The Basement, the Massacre, and Authoritarianism: Why Attack on Titan Resonates with a Former Citizen of the PRC
Author’s Note: Due to the nature of this essay, there will be much unavoidable discussion of IRL politics — mostly that of the People’s Republic of China— so turn back now if that’s not your cup of tea. Also, spoilers up to the end of Season 3 of the anime/Chapter 90 of the manga. (An earlier draft of this essay was posted in June 2020 on Reddit as “The Basement, the Massacre, and Authoritarianism: Why Attack on Titan Resonates with Me.”)
(Disclaimer: This essay was written from the perspective of a middle-class male Han Chinese urbanite born in the 1990s. It by no means represents the views and experiences of everyone who grew up in the PRC.)
“The people have lost the confidence of the government; the government has decided to dissolve the people and to appoint another one.”
— Bertolt Brecht
“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”
— George Orwell
“For memory and depth are the same, or rather, depth cannot be reached by man except through remembrance.”
— Hannah Arendt
「起来！不愿做奴隶的人们！」
“Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves!”
— Tian Han (“March of the Volunteers”)
“Look around you. Who do you think is the real enemy?”
— Erwin to Eren (Attack on Titan, Episode 15)
谨以此文，献给六四遇难同胞及所有为祖国的自由与民主而奋斗的勇士们。
This essay is dedicated to the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre as well as all the brave souls who have fought and continue to fight for our motherland’s freedom and democracy.
Last year, when I finished the final episodes of AoT’s Season 3 and saw the Scouts reach the ocean, I felt something stir within me. Sure, it was immensely satisfying to see this part of the story finally animated, but that alone didn’t explain it. So, I did some introspection:
From my experience, early-to-mid teens is when a person starts to shed their childhood innocence and become wary of the ugly realities of their world. This is usually a gradual process, but sometimes it can be punctuated and accelerated by a worldview-shattering experience. For Eren Jaeger and his peers, it was the basement reveal (along with various revelations leading up to it). For me, it was when my father revealed to me what had happened in Beijing on June 4th, 1989.
I’m not going to go into detail about the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre here. If you’re not familiar with it, read this. Instead, I’m going to briefly describe the environment in which I grew up:
I grew up in a one-party state, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), but it wasn't one that was completely closed off from the rest of the world à la Paradis or North Korea. Sure, government censorship was ubiquitous: For instance, the internet within the borders of the PRC was walled-in by the Great Firewall and strictly policed.[1] But we still had access to entertainment from around the world, among them being AoT. (Though the show’s been officially banned in China since 2015.) Nevertheless, anything critical of the Chinese Communist Party[2] was prohibited in public[A1]; state propaganda always laid the blame for China’s problems on domestic scapegoats or “foreign hostile forces,” never on the Party itself. The education system was designed to instill conformity and loyalty to the Party-state, and as a consequence, discouraged critical thinking.
Growing up in that kind of environment, most Chinese citizens — myself included — never seriously questioned a lot of the things we were told, even if some of us didn’t like the government. One Chinese truism I had always took for granted was that, unlike the corrupt government, the national standing army (called the People’s Liberation Army, aka the PLA) was a “people’s army” whose soldiers were like family to us ordinary folks; we were taught that these soldiers were “the sons and brothers of the people”(人民子弟兵). Back then, PLA soldiers opening fire on a crowd of Chinese civilians was about as alien and unthinkable of a concept for me as George W. Bush speaking fluent Mandarin.
Through King Fritz’s manipulation of his subjects’ memories after settling his nation within the walls of Paradis, AoT demonstrates the potency of rewriting history as an instrument of control. In reality, authoritarian rulers don’t even need supernatural powers to conceal the past; fear and draconian censorship suffice.[3] Frankly, the Chinese Communist regime’s erasure of the Tiananmen Massacre from the collective memories of the Chinese populace is a feat that would make King Fritz himself proud.[4] While there does exist an official government narrative of the event that paints the military in a positive light, it’s almost never mentioned by anyone these days. The vast majority of the older generation, including some of the survivors themselves, choose to remain completely silent about the Massacre in public; those who don’t are either kept under surveillance, detained, or exiled. As a result, most of the younger generation, especially those like me who were born after the Massacre, have little to no knowledge of what really happened. It’s a bit similar to how the older Ackermanns, despite being unaffected by the king’s memory manipulation, kept their kids ignorant of their world’s true history in order to protect the Ackermann clan from the royal government. My dad is a fairly liberal-minded person who had actually participated in some of the smaller local protests before the PLA’s tanks rolled into Beijing; but up until the day he spilled the beans, I had never heard him utter a single word about what had transpired in the summer of 1989.
I still remember the exact date, time, and location at which I discovered the Tiananmen Massacre. In retrospect, I can’t help but laugh at how this “grand reveal” was delivered: My dad told me about PLA soldiers firing on protesting students with basically the same level of casualness as Reiner told Eren about his true identity. It was on the evening of June 4th in our living room, and my dad was telling my mom how he couldn’t believe that over two decades had already passed since “Six Four”(六四). I overheard him and asked him what he meant by “Six Four,” and he just dropped the bomb on me with no warning.
While discovering the Tiananmen Massacre for me was nowhere near the existential-crisis-inducing mindf*ck the basement reveal was for Eren and co., it still shook me to the core. You know that feeling when you’re presented with a fact that either completely contradicts or makes zero sense in your pre-existing framework for understanding the world? That sense of shock and subsequent disorientation? I felt that in spades after realizing the PLA had mercilessly slaughtered their own civilians[5] for peacefully protesting. If I had to pinpoint the exact moment of my “political awakening,” I would point to that evening. Remember Eren clutching his head in disbelief after realizing the Smiling Titan’s true identity?
Feels kind of weird to say this, but this scene really resonated with me. In fact, I was feeling a sense of déjà vu throughout the basement episodes as I watched Eren, who at that point in the story was the exact same age as I was when I discovered the Tiananmen Massacre, have his entire world flipped upside down by his father’s memories.
Considering how much the Tiananmen revelation affected me, I didn’t actually react to it that strongly, at least not outwardly. (I’m very similar to AoT’s Bertholdt in disposition. You can think of me as Bertholdt but without any of Bertholdt’s competence.) I’ve heard multiple stories of young people from mainland China who broke down in tears after seeing footage of the Massacre for the first time.[6] On the other hand, there also exists Tiananmen Massacre truthers who, in the face of overwhelming evidence, continue to parrot the government’s narrative and/or buy into conspiracy theories.[7] I do feel a degree of sympathy for these folks: Falling back on familiar beliefs and heuristics when our worldview is challenged is a defence mechanism everyone has; it’s there to mentally protect and stabilize ourselves. Remember how some citizens within the walls were spreading conspiracy theories after the military publicized what they had learned in Grisha’s basement? Considering how jarring the truth must be from their perspective, I honestly can’t blame them.
I think what initially attracted me to AoT, aside from just being very entertaining, was young Eren’s frustration of being trapped within walls and deprived of freedom. As someone who went to boarding school at a young age, I was also constantly surrounded by three layers of walls — the physical walls of the school campus, the ideological walls of political indoctrination, and the mental walls of a stifling curriculum that demanded little more than memorization and regurgitation. It frankly felt like living in a cage. While I didn’t share Eren’s scorching desire for freedom, there was a part of me that desperately yearned to be set free. Back then, I didn’t realize the true reason why I identified with Eren’s frustration so much: We both grew up in a nation ruled by an oppressive authoritarian regime.
In my opinion, the most underrated aspect of AoT is the show’s recreation of what it feels like to grow up under authoritarian rule and to subsequently break free of its ideological manacles through clever utilization of its setting and narrative. First, AoT presents the audience with a deceptively simple premise of humans vs. titans — a reality that’s already deeply ingrained in the psyche of most characters in the show. Initial impressions of this anime— from the promotional material, to the lyrics and imagery of the first OP,[8] to the absolutely brutal first episode — all serve to reinforce the notion that these giant human-eating zombie-like creatures are the main antagonists.
The audience, while acknowledging the awful things done by the government inside the walls, are led to assume that the root cause of humanity’s problems lies with the titans — who are depicted as the external enemy, the foreign and monstrous “other.” The rulers of Paradis want everyone, including the audience, to fear and loathe these external threats so that no one would question their own brutal, unjust rule within the walls (as well as the systems and hierarchies that enable such tyranny). It’s all for the survival of the human race, they say. Thus, by accepting this “humanity under siege” narrative at the beginning of the show, the audience is effectively brainwashed by the Paradis ruling class as if they had grown up in this fictional walled nation. (When we first started watching AoT, how many of us thought that the human vs. titan conflict was going to be the entire show? I certainly did.) Then, as the Scouts gradually unravel the web of lies and deception that forms the foundation of this reality, both they and the audience start to second-guess many things about the world of AoT that they have taken for granted. Finally, the Scouts’ quest for the truth culminates in a series of reveals that turns the setting on its head, re-contextualizes the entire narrative, and forces everyone on both sides of the fourth wall to reconstruct their worldview from the ground up. Turns out the real culprits behind the enslavement of humanity were not the monsters beyond the walls, but mankind’s own monstrosity. Our protagonists are now free from the yokes of walls and titans, but their newfound knowledge is disorienting, cruel, and terrifying.
Similarly, growing up in mainland China, I was cognizant of the fact that our government was very corrupt, and I became more and more aware of its amoral nature as I entered my teens. Nevertheless, I seldom questioned the status quo or the official narratives of the government, believing that there were far more threatening evils to the peace and prosperity of China (hostile foreign powers, “separatists,” “anti-China forces,” etc.). The Tiananmen Massacre jolted me awake and made me realize just how ignorant I was of my own country and its history.
In the years following this revelation, as I learned more and more about modern Chinese history from different sources and perspectives, I forced myself to critically re-examine everything I was taught growing up; and it was disturbing how much lies, manipulative half-truths, and ideological bullsh*t the Party-state’s education system shoved into my young mind alongside benign messages like “respect the elderly and care for the young”(尊老爱幼). It took me a long time to completely unlearn internalized beliefs and biases that seem utterly ridiculous and toxic in hindsight. Then, I started to open my eyes to absurdities around me that had been hiding in plain sight my entire life, such as the absolute farce that was the Party elites’ self-identification as communist proletarians following Marxist ideologies, the complete sham that was “socialism with Chinese characteristics”(中国特色社会主义, the official state ideology of the PRC), the disturbing undertones[9] as well as unintentional irony[10] in the lyrics of the national anthem I had sung countless times growing up, and the rhetorical sleight-of-hand of framing Indigenous peoples living within China’s borders as “ethnic minorities”(少数民族), erasing both their Indigeneity and their violent colonial subjugation and exploitation by China in one stroke. All of this eventually forced me to confront the fact that my beloved motherland was both a slave and an accomplice to an unscrupulous, imperialist, genocidal Party-state built on more than seven decades of terror, exploitation, and deception — a realization that was painful, frightening, and liberating all at once. I had now shaken off the layers of mental shackles that had been imposed on me since I was a young child, but what could one freethinking individual accomplish in the face of the ruthless and overwhelmingly powerful Party-state machinery?
As young adults approach the end of their childhood, they open their eyes to a world that is far more complex and cruel than the one in their childhood imagination. I think the final episodes of Season 3 really captured that mix of awe, confusion, dread, wistfulness, and resolve as they step out of their childhood cradles into the vast unknown; as they realize that a lot of things are going to be different now, and that there’s no going back to simpler times. And I feel like that was why watching those episodes last year — especially seeing Eren and his friends finally reach the ocean — touched me on a deeper, more personal level.
I wonder if the Scouts post basement reveal ever think back on their previous lives — ones in which their whole world was merely the walls, the titans, and dreams about the vast lands and oceans beyond. For them, that must feel like a lifetime ago. The world they inhabit is still the same world — they weren’t thrown into some alternate universe — but after having everything they knew growing up turned upside down, it must feel like living in a completely different reality. I sometimes get that surreal feeling too when I think about just how far apart my current worldview is from when I was a kid; it’s like my brain’s been completely rewired. And considering the massive paradigm shifts AoT’s story has undergone from the beginning of Season 1 to the ocean scene and beyond, I bet the audience will be experiencing a similar sense of cognitive dissonance during the upcoming final season.
There are three things that I’ve taken to heart about authoritarianism from both AoT and my own experiences:
- All authoritarian regimes operate by suppressing or eliminating anything that they perceive to be a potential threat to their rule, including the truth, even if it means trampling all over innocent lives in the process. These actions are often justified with the rhetoric of “national security” or “social order/stability.” In truth, they are not accountable to anyone but themselves.
- The most effective way to stabilize authoritarian rule is to brainwash the populace into adopting a binary “good vs. evil” worldview — one in which the evil is always someone or something else, never the tyrants themselves and the systems of oppression that they perpetuate. This is done through strict control of information as well as abuse and manipulation of historical narratives. In other words, authoritarian rulers have a vested interest in keeping the populace as ignorant and their worldviews as black-and-white as possible. Critical thinkers who openly challenge state-sanctioned narratives[11] are seen as huge threats to these rulers’ monopoly on power — or in authoritarian-speak — “subversive and seditious.”
- “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Propaganda aimed at covering up or distorting the truth are usually full of holes upon closer inspection. But when falsehoods are drilled into you repeatedly from a young age**, you end up uncritically accepting them as part of your reality — similar to how you never bother to question why you were born with five fingers on each hand instead of four or six. When I first saw the Marleyan propaganda about how “Eldia committed genocide on Marleyans for 1,700 years,” I thought it was unrealistic that most mainland Eldians would believe that kind of nonsense — before remembering all the ridiculous IRL propaganda that I used to take at face value (-_-’) Which ties back to my previous point: Critical thinking is feared by authoritarian regimes and is a powerful tool with which to rebel against authoritarian control.
**Note: the essay linked here contains spoilers for Season 4 Part 1 of the AoT anime.
In my opinion, Hajime Isayama has created a seminal work among young adult fiction. Kids often have a black-and-white worldview, and there’s nothing wrong with that — it’s part of their childhood innocence. But more often than not, popular YA fiction, with narratives that don’t go beyond friends vs. enemies, does not challenge that kind of simplistic worldview as these kids age. This not only can stunt their mental growth, but also fails to inoculate them against far-right extremism. (From what I understand, all violent extremist ideologies[12] are built upon Manichean interpretations of our world.) Even if these kids don’t grow up to embrace these bigoted, dehumanizing ideologies, they don’t always outgrow that binary mode of understanding the world from their youth.[13]
While AoT began with a simple and straightforward premise, it pulled back its layers of curtains one by one to reveal a world uncomfortably similar to our own. The beautiful thing about my experience with AoT is that the show’s evolution over the years both mirrored and (to a degree) spurred my own mental growth from a naïve teenager to an adult with a more independent, holistic worldview. As I got older and as AoT’s story progressed, what started off as a “humans vs. monsters” action thriller gradually evolved into a complex, multi-layered narrative that satisfied my urge to see the world through a more nuanced and critical lens. In particular, the evolution of Eren’s worldview from the beginning of Season 1 to the end of Season 3 (and beyond) really resonated with me and was just a joy to watch. Revisiting Season 1 these days feels like watching a different show now that I’ve gained new perspectives on both the world of AoT and my own — perspectives my teenage self lacked as he cheered for the protagonists to rout all the big bad titans.
In other words, as Eren went through his character arc in AoT, I basically went through my own (much less dramatic and compelling) IRL character arc alongside him. Because of that, AoT will always hold a special place in my heart — not only as an incredibly compelling piece of fiction but also as an important part of my formative years.
Thank you, Mr. Isayama, and I cannot wait for the conclusion to your magnum opus!
To bookend this essay, I would like to answer the question posed by Erwin at the beginning:
“Look around you. Who do you think is the real enemy?”
My real enemies are the systems, organizations, and ideologies in this world that compel people to dominate, oppress, and exploit each other.
I have no (human) enemies.
我有我深恶痛绝的组织、体制和意识形态，
但我没有敌「人」。
Notes
[1] This does not apply to Hong Kong and Macau. (Although given recent events, I’m not sure how much longer their internet freedom will last.) In this essay, I use the term “mainland China” (i.e., 中国内地) to refer to PRC territory outside these two semi-autonomous coastal cities. My use of this term is not meant to imply that Taiwan is part of China (see this declaration by the Indigenous Taiwanese).
[2] I use terms such as “the Party,” “the ruling regime,” “the government,” and “the Party-state” interchangeably throughout this essay. In the context of mainland China, they are effectively one and the same.
[A1] Criticisms of local lower-level bureaucrats or proposals for surface-level reforms were often tolerated, but criticism of the central government or structural critiques of the Party-state system were not. In the years since I left China, the political environment has only gotten worse.
[3] The Chinese populace’s political apathy and their acquiescence to the regime and its “social contract” post-1989 also contribute to this erasure, but these are outside the scope of this essay.
[4] Another example of collective amnesia under authoritarian rule that I’ve come across: In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Pinochet regime** in Chile, a survey found that a lot of Chilean youths had never even heard of their democratically-elected former president Salvador Allende or Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup that had overthrown and killed him. I’m sure there are many more similar cases of top-down “enforced amnesia” throughout human history.
**(Not very) fun fact: Pinochet’s fascistic regime and the Chinese Communist regime were actually allies during the Cold War. See this thread for details.
[5] I didn’t learn until many years later that, while there were student casualties, most of the victims were actually Beijing workers (who were fighting for a socialist form of democracy, i.e., democracy in the workplace) and other local residents.
[6] Example. Refer to the paragraphs above the black-and-white photo, but read the whole thing for another young Chinese person’s perspective on the Tiananmen Massacre. It’s a well written piece that’s very much worth the read.
[7] Much to my surprise and dismay, distortion of facts and denial of reality regarding the Tiananmen Massacre (as well as the protests that led up to it) are apparently not limited to people who grew up in mainland China.
[8] The disturbing fascist undertones of AoT’s very first OP were most likely a deliberate design choice. This OP does a great job of stoking fear and animosity towards the “foreign invaders.” Also, notice the chains over the walls starting from 0:09 of the OP. I think they are meant to represent not only the physical restrictions on freedom imposed by the titans outside the walls, but also the ideological chains of authoritarian rule imposed on our protagonists within the walls.
[9] The Party claims that China is a peace-loving country, yet these lyrics invoke violence, carnage, and animosity towards “the enemies.” I can’t help but think these lyrics are there to reinforce the “China is under siege by external enemies” narrative that has been abused time and time again by the ruling regime for its own self-serving, reactionary agendas — similar to how AoT’s first three OPs serve to reinforce the Paradis government’s “humanity under siege by the big bad titans” narrative. I’m reminded of a quote** from Liu Xiaobo’s “I Have No Enemies” statement (made during his “trial” by the Party-state for subversion) that I think is relevant here: “Hatred can rot a person’s wisdom and conscience. An enemy mentality will poison the spirit of a nation and inflame brutal life and death struggles, destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and hinder a country’s advance toward freedom and democracy.” (「仇恨会腐蚀一个人的智慧和良知，敌人意识将毒化一个民族的精神，煽动起你死我活的残酷斗争，毁掉一个社会的宽容和人性，阻碍一个国家走向自由民主的进程。」)
**This quote, which was part of Liu’s Nobel Lecture in absentia, also sums up quite nicely one of AoT’s main themes. (Refer to the post below for more details. Contains spoilers for the upcoming final season!)
[10] Originally written as a rallying cry for resisting Imperial Japan’s invasion of China, these lyrics can easily be reinterpreted as a call to arms to overthrow the tyrannical Party-state that currently rules over China. This will never stop being funny to me. (And they are made doubly ironic by the fact that, during this invasion, the Mao-led Chinese Communist Party allegedly colluded with the Japanese imperialists they had vowed to fight against.)
[11] Such as Erwin, his father, and Armin’s parents in AoT; liberal dissidents in China like Lin Zhao, Liu Xiaobo, and Xu Zhangrun who refused to stay silent in the face of tyranny; Marxist critics of the Party like Beijing worker Yu Luoke and the radical students exiled in Gansu who created the underground magazine《星火》** (aka “Spark”); and last but not least, the many independent-minded Chinese socialists who demanded the abolition of bureaucratism and one-party dictatorship in favour of actual workers’ democracy.
**一名中国记者对当年《星火》主要成员之一的向承鉴老先生的采访：
[12] Which include different forms of fascism, ethno-nationalism, and religious fundamentalism.
[13] The hyperlinks in this sentence contain a few examples of problematic binary thinking that I’ve come across in politics.
Afterword
「我们爱的是人民拿出爱国心抵抗被人压迫的国家，不是政府利用人民爱国心压迫别人的国家。我们爱的是国家为人民谋幸福的国家，不是人民为国家做牺牲的国家。」
“The country we love is a country whose people resist oppression with patriotism, not one whose government oppresses in the name of patriotism. The country we love is one that seeks happiness for its people, not one that sacrifices its people for itself.”
— Chen Duxiu (co-founder and the first General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party)
“Stand up, all victims of oppression
For the tyrants fear your might!”
— “The Internationale” (Billy Bragg ver.)
I jotted some of my thoughts down when I first finished Season 3 last year, but I didn’t have the courage to share them publicly until now. Writing this essay was a draining but cathartic experience for me: It feels great to finally get all of this off my chest, even if my political opinions will inevitably anger some people. As an ordinary Chinese guy, sharing my perspective on the Tiananmen tragedy is the least I can do to honour all the brave souls who paid the ultimate price thirty-one years ago in their quest for our motherland’s freedom and democracy.
「野火烧不尽，春风吹又生。」
May you all rest in peace, my brothers and sisters. Now it’s up to our generation to carry on your legacy. Your unyielding desire for freedom lives on in all of us.
I remember June 4th, 1989.
毋忘六四，自由万岁！
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to both the YouTubers Soul, Oceaniz, Sufferent, and Aleczandxr for their thoughtful analyses of AoT, and to like-minded fellow patriots for continuing to bravely stand up to tyranny and injustice. Thank you all for inspiring me.
(Update: 11/28/2022 in Beijing, 33 years later)
[Additional Resources]
- Here’s a full-length documentary on the 1989 Tiananmen protests and massacre if you’re interested in learning more. It was more complex than simply “all of government & military = bad, all protesters = good”
- This article on the crucial but often forgotten role Chinese workers played in the protests leading up to the Massacre is a great complement to the documentary above: “Repressing the rebel workers of Tiananmen Square”
- For some more historical context, I highly recommend the essay “The Chinese Amnesia” by Chinese astrophysicist Fang Lizhi (written a year after the Massacre).
- Also recommend the book The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, which covers another massacre of protestors in Chengdu that occurred around the same time as the one in Beijing.
- Some recent news: “Textbook censorship threatens to spread China’s collective amnesia to Hong Kong”
- Finally, a short collection of how other young people from mainland China discovered the Massacre.
(Final edit: 04/24/24)
