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historians, this discussion nevertheless allows consideration of the central issue of the chapter, that is, the extent to which efforts to undo systemic infliction of injury and to respond to abuse become preoccupied with reductionist Lockean constructions of the state and of the individual, thus overlooking the actual dynamics of the situations in question. The Tiananmen Square massacre, following upon the heady months-long Beijing Spring, has for many in the West become at least a kind of touchstone and point of reference to contemporary China
This book argues for greater openness in the ways we approach human rights and international rights promotion, and in so doing brings some new understanding to old debates. Starting with the realities of abuse rather than the liberal architecture of rights, it casts human rights as a language for probing the political dimensions of suffering. Seen in this context, the predominant Western models of right generate a substantial but also problematic and not always emancipatory array of practices. These models are far from answering the questions about the nature of political community that are raised by the systemic infliction of suffering. Rather than a simple message from ‘us’ to ‘them’, then, rights promotion is a long and difficult conversation about the relationship between political organisations and suffering. Three case studies are explored: the Tiananmen Square massacre, East Timor's violent modern history and the circumstances of indigenous Australians. The purpose of these discussions is not to elaborate on a new theory of rights, but to work towards rights practices that are more responsive to the spectrum of injury that we inflict and endure.
. Part II is a consideration of three case studies: the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989; East Timor; and Australian Aboriginal health. The case studies were not chosen as examplary of the arguments put forward here – indeed in many respects they challenge those arguments. All, in their own way, are high-profile issues internationally or on a national stage, referred to repeatedly by the media in terms ranging from bell-like clarity (Tiananmen) to moral ambiguity and political confusion (Indigenous Australians). All occupy public as well as specialist imaginations
and underpins international treaties and declarations. The following three case studies look at quite different situations. The first considers an event: the Tiananmen Square massacre in China in 1989. This case study looks at the way a language of indignation that draws significantly on Lockean models of the state, political community and human rights may hinder understanding of and response to particular situations of abuse – even when that situation, in this case a textbook example of the grave abuse of citizens by their own
focusing on two Chinese overseas artists – Ah Xian and Dong Wang Fan, who share the experience of emigrating from mainland China to Australia in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 and building new careers as successful Chinese Australian artists in Australia and abroad – this chapter discusses conditions for, and elements of, diasporic aesthetics and migratory imagery. It intends to explore the production of diasporic Chineseness in Chinese Australian art with regard to the global transnationalisation of contemporary Chinese art. The aim of this case
countdown to the Handover, British discourse began to consider the meaning of the Handover itself. Much of the discussion turned shrill, particularly after the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989, with novelists, journalists, and memoirists evoking apocalyptic scenarios. On the other hand, British officials, both in London and in the Hong Kong Government, insisted that they had secured a good deal for
Tiananmen Square massacre, which Christine Loh and others had expected to be suppressed after 1997, endured – held, one might add, at a site still called Victoria Park and under the watchful eyes of Queen Victoria’s statue. This is not to say that fears were misplaced. As an increasingly assertive China threw its weight around the region, contributing to clashes with Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines, even
any such events during critical political meetings and sensitive anniversaries like the 4 June anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Ahead of the NPC in October 2017, when Xi Jinping’s leadership was further strengthened, enormous security was visible throughout the country and restrictions on the internet were particularly tight. At a meeting of the G20 group of world leaders held in the eastern city of Hangzhou in 2016, a third of the city’s population of seven million was asked to leave for the duration of the event. The government gave them 2,000 yuan
after what John Darwin terms the end of the ‘British World-System’? 4 Was it dismay at the handing-over of six million imperial subjects to a Communist regime, barely eight years after the Tiananmen Square massacre? Was it a protest against what many regarded as a humiliating retreat following Margaret Thatcher’s failed negotiations in the early 1980s, symbolised by the public spill the Prime Minister took at one of the meetings
his oft-quoted Sid Vicious’s verdict of ‘the man in the street’. The week after the June 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of demonstrators by the Chinese state, on his early hours TV magazine The Other Side of Midnight Wilson opined that, as regrettable as the events were, it was important not to forget that China had raised hundreds of millions out of poverty. Lack of controversy was ensured by the fact barely anyone was watching. Given Burnham’s Liverpudlian origins, would Wilson have employed an