New Approaches to Asian History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Xxvi, 266 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$34.00, paper. ISBN 9781107657809.
The 1989 Tiananmen Square protest movement and subsequent Beijing massacre is one of the most globally well-known and oft-referenced events in recent Chinese history, outside of China itself. Its images are iconic, with that of a lone figure stopping a government tank still immediately recognizable today. Even the square itself, a space that has played host to innumerable groundbreaking historical events, usually evokes the 1989 massacre more than the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, or the May Fourth movement of 1919, both of which unfolded on the same grounds. It was a moment that, as Jeremy Brown personally attests, was globally felt, even capturing the attention of 12-year-old boys in Iowa City concerned more with whether the Chicago Cubs beat the New York Mets than global current events. By beginning his book with his own memory of watching the massacre unfold on BBC as a pre-teen halfway around the world, he provides the impetus for writing this book: everyone knows this moment is important, and an enormous amount has been written about why it is important, yet somehow, so much feels still unknown. Over 30 years later, Brown feels unsatisfied with how this story has been told. We still, in his mind, lack a narrative that weaves together and makes sense of the sheer volume of insight, information, and knowledge that exist in memoirs, documentaries, and studies.
What is missing, Brown explains, is a historian’s approach. But what does it mean to view Tiananmen Square as history? In Brown’s explanation, it means a more comprehensive narrative that probes the unexplored stories, corrects the misrepresentations, and exhumes the unquestioned presumptions in popular, well-worn narratives, narratives best exemplified by the 1995 documentary Gate of Heavenly Peace. In this spirit, Brown’s book, over five parts that span from the early 1980s through both the immediate and long-term aftermath of the movement, asks us to reject the presumption that this movement was nothing more than a showdown between idealistic students and intractable government leadership that lasted no more than six weeks. His focus is, instead, on widening our gaze. He wants us to decentre the significance of student protestors, considering how different groups—workers, police, mothers, military—led and drove the movement. He wants us to extend our timeline before and beyond those six weeks on the square; the movement’s momentum was years in the making, and the bloody violence that ended it extended weeks, months, and years after June 4. And he wants us to consider that events outside of Beijing, from contemporaneous clashes between Tibetan and Han students in Lanzhou to student demonstrations in Xi’an and Changsha, were just as critical to the movement’s unfolding as the heavily scrutinized moments in the square.
Some of Brown’s book is a retread of earlier works, leaning in particular on studies by Denise Chong, Louisa Lim, Wu Renhua, and Perry Link, among others. Some chapters centre on relatively lesser-known events. I was particularly riveted by chapter 18, which narrates how earlier protests against communist rule by non-Han citizens, in particular Tibetan demonstrations in Lhasa only one month before the movement in Beijing began, created both impetus and precedent for violent, martial-law crackdowns on unarmed citizens—a causal connection that, because of pervasive Han supremacy in China’s coastal cities, few Beijing protestors recognized. But Brown’s desire to include both familiar moments and unfamiliar ones sometimes comes at the expense of a clear narrative arc. Switching between quiet conversations in the Great Hall to the personal romantic intrigues of well-known protest figures to creative, if sometimes a tad perplexing, “what-if” thought exercises about personal decision making that seem to be trying to grasp whether or not violence was inevitable, we get something akin to a Van Gogh painting—a rich pastiche of colour that looks like a recognizable narrative, but upon closer inspection becomes somewhat less clear.
This is not the only way the book is not a traditional monograph. It is not argument-forward, beyond Brown’s desire to correct what he sees as false or misguided presumptions. Brown also makes his positionality plain—he is not, here, the disinterested narrator, but the child who remembers these events unfolding, the friend creating bonds and relationships with the people he interviewed, and the professor trying to figure out the best way to teach these topics to undergraduate students. Because of this, Brown does not shy away from frank assessments of the cruelty of the violence, or the racism and misogyny that affected not only the events themselves but also our collective memory of them. Yet despite all of this, or really because of all this, I found Brown’s book thoroughly refreshing. Perhaps this is because he answers so many questions I, personally, have been searching for answers to. I, too, have taught Gate of Heavenly Peace every year since I began teaching my Modern East Asia survey, and I, too, find the documentary both compelling and frustrating in the problematic assumptions it subtly reinforces. I thus found myself nodding along to Brown’s characterizations of familiar events and individuals, characterizations that are full of both nuance and empathy. Reading this book felt like listening to a deeply knowledgeable friend explain to me how I might do better by my students. I’m already thinking about how this book will change my class next semester.
In this way, Brown’s book is of a critical underrepresented genre that I think will be of substantive use to many: a clear, nuanced, and comprehensive accounting of an event that so many of us teach but, because of the sheer amount of information and accounts that exist, don’t always teach well. Brown also makes clear that, as we begin to think of Tiananmen as history, that his is not the last word on the subject. I’m not sure I agree with his justification for what historians do, which might, to an ungenerous reader, seem as though all we have to offer are correctives, nuance, and a comprehensiveness that will never be exhaustive. But Brown recognizes that historians have a critical perspective that bears critical insight. I hope that we take up the mantle.
Gina Anne Tam
Trinity University, San Antonio