BOOK REVIEW
Tiananmen tales from the dark side Tiananmen Moon by Philip J Cunningham
Reviewed by Kathryn Minnick
Philip Cunningham has regularly stirred up the sediment of the 1989 Tiananmen
student movement over the past 20 years, trying to keep the silt-like memories
of the movement from settling into obscurity.
After tens of thousands of words on the uprising, Tiananmen Moon is his
best work on the subject yet. Two decades have finally allowed Cunningham's eye
for cultural and narrative detail and his penchant for political analysis to
find their right proportion.
Cunningham, now a professor, freelance journalist and writer, has
extensive first-hand knowledge of the movement as witness, occasional
participant, and interlocutor for a videotaped statement by student leader Chai
Ling. He has used that knowledge as the basis for numerous commentaries as well
as a previous book-length memoir of the movement, Reaching for the Sky.
Published in 1999, it is a remote ancestor of Tiananmen Moon and shows
how Cunningham has evolved in the past 10 years into a superior - and often
brilliant - writer.
As a disclaimer, I have known Cunningham since 1984, when we were both graduate
students at the University of Michigan. However, I wasn't in contact with the
author in 1989.
Given the fodder the Chinese student movement of 1989 has
provided journalist Cunningham, I wondered, somewhat cynically, what more
Cunningham had to say. While many of the themes and anecdotes in Tiananmen Moon
are echoes of Cunningham's earlier writing, the new book stands out because
Cunningham has now fully mastered the narrative style.
He presents richly drawn characters and dramatic threads that pull us in like a
novel, while providing remarkable yet organic insights. In Tiananmen Moon,
Cunningham's high points - which are many - are equal to the best of any
nonfiction author writing today.
The book is not just a well-wrought story, though; it is a seamless blend of
memoir and history; past and present; narrative and reflection; gemlike
description and unadorned information. It tracks Cunningham's involvement with
the student movement, beginning on May 3,1989, when he joins student
demonstrators in a large march on Tiananmen Square.
The movement has been building for a couple weeks by this time - information
the reader needs to piece together himself. Tiananmen Moon would benefit
from a clearer explanation of the movement's timeline, one of the book's few
flaws.
Picking up the movement on May 3 apparently corresponds with Cunningham's
involvement and also with the device that gives the book its name: the author
follows the gradual waxing and waning of activity and hopefulness on the square
as it perfectly mirrors the cycle of the moon.
The uncanny correspondence of lunar brightness and darkness with the tide of
events on the square is partly a fortuitous moral symbol and partly a practical
matter: the full moon of May 20 provides a protective shield of light to the
protesters; two weeks later the dark, moonless sky of June 3-4 gives Beijing
the obscurity leaders want for a nighttime assault.
The new moon of June 3-4 is not only the end of an old lunar cycle - once full
of ecstatic promise - but the beginning of a new celestial and political era,
which many would argue fundamentally continues to this day.
The book's moon template - with the story divided according to the four phases
of the moon - initially feels like a gimmick, especially when explicitly
spelled out in the preface. But the larger-than-life forces of celestial bodies
soon become an apt counterpoint to the potency and uncontrollableness of a
heaving, breathing, million-strong human organism on the square that, like a
hydra, has no clear head.
Tiananmen Moon is the story of a movement, but also of the place that
vivifies it: Cunningham insightfully calls Tiananmen Square the "navel" of
Beijing. The movement promises to redefine Tiananmen, but later falls victim to
the same political rigidity that the square - so close to China's political
heart - represents.
The moral chiaroscuro of the book's characters is subtly rendered. Cunningham
categorically condemns the government's use of lethal arms against the
demonstrators, but nothing else is black and white. Cunningham shows, for
example, students treating their hunger striking comrades reverentially. But he
also describes a malignant peer pressure on the strikers, who must stick to
their fatal course or lose face.
Cunningham sees them much like kamikaze pilots who, once strapped in, can't
turn back even if they have second thoughts. He also introduces us to a student
demonstrator from Xi'an city, in northwest China, whose behavior and easy
adaptation to the perks of working for a BBC news crew make Cunningham
occasionally wonder if the man is a spy. Cunningham even shows himself tossing
a rock at a People's' Liberation Army armored vehicle and describes the moral
chill he feels at adopting the bloodthirsty mentality of the crowd.
Cunningham's treatment of student leaders is particularly nuanced. He portrays
them by turns as idealistic, narcissistic, passionate and sometimes dangerously
single-minded and abstract about the harm their decisions might cause.
Cunningham devotes more than a chapter to his interview with the movement's
commander-in-chief, Chai Ling - an interview that arguably made her famous and
gave him cachet as an expert on the movement.
The story behind the interview - Chai Ling's labile mood and an hours-long
circuitous drive around Beijing to find a safe interview spot - are the most
compelling parts of this section. But Cunningham gives too much space to a dry
recounting of her interview - in her words, a "Last Will and Testament". For
some, this may be one of the book's high points. For me - perhaps because I'd
seen the material before - it was the only place where Cunningham misplaces his
formidable storytelling gift.
Today's China - especially in its recent role as host to the opulent and
successful 2008 Summer Olympic Games - might seem to have little in common with
the China of Tiananmen Moon. Chinese students today have a hair trigger
nationalistic sensibility. They are more apt to demonstrate in support of the
Communist Party and its nationalistic pronouncements than against it.
For example, Chinese students' online hostility to CNN and other Western
media's supposedly biased reporting of unrest in Tibet last year shows that
nationalism, not democracy, is more on student lips. But Cunningham shows that
the students of 1989 were not entirely different from those today.
The use of minzhu (democracy) as a slogan 20 years ago and the creation
of a "Goddess of Democracy" were phases of the movement, like phases of the
moon. Cunningham describes how the movement's theme morphed over its short life
from seeking dialogue with the government, to "supporting the students"
(whatever people wanted that to mean), and later democracy.
It was never the stark good versus evil, authoritarianism versus democracy
narrative often portrayed in the West. The movement was not really about
adopting a Western political model. It was about saving the nation from its
worst tendencies and about a generation of students' desire to be patriotic, as
they understood patriotism.
Cunningham urges the Chinese government to allow free discussion about the 1989
student movement, to heal old wounds and give rise to more than one version of
the truth. But today's China has recovered from numerous self-inflicted
national tragedies over its brief 60-year history, often without any
discussion. There is no reason to think the government will change now.
In the absence of a full airing of the story of the 1989 Tiananmen student
movement, Tiananmen Moon provides the next best thing - the steady,
reflective, nuanced eye of someone who knows China and is not afraid to let the
truth fall where it may.
Tiananmen Moon: Inside the Chinese Student Uprising of 1989 by Philip J
Cunningham. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc (May 28, 2009). ISBN-10:
0742566722. Price US$39.95, 304 pages.
Kathryn Minnick lived in Beijing for 11 years and has a MA in journalism
from the University of Wisconsin.
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provided journalist Cunningham, I wondered, somewhat cynically, what more
Cunningham had to say. While many of the themes and anecdotes in Tiananmen Moon
are echoes of Cunningham's earlier writing, the new book stands out because
Cunningham has now fully mastered the narrative style.
