by Jeff Wasserstrom

In a recent essay for the New York Times looking back to Chinese events of one hundred years ago, I referred to an April tweet by Joshua Wong made up of just three numerals (2014, 1989, 1919) and three images (of rallies that took place in each year). The tweet’s basic meaning was clear to anyone familiar with Chinese history. Namely, Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement of 2014 can be placed into a protest tradition that stretches back to the May 4th Movement of 1919 and the mass gatherings at Tiananmen Square that preceded the June 4th Massacre of 1989. One thing about the tweet I didn’t mention in my Times essay is the name of the author that seeing the tweet made me think of: George Orwell.  

This may seem unsurprising as the thirtieth anniversary of the June 4th Massacre approaches. The Orwellian phrase “boot-on-the-face” evokes the killing of large numbers of students and members of other social groups in Beijing and the smaller massacre that took place in Chengdu soon afterwards in 1989. Similarly, “memory hole,” another of Orwell’s terms, is relevant for thinking about Chinese Communist Party (CCP) efforts to blot out recollections of 1989, via the methods Louisa Lim details in her tellingly titled The People’s Republic of Amnesia. But I bring up Orwell not, as you might expect, because he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, which gave us those two terms and many other memorable ones.  I do so because he wrote Animal Farm.   

Yes, it is Nineteen Eighty-Four that gets the most attention now, in an era when global events have made its dystopian vision seem newly relevant for thinking about many parts of the world. Yes, that is the book whose seventieth anniversary arrives just days after the thirtieth anniversary of the June 4th Massacre. Yes, “newspeak,” another classic Orwellian coinage introduced in Nineteen Eighty-Four, captures well many things CCP propagandists have said and continue to say about the people portrayed in two of the images in Joshua Wong’s tweet. For Beijing official media portrayed the Tiananmen struggles as “riots” stirred up by “foreign forces” back in 1989, as opposed to non-violent acts of civil disobedience responding to domestic grievances, and they did the same thing again when the Umbrella Movement took place a quarter-of-a-century later.

Still, thinking about that tweet, my mind goes to Animal Farm—even though I am among those who have argued before that the PRC is now ruled in a manner that mixes and matches Big Brother techniques of rule and the softer authoritarian methods Aldous Huxley warned of in the 1930s in Brave New World. The problem comes with taking the Nineteen Eighty-Four-meets-Brave New World idea back to 1919. Both of those books spoke to a fear of strong states run by disciplined elites. The China of a century ago, by contrast, was weak and governed by competing warlords. A key theme in Animal Farm, on the other hand, works as well for the May 4th Movement as it does for the Tiananmen and Umbrella struggles. The theme I have in mind is the notion that after a major political shift occurs, it can seem that only superficial changes have actually taken place.

In addition, even though this is not an anniversary year for Animal Farm, there are things about the current era of Xi Jinping that makes it appealing to revisit a political allegory that puts zoological imagery to creative use. The phrase “cat and mouse” game is often used to describe the back and forth between those who find Xi’s rule disquieting and the censors who try to keep the Internet swept clean of their posts. And critics of the status quo, or simply those eager to mock a political figure who is the subject of official veneration, sometimes turn to animals in their search for usable symbols—such as when they used images of a portly Winnie the Pooh to standin for the portly head of the CCP who as of March 2018 can potentially stay President of the PRC for the rest of his life.

Since the May 4th Movement well before Orwell turned his attention to the problem of repressive systems of governance, it’s worth asking first how exactly his famous novella featuring barnyard beasts can be used to make sense of that event, which was triggered by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Well, something often overlooked in discussions of the May 4th Movement is that one thing participants in it had in mind—other than diplomatic moves to transfer German possessions in China to Japanese control—were the moves President Yuan Shikai had made a few years before to push the Republic back in an imperial direction by founding a dynasty. When the warlord had himself proclaimed emperor late in 1915, this led progressive students and intellectuals, already angry with Yuan for failing to stand up to Japan as firmly as they wished he would early that year, to mount protests against and write denunciations of him. For a Republic that had been created by the anti-dynastic Revolution of 1911 to slide back into an imperial form of rule blurred the line between the old order and new order—the same thing that happens at the end of Animal Farm when it becomes hard to tell the pigs who led the charge against the farmers from the farmers who used to be in control.  

What then of 1989, which is often remembered now as an effort to bring novel modes of politics to China? There was a lot of talk on the streets and in manifestos then about the need for new things to happen, but there was also a good deal of Animal Farm-style discussion of regression to the way things had been in the past. Satirical posters mocked Deng Xiaoping as an Empress Dowager-style figure who exerted power from behind the throne while others were nominally in charge.  

In addition, at a 25th anniversary of June 4th panel I participated in with Wang Chaohua, the Tiananmen veteran emphasised that when Hu Yaobang was demoted in 1987, the fact that he was seen as a supporter of liberal trends was only one thing that led members of her generation of students to mourn him. They also felt that in leaving the era of Mao Zedong behind, as Deng claimed to be doing by introducing policies of “Reform and Opening,” China should be moving out of an era when the most powerful man in the country periodically pulled support from the person who was slated to succeed him. Mao would choose one heir apparent and then another, only to move against the person he had selected. In 1987, it seemed that Deng was going to do the same thing—and he did indeed do this a second time in 1989 by placing Zhao Ziyang, who had risen when Hu fell, under house arrest. There were also complaints in Tiananmen-era protest writings about the CCP being a corrupt organisation in which a few families monopolised power—the same criticism that had been levelled against the Nationalist Party just before Mao’s forces defeated those of Chiang Kai-shek and the PRC was founded.

The case for seeing the Umbrella Movement in Animal Farm terms is even clearer—and not just or even mainly because protesters turned to zoological symbolism to attack the hated Hong Kong Chief Executive of the time, C.Y. Leung, portraying him as an evil wolf, a play on the lupine sound of his surname. From the 1840s until the Handover, Hong Kong was under colonial rule, with its top official handpicked in London. The Handover was celebrated in Beijing official media as signaling an end to colonialism. One central goal of the Umbrella Movement, though, was to end the system of CCP control over the process of nominating individuals to stand for Chief Executive Officer of Hong Kong. As long as that system was in place, protesters claimed, the person running the SAR would be beholden to leaders in Beijing. Control by one distant capital had, they suggested and sometimes stated outright simply been replaced by control by a somewhat nearer one. This was, to borrow Orwell’s Animal Farm imagery, a shift from rule by men to rule by pigs with human-like characteristics, that is, a pseudo-transformation presented as a true one.

It may seem odd to look only to an author based in England when searching for fictional lenses through which to view the protests I have been talking about. There is, however, a Chinese author who was part of the May 4th generation, was quoted by protesters in Beijing in 1989 and in Hong Kong in 2014, and wrote a novella that shares some interesting features with Animal Farm. I am thinking of Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q, which has many dimensions to it but in part can be read as suggesting that the 1911 Revolution was better at changing who precisely held power than how power was wielded and the types who managed to get it.

There are, finally, three added reasons to bring Animal Farm into a discussion of the June 4th Massacre that not only moves back to the 1910s but also up to the 2010s. One is that at the start of the Umbrella Movement, at least group of student activists organised a discussion session devoted to the novella. Another is that when I visited the Occupy zone in Admiralty in November, one big banner I saw featured a famous quote from the book, “all animals are equal but some are more equal than others,” a phrase that was used in other ways during the protests and fit in nicely with the many posters presenting reviled Hong Kong CEO C.Y. Leung as a wolf.  

Moving back to the mainland, site of the May 4th Movement and the June 4th Massacre, it is worth noting that, while both of Orwell’s most famous books are for sale in Chinese language translations there, “Animal Farm” briefly became a banned term in the spring of 2018. This happened when a spirited game of cat and mouse broke out after the Constitution was changed so that Xi Jinping would not be limited to just two five year terms as President. This seemed to some akin to Xi proclaiming himself an emperor. In the back-and-forth between critics and censors that followed, not only were posted references to Animal Farm swept away, so were images of Yuan Shikai—and of Winnie-the-Pooh donning a crown.   

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine, where he also holds courtesy positions in Literary Journalism and Law. His books include, as author, Eight Juxtapositions: China through Imperfect Analogies from Mark Twain to Manchukuo (Penguin 2016) and, as co-author, China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (third edition, Oxford 2018). In addition to publishing in academic venues, he often writes for magazines, newspapers and online platforms. He is an advisor to the Hong Kong International Literary Festival and was a consultant on The Gate of Heavenly Peace, the award-winning Long Bow Group documentary on the Tiananmen protests and June Fourth Massacre.