I found the part of the ricksaw drivers at the end of the article powerfully moving -
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/02/opinion/02KRIS.html?th
- Re: a NYT articleposted on 06/02/2004
can you post the whole article here? i forget my password in NYT.
- posted on 06/02/2004
The Tiananmen Victory
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: June 2, 2004
On Friday, it will be 15 years since I stood at the northeast corner of Tiananmen Square and watched China go mad.
The Communist Party was answering the demands of millions of protesters who had made Tiananmen Square the focus of their seven-week democracy movement. The protesters included students, Communist Party members, peasants, diplomats, laborers — even thieves, who signed a pledge to halt their "work" during the demonstrations.
I was in my Beijing apartment when I heard that troops had opened fire and were trying to force their way to Tiananmen. So I raced to the scene on my bicycle, dodging tank traps that protesters had erected.
The night was filled with gunfire — and with Chinese standing their ground to block the troops. I parked my bike at Tiananmen, and the People's Liberation Army soon arrived from the other direction. The troops fired volley after volley at the crowd on the Avenue of Eternal Peace; at first I thought these were blanks, but then the night echoed with screams and people began to crumple.
The Communist Party signed its own death warrant that night. As Lu Xun, the great leftist writer beloved by Mao, wrote after a massacre in 1926: "This is not the conclusion of an incident, but a new beginning. Lies written in ink can never disguise facts written in blood."
So, 15 years after Tiananmen, we can see the Communist dynasty fraying. The aging leaders of 1989 who ordered the crackdown won the battle but lost the war: China today is no longer a Communist nation in any meaningful sense.
Political pluralism has not arrived yet, but economic, social and cultural pluralism has. The struggle for China's soul is over, for China today is not the earnest socialist redoubt sought by hard-liners, but the modernizing market economy sought by Zhao Ziyang, the leader ousted in 1989. The reformers lost their jobs, but they captured China's future.
In retrospect, the Communist hard-liners were right about one thing, though: they warned passionately that it would be impossible to grab only Western investment and keep out Western poisons like capitalism and dreams of "bourgeois freedom." They knew that after the Chinese could watch Eddie Murphy, wear tight pink dresses and struggle over what to order at Starbucks, the revolution was finished. No middle class is content with more choices of coffees than of candidates on a ballot.
So Communism is fading, in part because of Western engagement with China — trade, investment, Avon ladies, M.B.A.'s, Michael Jordan and Vogue magazines have triumphed over Marx. That's one reason we should bolster free trade and exchanges with China, rather than retreating to the protectionist barricades, as some are urging.
The same forces would also help transform Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Burma, if only we would unleash them. We are doing a favor to the dictators in those countries by isolating and sanctioning them. If we want to topple them, we need to unleash our most potent weapons of mass destruction, like potbellied business executives and bare-bellied Britney Spears.
So when will political change come to China? I don't have a clue, but it could come any time. While it might come in the form of a military coup, or dissolution into civil war or chaos, the most likely outcome is a combination of demands from below (perhaps related to labor unrest) and concessions from the top, in roughly the same way that democracy infiltrated South Korea and Taiwan.
It's often said that an impoverished, poorly educated, agrarian country like China cannot sustain democracy. Yet my most powerful memory of that night 15 years ago is of the peasants who had come to Beijing to work as rickshaw drivers.
During each lull in the firing, we could see the injured, caught in a no-man's-land between us and the troops. We wanted to rescue them but didn't have the guts. While most of us in the crowd cowered and sought cover, it was those uneducated rickshaw drivers who pedaled out directly toward the troops to pick up the bodies of the dead and wounded.
Some of the rickshaw drivers were shot, but the rest saved many, many lives that night, rushing the wounded to hospitals as tears streamed down their cheeks. It would be churlish to point out that such people are ill-prepared for democracy, when they risked their lives for it.
- posted on 06/02/2004
谢adagio贴过来。 这些三轮车夫的确应该在历史上有一个记录。 但如果有人拍摄到三轮车夫抢救士兵的镜头呢?这样的镜头是否也应该在民主的媒体上得到同样版面的报道?这牵涉到新闻是否有政治倾向的问题。
在海外,我觉得应该有另一种声音。 相对于国内的噤声,海外也有另一种声音受到窒息。四周似乎有一股假哭的做作姿态,这些不难在海外的各大网站上看到。那些死尸成了他们占据道德制高点的王牌,这种姿态让人联想起911后某些人的假哭和贝拉的911小说。
有一种真实在海外是难以得以表达的。这种真实在抗战沦陷时的上海曾有过,一边在枪林弹雨,另一边在琴诗书画。 窗外的枪林弹雨不过是几只炸响的爆竹而已。
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