ABSTRACT
Commentators have been quick to label the Beijing Spring of 1989 a more or less unified expression of democratic will against the machinations of the Chinese Communist Party, an opposition epitomized in the image of a man standing alone and defying the progress of a line of tanks leaving Tiananmen Square in the aftermath of 4 June. This image has been reproduced in posters and also adorns the cover of the first instant book to appear after the massacre (Salisbury, 1989). As such, it is a powerful indictment of the Chinese Communist Party and, with all the implication that metonymy can muster, communism as it now comes to mean. Yet the metonymy of this image defies its own reinscription into both Western discourse and Chinese history for there is no essential reason why this image represents the putative opposition narrativized in relation to it (what if, for instance, it was labelled ‘Panama City, 1989’ or ‘Vilnius, 1991’?). How does one begin to specify, rather than essentialize, the historical conditions of this image without discarding its metonymic profusions or the veracity which may inform them? Consider another image, this time from Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (1984) in which one may see a young peasant boy, Hanhan, running towards a Communist Party soldier, Gu Qing, but being held back by hordes of old peasant men engaging in a rain dance. Since Chen is certainly no apologian for the CCP how can we explain this disjunction? Where is the locus of democratic change, who or what is the source of defiance, transformation or renewal?
