When Dreamers Grow Old : Lost Causes of Youth Are Cyclical in Modern China

“When I was young I, too, had many dreams.” This confession of despair by Lu Xun, China’s foremost 20th-Century author, could speak for countless Chinese in this tragic century. The Beijing massacre is simply the latest brutal death of a youthful dream. It is the death not only of the specific dream of “democracy and freedom” but, for many, of the possibility for dreams. One of the tragic patterns of 20th-Century China is the recurring nightmare of hope dashed to despair, of dreams shattered by violence and repression.

The dream of national wealth and power in the first year of the century seemed to be realized by the revolution in 1911, which overthrew the Manchu monarchy and established a republic. Instrumental in the revolution were students returning from study in Japan where they had drunk the heady wine of modern progress and nationalism and seen the fruits of the Meiji restoration. But the promise of the revolution was snuffed out by the authoritarian leadership of President Yuan Shih-kai and, after his death in 1916, by the dismal plunge into warlordism.

The twin dreams of the May 4 Movement in the late 1910s and early ‘20s similarly failed to come to fruition. One goal was to attain greater individual freedom from traditional social and political structures. That was, however, swallowed up in the repressive statism and reactionary traditionalism of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government. The second dream was to build a nation freed from imperialist control and operating through self-determination. That hope faded in the face of Japan’s military campaigns and control of much of China in the 1930s and ‘40s.

In both efforts it was China’s young people who were in the forefront, who bore the brunt of repression in pre-dawn raids on universities by government police and of violence and death engineered by the state.

The Communist victory and the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 brought the reality of a nation freed from the depredations of outsiders. With it came the hope of a new China, energized by a popular will, modernized and ready to take its place in the international community. But the initial economic success was buried in the calamitous Great Leap Forward (1958-59), and the dream of a more open and tolerant system suggested in Mao’s Hundred Flowers Movement was destroyed in the ferocity of the anti-rightist campaign of 1957. The insanity of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) came when Mao tried to infuse the youth of the 1960s with his own utopian revolutionary dream.

Now, once again, the hopes of China’s young, symbolized by the Goddess of Democracy, are being destroyed by old men who once had their own dreams of change. It is a tragically ironic pattern repeated with depressing consistency. Many of the revolutionaries of 1911 became conservative statists and paranoid preservers of their own power in the ‘20s and ‘30s. Many of the revolutionaries of the May 4, Long March and Yenan periods have become the inflexible old guard of 1989, fearful of losing control, unwilling to admit that the dreams of their youth no longer match reality.

If the repeating cycles of hope and despair continue, then we may expect that hope will again revive, that dreams will again flourish. What is not hopeful is that China has not been able to break out of this self-destructive pattern in order to achieve long-term stability through an equilibrium between state power and popular will.

The unanswerable question now is what sort of reaction there will be among the Chinese people to the dashed dream of the students and their intellectual and proletarian comrades for a more open political system. Many in the vast country will likely never learn of the actual events of June 4. Among the peasants, the majority may well share the spirit of the Beijing-area farmer whose only complaint was that the demonstrations and martial law prevented him from selling his melons.

What is crucial to the country’s future is the response of those in China’s cities and elsewhere who have been engaged by the recent demonstrations and the Tian An Men assault. Will they respond to repression with a cowed sense of frustration and futility, submitting to the forces in charge, like Lu Xun’s erstwhile revolutionary character, who for his survival resignedly and hopelessly returned to teaching the discredited classics? Or will a massive purge of the intelligentsia bring a rapid rebirth of anti-government activity, perhaps marked by violence instead of peaceful protest?

For now, Lu Xun’s own prescription sums up the situation: “Hope cannot be said to exist nor can it be said not to exist.” The open expression of the dreams for basic change may be long in reappearing. But the willful efforts of many will almost certainly once again make the dream alive. Lu continues: “(Hope) is just like roads across the Earth. For actually the Earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.”

The young will again make a road, will again dream their dreams. But when will those dreams stop turning to nightmares and awake finally to a new reality?