How Occupy Wall Street is like the Chinese democracy movement.
This may sound familiar. But history does tend to repeat itself.
Way back in 1989, a bunch of young Chinese students got fed up with the way things were going in their country and decided to occupy a public place—Tiananmen Square, Beijing—and stage a non-violent public protest. They wanted the powers-that-be to stop hoarding the powers they had. They wanted something more democratic. Their protest lasted about seven weeks, and spread to a few other cities; Shanghai, Wuhan, Xi’an, and so forth. They got the world’s attention.
What triggered it? Deregulation. China was finally moving from a fixed economy to a market economy. Ultimately that was a good thing, but at the time it triggered some upheaval. Since prices were artificially low, suddenly there was an economic recession, high inflation, and job insecurity. College graduates were frustrated that there would be no place for them in the new economy. So they wanted some more say in the way things were run. They wanted democracy.
They didn’t get it.
The powers-that-be didn’t care for the minor disruption of the status quo. Nor did they care for the major disruption that the protesters were suggesting. The Chinese culture values harmony, and finds a protest like this to be extremely embarrassing. General Secretary Zhao Ziyang tried to negotiate with the demonstrators—basically, to see if he could get them to stop their hunger strike—and the Politburo tried to pass some superficial reforms that would shut ’em up.
But here was the trouble. The movement was unorganized. The protesters knew what they wanted, and wanted it now, but they weren’t unified about how it would be achieved. Some were more radical than others. Some agendas were profoundly different. There was no one faction with whom the government could negotiate.
So, after putting up with it for nearly two months, the government removed the press that was covering the protest, began arresting the protesters… and also began arresting anyone in the government who was sympathetic to the protesters. Even General Secretary Zhao Ziyang was put under house arrest. Troops from the 27th and 38th armies of the People’s Liberation Army were sent to clear Tiananmen Square. Took them a while to get there; the public was against this move, and tried to block the army, ultimately unsuccessfully. The protesters were ordered to clear out. Many did. Many didn’t.
Amnesty International estimates that 1,000 were killed.
Now, that is China, a country that has a long tradition of conformity to one’s elders’ wishes, and few civil rights. The United States had both a revolution and a civil war in the pursuit of civil rights, and conforming to elders’ wishes, while a conservative value, isn’t universally applied. When popular consensus is that the elders are wrong, society shifts. Not always for the better; sometimes the elders weren’t wrong. But still.
There are a lot of parallels, you might notice, between the Tiananmen Square protest and the Occupy Wall Street protest. The individual protesters might know what they want, and how to go about getting it, but they aren’t organized; they’re just annoyed at the powers-that-be, and are showing it. Of course, as in any protest, there are some causeheads who have no idea what they want; their thing is to get swept up in some great movement—the great wave that Hunter Thompson wrote about in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—and ride it for as long as it lasts before crashing, and look back on it wistfully.
Mix these disparate groups together, and this is why the press is reporting—in any other words than these—that these folks don’t know what the hell they want, or are doing. Meanwhile the counter-press pundits are loudly insisting the protesters do so know what they want; the problem is that “what they want” varies from pundit to pundit. It’s more what the pundits want than the protesters. You wanna know what a protester wants, ask a protester. But your chances are better than average that you’re gonna wind up talking to a causehead—when they see cameras, they try to get out in front—who will give you some lame-ass spiel about how they’re sticking it to the Man, and that all they really want is… uh… things to be more fair. How? Uh… somehow. They don’t want to say “seize their property and redistribute it to the people.” Well, the Marxists among them might, but the causeheads aren’t Marxists; they’re simple folk who are hoping that things get better, don’t care how, and are just happy to be there, and jazzed to be on TV. Hi Mom!
I am sympathetic towards the protest because I do think the economic disparity in this country needs to be addressed. It is not, as the social Darwinists claim, the result of the Haves being smarter or wiser or better or more anointed than the Have Nots. Nor is it, as the wealth redistribution folks claim, the result of the Haves being greedy and hoarding all the wealth for themselves. The problem has never been the rich. It’s the wannabe rich. It’s the people who are not rich—or not rich enough, in their estimation. It’s not the 1 percent, but the 50 percent under that 1 percent who hope to someday join it, or at least become comfortably well off. And by hook or by crook they will. All they have to do is get all the “by crook” methods legalized. And they have. The problem is that the reason those things were made illegal in the first place is that they cause drastic wealth disparity; they actually defeat the bulk of the wannabe rich in their quest to get richer. But so long that they never realize this, they’ll continue to permit deregulation, and continue to shaft themselves.
Shouting at Wall Street might make people feel good, but as much as the Wall Street sort produce the problem, they’re not gonna produce the solution. Any solution is going to come out of the Congress.
Even so, I like to watch people shake up the status quo. I like to see complacent people made uneasy. They need it from time to time. They need to look at their lives, determine what’s solid and what isn’t, and make positive change where necessary. Doesn’t matter whether you’re a rich banker, a flaky causehead, a politician who’s trying to figure out the sympathies of the constituents, an angry white male who wants the dirty hippies to be massacred Tiananmen Square style, a mildly liberal but disconnected sort who’s sympathetic to the protests but can’t see what good they’ll do, a religious nut who thinks Jesus is the answer but can’t articulate the question and doesn’t feel he needs to, or some schmuck with a blog who sees history repeating itself and hopes the New York National Guard won’t be this iteration’s version of the People’s Liberation Army.