(Digital Program) The June Fourth Incident - Looking back at the Tiananmen Square Uprising in China
The June Fourth Incident - Looking back at the Tiananmen Square Uprising in China
The China of today is an economic juggernaut, its urban Beijing citizens sporting Gucci, Rolex, and Louis Vuitton. Mercedes and Jaguars clog the roads and neon signs sell everything aglow all night. But it wasn't always that way. China in 1989 was a poor country with little electricity, few cars, and a world of impoverished people from the countryside moving to Beijing. The Chinese world of 1989 was nevertheless hopeful for change but had experienced very little of it. Indeed, Chinese students joined by workers launched a crusade to improve the lot of everyday Chinese people. Together and euphoric, millions challenged the absolute hegemony of Communist Party authority, and the world watched as a frail democratic movement grew into a massive protest that filled and spilled out of vast Tiananmen Square, center of Beijing life. But in one fell swoop, soldiers attacked those millions, scattered them all, and left thousands dead. No one knows for sure how many, because the dead were cremated quietly and instantly, and order and authority returned. But try as the Communist authority did to put the genie back in the bottle, its China was forever changed. In this JES digital program, Dr. Kibler will introduce listeners to the world of China then and discuss the culture as he experienced it as a young professor teaching in Beijing in the immediate aftermath of the revolution in 1989. It was a time long ago and far away, but with a contemporary message about the Chinese world of today.
Location: JES Facebook Live
Date/Time: Wednesday, April 19 at 4:00 p.m. EST
Admission: FREE
Robert Kibler, Ph.D., is chairperson of the Division of World Languages and Cultural Studies, and a professor of English and Humanities at Minot State University in North Dakota. His research focuses on the intersections of Latin, Chinese, and Modernist literatures, especially in respect to internationalism, travel, adventure, and ancient rituals and ceremonies. He has written and presented on ancient Chinese philosophy, African tribal life, British Imperial ventures in Africa and Asia, internecine war and violence in the Balkans, and on nationalism in all of its forms. Dr. Kibler’s primary scholarly interest, however, follows the trajectory of his dissertation, which explores the debt owed by Ezra Pound’s The Cantos poems to Naxi culture, a secluded tribe near the Chinese Tibetan border.
