Generation Shift

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While reporting on a forum held on Tuesday in New York about the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I noticed something odd. I seemed to be one of the youngest people in the room. At age 32, I’m not a kid anymore, and it got me thinking. The panelists were all professional journalists who had covered the fall. And as they reminisced about their memories and impressions, I noticed they offered virtually no context for the valuable perspectives they were sharing.
 
Every journalist on the panel had amazing experiences in 1989. They had witnessed history so intimately it became part of their personal life memories. One photojournalist commented that it was one of the most profound professional experiences he has ever had. But there was no recap of events before and after the wall came down during the 90-minute discussion. It was assumed the facts were known. And they might have been by most of the people in the audience, who looked to range in age from 40 to 70.
 
The fall of communism in Europe is not a story that belongs to my generation in the truest sense. I was 12 years old in 1989. My friends and I were playing video games, eating candy, and figuring out how to be teenagers, all while an epic human drama was playing out. I vaguely remember watching scenes on television of jubilant crowds. I clearly recall my father’s friends excitedly showing me a piece of the wall they had acquired as a souvenir. It was a small piece of rough stone housed inside a box, suspended in midair in clear plastic packaging. Overall, I was pretty removed from what had happened, just like that stone isolated in a box.
 
At least five times during their recollection of events, the panelists mentioned the widespread concerns in the autumn of 1989 that events similar to China’s Tiananmen Square massacre would play out in Europe if there was a popular uprising. Tiananmen had only been a few months earlier. It was the same open opposition to communism and stated desire for democracy in China as in Europe—but with tragically different results.
 
In 2009 the people of China still live under an oppressive communist regime. No matter how foreign policy wonks try to categorize the “new China,” it is still a communist dragon dressed up as a capitalist tiger.
 
As a journalist, I have interviewed many people who escaped from China to the United States. One woman lost her husband because he was murdered for being a Falun Gong practitioner. While she suffered a very specific loss, the broad strokes of her story are all too commonplace in China—people are persecuted for their spiritual beliefs, political ideologies, blogging, or running websites on banned topics (i.e. democracy), to name a few. Transgressions from the communist party line aren’t tolerated any more today than they were 20 years ago. But it’s a bigger game of cat and mouse with the advent of the Internet.
 
With that in mind, I had to know what the panelists thought about the Berlin Twitter Wall, set up by a German non-profit as a way for people to virtually express their sentiments on the anniversary of the fall of communism in Europe. There were more than 2,000 tweets from people inside Mainland China, many raging for the dream of freedom, in 140 characters or less. It didn’t take long for the site to be blocked by the Great Firewall of China, and tweets from a country of 1.3 billion people ceased.
 
Strangely, the panelists couldn’t quite handle my question about what could be in store for China in light of things like the Berlin Twitter Wall being crushed. One panelist attempted to give an honest opinion, but he is no China expert. Two didn’t even try. One spouted an academic assessment I have heard too often from my parents’ generation—all about how much things have changed in China.
 
But statements about change don’t wash when it’s clear most Chinese people don’t even have basic personal liberties that come with a free society—like being able to tweet. If the up and coming generation of leaders has any advantage over the chains of history, it’s that they can choose not to accept being spoon-fed answers on such important topics.
 
If my generation can use their voices to ask difficult questions and challenge the passive acceptance of persecution, there’s a good chance the truth about China will come out.
 
(Image by Jurek Durczak)
 
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