Today is the 20th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s brutal suppression of the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. It’s fascinating to see just how successful the successors of the Commissars who sent the army in to kill their own people have been in erasing the memory of their evil amongst the current generation of Chinese youth. Foreign media have been banned from the Square for today, gangs from local neighbourhood watch committees are being paid to patrol the Square, prominent dissidents have been sent on enforced ‘holidays’ outside Beijing, Twitter and other similar services on the internet have been shut down and the Great Firewall of China is vigorously censoring all sorts of key words like “June 4th”, “6/4”, “4/6” etc and any coverage of the events being staged around the world to commemorate the massacre or any report that shows footage from it.

I was amazed to hear that ‘Tank Man’ picture, famous around the world is practically unknown in China. I’ve even heard it claimed that the picture below is a fake! Odd how I can clearly remember watching it happen on the television at the time then.














Not so easy to dismiss is the footage of Zhao Ziyang, the then Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party apologising to the students for the Party’s sloth in loosening up society and asking them to disperse because he feared what his fellow Politburo members were about to do to them. The title of this post is a quotation from the opening part of his speech to the students in Tiananmen Square it means "students, we came too late. We are sorry."

Chinese people travel more now than ever, they study and live overseas, radio stations in Hong Kong broadcast directly to millions in the mainland and truth is not an easy thing to keep under wraps even if this posting gives them another site to block.

Messages have been circulating asking bloggers in China to turn their blogs grey on the anniversary to commemorate the crack down. I’ve done likewise as a gesture of solidarity.

民主自由万岁！

Over the weekend something amazing happened in Singapore – there was gay rights rally! Singapore is an authoritarian effectively one-party state where gay sex is illegal (thanks to laws left over from colonial times). It has a history of clamping down on any moves to try to advocate for a progressive approach, so to see something like this happing in such a country is pretty special. For years gay life in Singapore was underground, there were a few discrete nights at discos, a few incredibly camp people on TV but that was pretty much it. The arrival of internet made finding other gay people much easier for Queer Singaporeans but it’s still quite a conservative place.

The event was organised by a group called Pink dot sg who themselves look pretty organised by the look of their website and the fact that they have ambassadors for their cause and it more or less coincided with the International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO) which was the day after.

Despite the rather bland reporting in the state media, this is quite an unprecedented event, Singapore had a sort of circuit party for a few years earlier in the decade but it was shut down because it went “against the moral values of a large majority of Singaporeans” according to the Police. It’s good to see such a big turnout for such a visible gay rights event and great to see the Police didn’t shut it down. Let’s hope it continues. Shiok one!

Another one! The Vermont legislature has voted to overturn the Governor's veto on equal marriage. Great stuff!

More good news from the Hawkeye state, the mechanics of ballot initiatives there require the proposal to be passed by both houses of the Legislature before it can be put to the people. Currently both houses are controlled by the Democrats and they've signalled their support for the Court's ruling so it's not looking good for a ballot initiative in 2011, the Republicans would have to take both houses just to have a referendum on a constitutional amendment in 2013. It's always possible, but it seems unlikely that the Republicans will be back in business two years from now to win in 2013 and even if they were, equal marriage would have been bedded down for four years at that stage and people will have realised that the sun continues to rise and civilisation hasn't imploded.

It's been a while! I've been pretty busy and haven't had that much to write about but this week sees a major step forward in the fight for equal marriage, in one week both Sweden and Iowa have got same-sex marriage. Sweden would hardly be a shock but I must admit Iowa was a surprise - and no doubt disconcerting to reactionaries in the US, after all if the heartland states are falling...

No doubt there will be a fight to keep it, but a ballot initiative will be two years away by which time the change will be bedded down, plus activists will have learned a string of lessons as a result of Prop 8 in California, so here’s hoping.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens in Vermont as the Bill for equal marriage winds its way through their Legislature. Also keep an eye on New York, the Bill for equal marriage passed the lower house of the legislature before the election but was held up in the Senate by two hostile Republicans, both of whom lost their seats last November. For the first time in over 40 years the Democrats control both houses of the state Legislature in New York and the Governor has said he’s in favour of the Bill. This is New York after all. If Vermont and New York are won it will be a major setback for the forces of reaction, coming as it does on the heals of the tsunami that washed over them and swept Obama into office last year and of course the financial crisis.

It’s a pretty good time to be alive if you’re a lefty.

A couple of years ago, I attended the 20th anniversary dinner of the National Union of Students, all over the doors as people entered the hall where it was being held there were posters of past campaigns that had been run over the years, almost all of them dealing with government policy. I found this to be a bit of a dampener because as I looked at them, I realised that not a single campaign had achieved its stated aims.

One of the other things they all had in common was that they had all been organised along the same lines – set piece rallies that had had their direction and usually their dates set at the national conference of the Union and often this is mirrored in boarder campaigns outside of student politics. As the saying goes – nothing is more stupid than doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get a different outcome.

Having been to more than my fair share of student rallies in my time it has to be noted that most of them are small in the numbers they attract, even at what was by far the most pressing issue for the National Union of Students in recent years, the then Howard government’s introduction of voluntary student unionism (VSU), there was a clear reduction in the numbers of students attending the rallies as they wound on. Usually however the rallies are far smaller, Sydney and Melbourne would be doing well if they got 1000 students to come out and in other cities in Australia even 200 people would count as a great success, often in some cities the numbers were less than 100. One has to wonder why it is that so few students attend rallies. Of course there will be those who oppose the campaign behind them and there will those who are simply apathetic but a few points stand out.

Before embarking on any campaign, activists need to ask:

Is it widely felt?
Is it deeply felt?
Will people act on it?

They also need to do a SWOT analysis and at the end of the campaign, whether they succeed or failure they should sit down and come up with a written debrief on how things went, what worked, what didn’t (and why) and the lessons learned. All of this sounds too obvious for words but often in student politics preplanning is just not done and people launch into campaigning based on a resolution passed at national conference or their own (or their faction’s) ideas.

The rallies are often timed to be around lunch time, whilst some students are on campus and can spare a few hours to go protest something, a lot of them are either in class or at work, and so why have a rally at a time when many people who support the cause may not be able to come? What’s wrong with a weekend especially if you can get the media to come along and get the message out?

Success is often measured in how ‘correctly’ the campaign was run or how many people came to the rally rather than whether it achieved its aims, this has the potential to turn off many people who would otherwise get involved, what’s the point of campaigning the ‘correct’ way if it doesn’t work?

The campaign, its message and strategies are all decided either at national conference/education conference or out of head office in Trades Hall in Melbourne by a handful of people. Surely if a campaign seeks to engage large numbers of people, it has to empower them to make them feel that they have a personal stake in the campaign. Witness the way that the Obama campaign relied on grassroots campaigning and activism, there were flyers up in cities all over the US asking for people who wanted to help organise the campaign instead of leaving it to just a few party apparatchiks.

In essence, the method of organising we see in student politics is the same one that has been used since at least the time of the Suffragettes. Whilst their campaign had right on its side and was ultimately successful, I don’t think it can be said that it engaged working class women, perhaps women would have got the vote sooner if more of them were active on the campaign to get it. Similarly, the vast majority of students are either completely unaware or only slightly aware of the campaigns being run by NUS (or indeed of NUS itself) and the great majority remain unengaged.

So what can be done?

Rather than leaving it to the professional activists, aka campus/state/national office bearers to spread the word by handing out leaflets, lecture bashing and talking to students, why not try virally marketing it using Facebook, MySpace or Twitter in addition to these things? This method changes the dynamics of organising considerably from where they are now.

The focus of how campaigns are organised needs to shift from a top-down “the leadership has called on students to assemble at the following time and place” to a bottom-up one where people are going because they feel a sense of ownership about ‘their’ campaign and have at least some personal investment in it. We need to be empowering people to speak out for themselves rather than just listen to activists give speeches, hence communication must change from being basically bilateral (leadership talking to the students) to multilateral (students talking to each other and talking to the leadership). Whilst there does need to be leadership that is capable of speaking for the movement, a top-down approach to a campaign set away from the mass of the people it is hoping to engage clearly is not effective and activists should always be open to disruptions to the certainties of their role and the niche they’ve carved out for themselves.

Alternative methods of campaigning need to be considered – it’s not a matter of just handing out more leaflets or putting more posters, not everyone wants to go to a rally but they will sign a petition, fire off an email to their local MP or the like. These can be used to build awareness during a low cycle of political activism on a subject and provide useful databases of people who should then be asked for some sort of follow-up action – “thanks for signing our reformisty petition, now how about sending an email to your MP/Senator or coming to the rally next Saturday?” These databases can also easily keep people informed about what’s happening with the campaign. Rallies can be useful as a show of strength at key times in a campaign but they aren’t the only method for campaigning out there or always the right one. The problem is student politicians can be remarkably doctrinaire about how to campaign, in my experience, ironically the further left you go on political spectrum, the more doctrinaire they are. Radicals thus become conservatives when it comes to running campaigns. Reformist campaigning tactics may not have all the heady excitement of large groups of people marching, chanting slogans and carrying banners but they are useful tools to build campaigns

The direction of the campaign must be flexible, responsive to developments and shift depending on how the campaign is going – if something isn’t working, why keep doing it? Try a different approach.

Build on the successes you have, last year for instance, the NUS Queer Department got 30,000 people to sign a petition calling for same-sex marriage in Australia, if there had been follow up, perhaps asking if people wanted to be kept informed about the campaign, future Queer Officers would have had database of tens of thousands of people who would have been prepared to make some sort of stand in favour marriage equality when things picked up on that front – a figure that would totally eclipse the roughly 3000 supporters of the Australian Christian Lobby, it was a shame that something so obvious was not done.

Finally, whilst it’s always helpful to have the government on side, the success or failure of campaigns should not depend on who’s in office but on the power of the movement they create in society.

I don’t pretend that I’ve just outlined all the answers for the problems facing students (and indeed others) campaigning for social change but since stand on the shoulders of others when it comes to the changes we shape in the word we would do well to from learn from past failures and past successes.