ABSTRACT
In the minds of people who experienced or witnessed the June Fourth Massacre of 1989, the events scream in memory as if they happened only yesterday. For these people, it can seem odd that the intervening 20 years are fully one-third of the history of the People’s Republic of China, or that the same years are more than 10 per cent of Chinese history since the founding of the Republic of China in 1912. To realise that events that feel like ‘only yesterday’ in fact occurred 20 years ago startles us, in part, because we normally expect that memory will fade. Most memories do. But with traumatic memories like those of June Fourth, the fading does not happen – or, at least, happens much more slowly – and the result is that events of 20 years ago do indeed present themselves in the mind as if little time has elapsed since they occurred. But unusual vividness is only one of several special effects that a traumatic or
politically charged event can bring to human memory. In the case of June Fourth, families of victims have felt special needs to preserve memory and to memorialise the dead; survivors have hoped to use memory in pursuit of their continuing political ideals; government authorities have tried to repress memory and even to annihilate it if possible. And problems such as these are all in addition to normal problems of human memory. In this essay I look first at some general problems of memory and of how events are retold from memory. Then I focus on memory of June Fourth and organise the analysis by asking how three categories of people – perpetrators, victims, and bystanders – have remembered, have failed to remember, or have altered memory, whether willingly or not. The tripartite division of ‘perpetrators, victims, and bystanders’ is not analytically perfect, but it opens important and illuminating questions. Nearly all the questions that I raise have moral implications, so I call the essay ‘memory and ethics.’2
