China Perspective Issues
Michel Bonnin
VIIIème Assemblée Nationale Populaire : la touche finale
De la représentativité des représentants
Dissidents
L’année du coq
Zheng Yi : un écrivain chez les cannibales
Far from Harmonious: The Chinese Authorities’ Handling of the 2008 Tibet Crisis
The Tibet crisis tainted the success of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The handling of the crisis showed the CCP’s rigid denial of genuine dialogue and compromise and adherence to a formula of repression and economic growth. Current leaders are enmeshed in this policy, but a new generation might well seek out policies more in tune with the quest for ”harmony” at home and ”peaceful rise” on the world scene.
Dossier : cinq ans après le 4 juin, la société échappe-t-elle au pouvoir ?Recentralisation ou éclatement ?Un rapport alarmiste sur l’état de la Chine
Lucien Bianco : La Chine
Mang Ke : Ye shi (Sauvageries)
The Chinese Communist Party and June 4th: Or how to get out of it and get away with it
The spring 1989 democracy movement and the massacre of June 4th were a serious challenge to the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party. Twenty years on the Party appears to have successfully overcome it, but at the price of a return to the political fundamentals of a Leninist party-state and the use of nationalism as a replacement source of legitimacy. Despite all its efforts to conceal and deform the true history of the 1989 “disturbances” (as demonstrated in school and university text books), the party has not succeeded in ridding itself of this stain on its history. Questions about recognition of responsibility and a possible “reconciliation” continue to haunt it.
The Threatened History and Collective Memory of the Cutural Revolution's Lost Genaration
Since the Communist Party of China published its brief official version of the Cultural Revolution in 1981, few works on the history of that period have been approved for publication, even if they have kept strictly to the orthodox line. Still, some research work and eye-witness accounts by Chinese people outside the official apparatus have appeared, mostly in Hong Kong and Taiwan but also on the mainland. In spite of official attempts to bury the memory of that time, and against the grain of unreliable nostalgic recollections of some of their contemporaries, some former Red Guards and educated youth have managed, against all the odds, to put together an authentic and critically aware "people's" memory. These scattered islands of memory of China’s “lost generation"? are under constant threat of submersion, but they are worth our attention, not only because they are essential for the future of China but also because the Cultural Revolution was an event of global significance.