Annual Forum: Back to History
Date: June 4th, 2009
Venue: TBC (London)
If we have to inquire the justice of the June 4th event today, we immediately confront a question without answer. But this impossibility of asking for justice also implies the necessity to demand multiple justices. In other words, the question today is probably not to demand the justice of a historical moment, but the justice of the historical events.
To make the distinction is to avoid the totalization of what happened 20 years before as a historical moment which can be plainly understood by the death toll or the CNN news report; it is also an attempt to unfold the multiple voices and complexity of their confrontation. It is well-known today that the 1989 movement was complicated in the sense that it involves different struggles between students, multiple interest groups as well as the state. To singularize the movement as one voice seems not doing justice to history, but to use it as an excuse to cover up the massacre is simply non-sense. The paradox has to be solved by looking into individual event and its historical conditions.
The urgency to go back to history means to re-examine the condition for possibility of the movement and the influence posterior to the movement. These conditions disclose the historical problems, and project to a future all of us share, which is to say, the possibility to unfold the problem of a singular “justice” as well as problem of the party rationality.
The 1989 movement according to the Chinese Scholar Wang Hui is a response to the social and economic reform prior to 1989. The parallel existence of the planned economy in the state level and the market economy at local level, led to problem of serious corruption, hence inequality and injustice. Wang Hui sharply points out that it “should not be understood as the state promoting reform and various elements of society opposing it, but rather as people demanding even greater reform, given the decline of the old system”. 20 years after, we came to recognize that China is moving toward neoliberal capitalism characterized by radical privatization, social polarity, floating population. Today we may not be able to identify from this genuine solution and response how important the 1989 movement plays in this shift of policy, there is also no way to deny the deterioration of inequality and injustice.
2009 is not only the 20th anniversary of the social movement, but also the year we see the failure of neoliberalism. This coincidence demands us to go back to history, and to formulate the contradictions within. We may have to ask:
1) What is the relation between the neoliberal policy and the requests of the 1989 movement? This is not suggesting that the social movement is responsible for the shift, but we cannot ignore that it was actually demanded as a promise of economic “freedom”, while it further becomes a technique of depolitization.
2) What is the response of the state to the request of freedom and democracy? What is the negotiation today if there is any? The criticism of the student movement is their naïve thought of democracy and freedom, which are requests without determinate content, while the Italian philosopher Giorgia Agamben highly endorses it as “the coming politics”
3) What is the possibility of another economic system proper as an answer to the 1989 event? The Chinese version of neoliberalism is one which recognizes economic freedom and dissociates it with political freedom, the Chinese version of socialism is actually another name of “capitalism with Chinese characteristics”
These questions demand our further investigation of history, and to project the meaning of the social movement to the present struggle as well as the formulation of the future resistance. We sincerely invite your participation of our annual forum “Back to History”, any form of participation is welcomed: academic paper, poetry, painting, music, etc. If you have any proposal, please email to tam040607[a]gmail.com
References:
Wang Hui, China’s New Order, Hardvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England. 2003
Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, University of Minnesota Press. 1990,2007
