In Between Naivity and Hypocrisy: The Problem of Historical Truth
It has been twenty years, almost a generation. For my generation, there is hardly any concrete memory of what happened, if not relying on the extended memory of video and news reports. But then what does it mean by June 4th? For the memory left to us, there is an unofficial death toll, the crying of the mums who lost their sons, and the fact that the Chinese communist party’s attempt to depolitize the whole event. But these remain factual stuff, and they are subject to debate. In Hong Kong every year around June 4th, there is always debate on the question of historical truth, for example a few years ago a politician close to the community party claimed that those rolled under the tanks are not human bodies, but pigs. Last month, the chief executive of HongKong, said that the political event should give way to the economic growth of the country, to put it plainly, it is the country is doing well in terms of economy, and we should forget what happened twenty years ago. All these debate, as I think, on the one hand are trapped in a nihilistic black hole, which naturalize and depolitize any form of resistance; on the other hand, they ignore the historical complexity of the event, as well as the economy reform.
Historical Turning Point to Neo-Liberalism
The Chinese scholar Wang Hui analysed that the 89 social movement is a critical turning point of China’s stepping towards neoliberalism. The economic reform in the early 80s produced an unordinary setting, which created serious problems of corruption, inequality and injustice. On the one hand the government attempted to maintain the planned economy, by regulating the prices in the market; on the other hand, it also allowed a free market trading on the local level, which means a flexible market price. This implies that people can buy goods from the government and sell them in the private market, and vice versa in order to get profit. This also implies that if one wants to make more money, one needs more connections, hence more corruptions. According to Wang Hui, this is one of the main sources of the social movement. The students asked for democracy, freedom and equality, the other interest groups asked for similar values by demanding further reform. The movement cannot be reduced to one or two motives, rather its complexity, according to Wang Hui, remain undetermined.
What is this further reform? Today we can see that it is a perfect combination of authoritarian government and neoliberalism. The free market is based on the violence created by the state, for example, dismantling of the state owned enterprises lead to unemployment; giving away the land which the farmers rely on to industrial development, etc. This process of proletarietization has to be understood in two senses. On the urban level, the workers who were not able to get jobs had to live in poverty and indignity; workers who were able to transform, which means participating in the market and playing by the rules, are called “xia hai” in Chinese, meaning “jumping into the sea”. Now we can find far too many examples how people from intellectuals to those who are “literally blind” thrived in the new economy, and became models of every follower. In the rural level, due to the urban reform, the wealth gap between the urban dwellers and farmers are further deepened. As a result, the farmers, especially their sons and daughters have to go to the cities and become what is later called the “floating population” The shift of the population, also facilitates the industrial development by turning farmlands into factories. The Chinese government finds itself an important, yet ahistorical role to carry out the reform. This role also represents a historical break between the pre-1978 red china and what Deng Xiao Ping called the “socialism with Chinese characteristics” or Brian Homles twisted “capitalism with Chinese characteristics”, Wang Hui wrote:
“Those in charge of implementing the last will and testament of the revolution [that is, the Party leadership] carry out their dual responsibilities in an absurd fashion: on the one hand they clownishly bury all the reasonable aspects of the revolution and of socialism, while on the other they employ state violence and monopolization to guarantee the smooth transition of a Chinese economy in crisis to one based on market mechanisms, in the process wrecking all of the equitable features of the social guarantees contained within the old system”
This is a widely discussed scene happened between 89 and the 90s. As Wang Hui pointed out in Mainland China, the critique of the reform, shifted from the critique of radicalism in the early 90s, to the critique of humanity from 94-97, and finally the critique of neoliberalism after 1997 following the Asia financial crisis. The critique of radicalism centres on an elite belief, that a political movement can only be effective within an internal reform but not a revolutionary impact from the outside. By these kind of criticism is meaningless, yet they attempts to reduce a historical event to an utilitarian question, the historicity of an event and its projection is not taken into account. Yet, we have to realize that the direction of reform itself is already embedded in the demand of the 1989 social movement, as Wang Hui points out it is not the people fought against the reform, but pushed forward the reform.
So today, I think we have to ask what does it mean by June 4th in a new context. But this “new”, this novelty doesn’t come naturally; rather it has to be demanded. It is also important that this “new” refreshes a historical events and its traumatic experience, in favour of an overcoming rather than melancholia. In 2009, we saw the failure of neoliberalism, not only because Karl Marx’s Das Kapital becomes the bestseller, but also it comes to the moment that people starts realizing that the illusion of a self-organized, self-controllable freemarket cannot hold true anymore. But isn’t this already noticed in Adam Smith’s invisible hand? Didn’t we realize that the term invisible hand precisely means it is also out of the vision of human beings? How are we going to look at the failure of neoliberalism with reference to the demand of the June 4th event? And we come to the complicated concept of democracy and freedom embedded in the economic reasons of neoliberalism. Lets suspense the question of efficacy of democracy and freedom first, and instead, lets look at the motive of pursuing and adopting economic reasons as such.
The Aporia of Democracy and Freedom
Zizek in his article China’s River Valley of Tears points out China’s route to neoliberalism and its success in the combination between the state violence and neoliberal policy. Yet to Zizek, China’s move is merely a copycat of the western capitalism, without realizing its failure. This movement is homogenous and boring, so he says that the culmination of the idea of democracy in 89, is actually a pursuit of western consumerism.
“In post-Communist nations, the economic results of this new democratic order have disappointed a large strata of the population, who, in the glorious days of 1989, equated democracy with the abundance of the Western consumerist societies. And now, 20 years later, when the abundance is still missing, they blame democracy itself ”
Lets suspend the debate on the validity of Zizek’s argument, and lets assume it is true. Then we may have to ask what kind of democracy owns its highest authority and authenticity. So what is a true democracy in western culture if there is one? And if there is such a universality, what is its nature and origin? We know that this is an old fashioned question which philosophers try to answer without absoluteness. But this will be another topic to be discussed. Yet we may contrast this with Agamben’s commentary on the TianAnMen event. He pointed out in his book The Coming Community, that democracy and freedom are two broad concepts without content:
“What was most striking about the demonstrations of the Chinese May was the relative absence of determinate contents in their demands (democracy and freedom are notions too generic and broadly defined to constitute the real object of a conflict, and the only concrete demand, the rehabilitation of Hu Yao-Bang, was immediately granted)”
So the question is how can we look at an historical event as such? Let me pose you an aporia between hipocracy and naivity. Zizek’s argument is that it is naïve to demand democracy as such, since anyhow it is “our” consumerism, so he finds it exotic that the Chinese were looking for it in the late 80s when consumerism has been already criticized in Europe, then isn’t this naïve? Lets look at Agamben’s argument, what can we perceive people are doing something which they don’t know but they pretend to know, the so called democracy and freedom? Isn’t this hypocrite? As we have seen from Wang Hui’s self critique of the 89 movement. And the critique of neoliberlaism after 1997, is a hindsight, though it is the same everywhere in the world.
So we are in an aporia of the so called historical truth, which is nevertheless without a truth. Since there are not many choices for us, either hypocricy and naivity, none of them sounds great to us immediately. This is exactly the problem today, this aporia, is what I called before a nihilistic black hole. Agamben provides us a solution called the coming politics, which is to say, a gesture. But then what is the gesture, since there is no truth value of gesture as such. A gesture can be naïve as well as hypocrite. Today we find it impossible to claim a truth of such a political movement, since whenever one talks about it, one immediately faces the aporia which he or she cannot decide. The only thing we can talk is fact, and the debate of fact is a debate over media, which is to say, the media actually determines a truth based on fact. And this is precisely the impasse of thoughts. And this is especially true in the case of June 4th event in china, because of the control of media as well as the propaganda of a harmonious society under the guise of economic growth. That is to say, the nihilistic trap of historical truth, is actually covered under the debate of fact in media. This is very peculiar, we may naturally think that nihilism is a denial, but in fact, if this aporia remain unsolved, even to those who assert it positively, they may not notice that they are trapped in the aporia of naivity and hypocrisy.
The Remaining Question of Truth
It is important to overcome this aporia in order to save oneself from confusion and pesmistic nihilism. I would like to leave this aporia to you now for our discussion. But before I do this, I would like to talk a bit more how aporia as such is solved in the history of philosophy. This aporia is similar to the aporia of truth, in Plato’s Meno , Socrates was challenged by Meno on how he is going to find the truth. Meno’s argument can be summarized as below: if you don’t know the truth, you are not able to distinguish it even when you find it; if you know the truth, then you don’t have to look for it. And Socrates resolves this aporia by saying that he knew the truth, but he forgot it, and now he is trying to remember it. Socrates demonstrates this by teaching a shepherd some geometry.
Socrates’ approach, is what I think Derrida employs to answer the question of justice. According to Derrida, justice is not deconstructable, the affirmation of justice is the key to the ontological foundation of law . The ground of justice, is the already given, which can not be negated or deconstructed but have to be affirmed. By the same token, today we may ask where is the truth we can affirm. And I don’t think the debate on media of mere fact is going to be helpful, since it actually suspends the truth. It seems to me that probably we need the courage to affirm either naïvity or hypocracy. And this is the difficulty, who has the courage to affirm himself or herself of being naïve and hypocrite? But of course there are conditions. To affirm means that one already knows the aporia, and take it as way out of the paradox. So to affirm is conditioned by understanding, as well as hopes and believes, which nevertheless transcend all hindsight which is again fact.

