As China Disappears People and Histories, An Artist Fights Back
Remembering Tiananmen Square and a History of Protest against Communist China
This is the second essay of a Lucid series that will run occasionally over the next months and into the fall. It explores the ways that past and present authoritarian states and parties around the world create silences around objects, histories, events, nature, and people that they have locked up, destroyed, banned, and muted.
The series also helps us understand how to fight back against this destruction and silencing. It highlights the work of human rights and climate activists, judges, historians, artists, forensic archeologists, and many others who bring to light what has been cancelled and buried. This is difficult and often dangerous work and it deserves our support.
Read the introductory post here:
How Autocrats Disappear People and Information, and How We Can Fight Back
I am excited to announce a new Lucid series that will run occasionally over the next months and into the fall. It explores the ways that past and present authoritarian states and parties around the world create silences around objects, histories, events, nature, and people that they have locked up, destroyed, banned, and muted.
Authoritarian states often silence critics of their policies by jailing them or forcing them into exile. Yet they also aim to create a unified narrative about the nation's history, and any past event that threatens the established power structure can be subject to disappearance or revision. This can also mean removing individuals associated with past dissent from public circulation and public memory, so that future generations will ideally not know that such dissent ever existed.
China: More Disappearances as Xi Jinping Consolidates Power
Communist China is instructive in this regard. After the Chinese government cracked down in 2019 on Hong Kong protesters who opposed the new National Security law, they also arrested dissidents at those protests who had been active in earlier decades, so the memory of resistance in Hong Kong would be extinguished as well. Scrubbing all references to this history and its protagonists on websites and search engines ensures that China's digital world mirrors these physical removals.
As Chinese President Xi Jinping has become more draconian, disappearing more "unacceptable" people and cultural artifacts, he has tellingly grounded his expanding cult of personality in the precedent set by master silencer Mao Zedong, who erased tens of millions of people and animals and targeted China's entire high culture heritage for destruction.
"Disappearances, of one kind or another, have become the backbeat of Chinese public life under Xi Jinping," Evan Osnos concludes in a sobering 2023 New Yorker article. And yet we may not associate China with such disappearances, and democracies which are dependent on and enmeshed with China in areas of trade, manufacturing, and education have usually chosen to look the other way.
As of Jan. 2025, over one million Muslims (Uyghurs, ethnic Hui, ethnic Kazakhs, ethnic Kyrgyz, ethnic Tajiks, and ethnic Uzbeks) have been abducted and detained in over 1,200 camps in the Xinjiang region of China, with many subject to forced labor and others never heard from again as they vanish into the infrastructure of repression.
Major figures in Chinese political and business life have also continued to vanish, the fate of each one proving the maxims:
in an authoritarian state, you are powerful, until you are not.
Everyone but the strongman must be seen as dispensable.
In March, General He Weidong, China’s second-ranking military official and co-vice chairman of the powerful Central Military Commission (CMC), disappeared from public view. He’s removal from public circulation is part of a larger shakeup of the Chinese military as Xi continues to tighten his hold on power and achieve greater combat readiness.
When the leader is insecure, he may select the most powerful or independent officials to be removed from view and circulation rather than merely fire them. That’s what happened to Foreign Minister Qin Gang, a former Chinese Ambassador to the United States. The pugnacious diplomat vanished in the summer of 2023 and his name was temporarily scrubbed from government websites. Seven months later, Qin "resigned" from his job, without ever physically returning to public view. In 2024, he surfaced as an employee of a minor publishing house connected to the government. General He, too, may surface in some marginal role – or not.
These and other disappearances of prominent people are part of a much larger wave of voidings and vanishings in Chinese society. Books have disappeared from stores; television shows and comedy routines have been taken off the air; many statistics on the Chinese economy are no longer publicly available; and social media and messaging platforms have been transformed into tools for monitoring potential dissidents.
All of this has brought on a cultural impoverishment that no amount of "Xi Jinping Thought" or other personality cult artifacts can fill. It is no wonder that the favored protest message during the unprecedented 2022 lockdown demonstrations was a blank white piece of paper. Naturally, those statements against draconian state censorship have themselves now been censored. State removal of information about the protests has included silencing those who documented them.
Badiucao: Art as Restoration of Memories Authoritarians Want Buried
Another set of protests, from decades earlier, have required an even greater effort to disappear them: the Tiananmen Square protests of June 1989, which were brutally crushed by People's Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers. They remain such a threat that any memory of the protests and the massacres of protesters must be suppressed. Chinese censors have not only suppressed all discussion of the events of Tiananmen Square, but they have also removed the protest site, Sitong Bridge, from online map searches conducted on the Chinese search engine Baidu.
Then the Chinese dissident artist Badiucao, who lives in exile in Australia, disrupted this engineered oblivion when he was given an artifact of the massacre.
PLA soldiers were given watches to honor their “quelling the rebellion,” along with a book of photos and a medal. These objects connected to a past that officially no longer existed in China were likely hidden away by their recipients. One of the watches surfaced in 2021 when it was put up for auction in the United Kingdom, only to be withdrawn after protests over trading an item produced to honor a massacre.
In Badiucao’s hands, the watch became a testimony of repression and its coverup. He displayed the object alongside ghostly imprints of it made from his blood, implicitly placing Tiananmen Square within a history of violence against dissidence that continues today. Here is a video of Badiucao speaking about the exhibition, which was held in Prague in 2022 despite Chinese government attempts to have it cancelled.
A new generation of Chinese are starting to chafe against the government’s dehumanizing treatment and severe restrictions on freedom of expression. Young people drove those 2022 white square protests, which were the biggest since Tiananmen Square. 79 universities, including Tsinghua University, Xi's alma mater, held demonstrations.
While many who participated in the protests were later detained by police, the feeling that an opening had been created for public expression won't just disappear. As this generation of Chinese articulates its desire for more rights and agency, it will seek out knowledge of past resistance. Over time, the memory of Tiananmen Square will grow, despite the regime's efforts to remove it. Badiucao’s work stands up against the obliteration of histories of protests and state repression of dissent.
Thank you for calling our attention to what's going on in China and how artists are fighting back. The importance of preserving history and the inspiring courage of artists like Badiucao--that's what I take away from this post. And, while it's terrifying to think about the disappearances of people and the attempted suppression of facts, it feels as if disappearing the past has to be a lot more difficult in the modern world. Or maybe I'm just hoping it is.
Very interesting to find out what the Chinese have been doing for so long. The timing on this was perfect, because just this morning I was thinking about the detention center at Fort Bliss, which is supposed to be tents. Given that I know these detention centers do not provide sanitation, water, air conditioning, or reasonable amounts of food, and given that our summer temp here in El Paso are in the triple digits, our president will be killing a lot of people who don't deserve it, because they've done nothing beyond being in the wrong place at the wrong time when ICE came calling.