How has life as a student in Beijing changed since the events in Tiananmen Square 20 years ago?

The college cafeteria looks like the inside of a Starbucks. Students plug Lenovo laptops into the power points on the floor and, reaching under hoodies and baseball caps, insert headphones into their ears.

Twenty years ago, 3,000 students marched from this campus of Beijing University to Tiananmen Square to protest and to demand reform; a generation on from the massacre, it is still the domain of China’s brightest students. Many among this group of undergraduates hope to become journalists. Some of them were born in 1989. But none of them knows much about the massacre.

“When I was in high school, my teacher told me that the army was used to stop the protest. I don’t know if it is totally the truth,” one second-year student told me.

Here in China, the history of the pro-democracy protests is officially forgotten. The government forbids schools and universities to teach the events of Tiananmen. Students on the Beijing campus don’t know about the actions of their predecessors, who sparked martial law by calling for democracy and a free press. They have never seen pictures of the lone student who stood between a row of tanks and the world’s media.

The Chinese government is now investing millions into expanding the media, and the students learn about the virtues of journalism and the importance of objectivity in their seminars. Yet outside the classroom they have little experience of a free press. In a nation where the media are heavily controlled, few outlets push boundaries. Most newspapers – with the exception of those in the south, based far from Beijing – predictably peddle the party line.

The events of 4 June 1989 not only left the blood of students on the streets, they also destroyed the hopes for a more independent press in China. A rare window of freedom was closed. In the preceding years, there had been optimism in the air: the word “democracy” was on the lips of intellectuals and party members, and newspapers such as the World Economic Herald in Shanghai openly called for change. Even some of the journalists at the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the government, signed petitions calling for democracy, although plenty continued to hold more conservative views.

The mood expressed in the headlines oscillated between condemnation of the students and sympathy for their cause. But as the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square on 3 June, the media’s relative freedom came to an end. Publications including the World Economic Herald were closed, and foreign journalists were suddenly subject to increased restrictions.

However, 1989 also brought the spread of the worldwide web. For citizens in many countries without a free press, the internet has proved revolutionary. It is the most effective tool for putting pressure on public officials, and China now has more than 100 million internet users. “Netizens are more real than citizens, in the sense that they enjoy more freedom of speech, which is the very foundation of other freedoms,” says Dean Peng, a Chinese journalist.

But the web’s effect on freedom of expression in China has been surprisingly limited. Technology in itself is not enough, as Weisi Guo, a Chinese activist studying in England, points out. Its users must be politicised, and with many young Chinese, he says, that is just not the case. “Those of post-1980 are all about money, comfort, who slept with who, what they ate, and occasional sporadic outbursts of love or hate.” Some of the Beijing University undergraduates agree. “Today’s students are too selfish – or realistic,” one told me.

The Chinese government is investing 30 billion yuan (£2.76bn) in the development of its media. CCTV, the official broadcaster, and Xinhua, the government news agency, are reportedly setting up networks akin to al-Jazeera in order to present a Chinese slant on the news. If the students typing away in the cafeteria continue to pursue journalism, they are likely find themselves in state-run outlets such as these, or working as news assistants or fixers for foreign journalists (it is illegal for Chinese citizens to work as reporters for international media). Neither presents a huge challenge to the status quo of press freedom.

Some claim that the expansion of the media will bring change. “Competition does something to newspapers,” says Hu Xinjin, editor of China’s most successful tabloid, the Global Times. Hu has told his staff that he will run a story covering the anniversary. He would be the first editor within China to do so, though foreign journalists at the publication doubt it will happen.

In 2009, students no longer need to look down the barrel of a tank to make a point: the internet is, or should be, the new opposition.

Yet the question is whether, in these comfortable times, they have a point to make and a reason to make it.

Daniel Vincent is a freelance news correspondent based in Beijing

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website