Tiananmen rock icon returns

JEHANGIR S. POCHA

Beijing, Oct. 10: Chinese rock star Cui Jian, whose song Nothing to my name became an anthem for the Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989, was allowed to perform live in Beijing for the first time in 12 years on Saturday.

As the iconic singer, often called the “father of Chinese rock”, delivered his trademark Bob Dylan-esque songs of satire and protest, his audience of about 10,000 sang along.

As Cui’s raspy vocals and raunchy guitar riffs, backed by an energetic band comprising some of China’s most famous musicians, rocked the auditorium, the hundreds of policemen sitting at the edge of most front aisles looked nervous. But the show ended without incident and the crowd departed peacefully after a triple encore, which included Jian’s once seditious hit.

Until the show, Jian, who wears a white baseball cap crowned with a red star in public, was banned from performing and it was hard to get hold of his CDs. In December, Jian was put on a list of “public intellectuals” whose names, work and ideas were banned by the Chinese government from being mentioned in the Chinese official news media.

Now, Jian’s public resurrection raises some questions about whether China is loosening its controls on the freedom of expression, and coming to terms with the Tiananmen Square massacre.

An estimated 2,000 students pressing the Communist Party for more democracy were mowed down in the square by the Chinese army, ironically called the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The brutal suppression led some army units to mutiny and fight the units attacking the students, and the turmoil unleashed across China resulted in a frightened Communist Party rolling back several of the political reforms leaders like Zhao Ziyang had initiated.

In the pre-concert publicity, the state-run Xinhua news agency refrained from mentioning Tiananmen Square but described Jian as a songwriter who became a “thorn in the eyes of others”. It also said Jian “encountered constant difficulties when trying to stage shows”.

Any softening by Beijing over free speech and Tiananmen would fly in the face of recent events.

Controls over the local media and arrests of journalists and political dissenters have increased in China since President Hu Jintao came to power.

Today, China has 30 journalists in prison, more than any other country, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

This June, Shi Tao, a journalist with the Contemporary Trade News in central Henan province, received a 10-year sentence for merely passing on minutes of an internal meeting in which his editor asked the staff not to cover the upcoming Tiananmen Square anniversary to a US newspaper.

It is more likely that Jian’s change in status is driven by the fact that the Chinese government just doesn’t consider him a threat anymore.

Though Jian has always maintained an underground career and retained a core fan following, a decade of being denied mass publicity and TV coverage coupled with changing musical tastes has diminished Jian’s popularity.

Most of the crowd at his comeback show was in their mid-to-late 30s and 40s, a generation of urban yuppies who are firmly ensconced in the benefits of the new China and pose no real threat to the leaders who have created China’s economic miracle.

But many people came to Jian’s concert wearing Mao suits and PLA uniforms and wrapped a red cloth around their eyes to symbolise how being taught to see the world through Communist Party rhetoric merely masks the betrayal of the proletariat in real life.

It revealed how widely the Communist Party’s rhetoric is ridiculed and how much of its imagery has devolved into kitsch.