Introduction

within international relations itself, a new culture rises up

Stephen Chan

Peter Mandaville

pp. 1-14

in: Stephen Chan, Peter Mandaville, Roland Bleiker (eds), The zen of international relations, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001

Abstract

What the West did not realise, according to the Sinologist, Rudolf Wagner, was that both students and political authorities, at the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident, used the same Chinese rhetoric of absolute and exclusive truth. As long as they maintained that rhetoric, meaningful dialogue and compromise were impossible: each side was excluded from the truthfulness of what was said by the other.1 In short, notwithstanding their construction of a Franco-American Statue of Liberty, and their identification with the democratic revolutions of France and the United States – not to mention theWestern sympathy to their cause and their symbolism – the students were not speaking democratically. What the West did understand was that the students had attempted a political protest, and thus analysed it with the instruments of a Western political science. In the years afterwards, seeking the icons and typologies of that political science – ideologies, parties, manifestos; the organisation of grievances and aspirations – the West took a long time to recognise the Falun Gong as a political challenge to Beijing. It did not take Beijing so long. Using legislation that forbids the misuse of religion and Qigong, the authorities have cracked down upon the Falun Gong; which, all the same, refuses to go away.