. Known as "Beida," it has been China's centre of intellectual ferment ever since. Its writers were the first to use the vernacular. A young Mao Zedong worked there as a library assistant in 1918 (and was ridiculed for his peasant accent). The first "big-character poster" of the Cultural Revolution went up at Beida, and in 1989, the first students to demand democracy marched from Beida to Tiananmen Square.

The university also launched the only student movement comparable with the Tiananmen protests of 1989. At the end of World War I, Beida students led a massive protest against the government for ceding imperial Germany's territory in China to Japan. Under the slogan, "Democracy and Science," the 1919 agitation became known as the May 4th Movement, and heralded a nationwide drive to abandon outmoded practices in favour of modern science, literature--and government.

The Communist Party has lumped Beida's centennial together with the May 4th anniversary. The university invited 50,000 alumni and 140 college heads from all over the world to attend celebrations.

The party's message to this throng was distilled in a May 4 editorial in the People's Daily: Beida "played an undeniable historical role in the spread of Marxism in China and in the Chinese Communist Party's establishment." Party chief Jiang Zemin, speaking in the Great Hall of the People, tried to weaken the democratic overtones of the May 4th Movement by insisting that it was about "patriotism, progress, democracy and science."

But, as one prominent professor from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences notes, "when the party says, 'Be patriotic,' it doesn't just mean towards China. It means towards the party."

That contrasts with previous interpretations of the movement. In May 1989, with perhaps a million demonstrators in the capital, party chief Zhao Ziyang told the nation that according to May 4th principles, China must "step by step eliminate all thinking and customs that are undemocratic or unscientific." It was a remarkably progressive cut at history. Less than a month later Zhao was purged and has lived under house arrest since.

Others offer competing interpretations of the two anniversaries. Only days before May 4, a new book called Beijing University and Liberalism in Modern China hit bookshops. It compiles essays by scholars associated with the university from the Qing dynasty onward who have argued for freedom of expression.

The introduction, by liberal patriarch Li Shenzhi, counterbalances the party's claim that Beida was China's cradle of leftist thought. He says it was the centre of liberal thought, which he compares with Buddhism as a foreign idea easily accepted by Chinese. When everybody enjoys freedom, Li writes, they might be able to "erect roadblocks on the road to tyranny."

Today, Beida students seem both more political and more practical than at any time since 1989. A student said his classmates want to bring "change" to China, and "are nurturing this hope, and waiting for an appropriate time to express it."