Remember the butchers of Tiananmen
The anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre came and went this week, barely noticed, unmentioned in official circles in Canada, legally unmentionable in China and expunged by algorithm, in advance, from Sina Weibo’s millions of overseas social media accounts. It is as though the event never even happened. And in a way, it never did.
When it is remembered at all, the event is commonly understood to have been a riot in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square that was brutally put down. A journalistic convention has evolved over time to mention hundreds, “perhaps thousands” of deaths. In the hours that followed the killings in Beijing, the Red Cross Society of China released an estimate of 2,700 dead. British diplomatic cables declassified last year, however, refer to an anonymous official with the State Council who put the butchers’ bill at 10,000 deaths.
In Beijing, most of the dead were not murdered at Tiananmen Square, but rather in the surrounding streets and boulevards, especially in the Muxidi district. They were shot, bayonetted, bulldozed and crushed by tanks and armoured personnel carriers. The killings were not confined to Beijing, either. Nor were the protests. Student-led rallies and marches for democracy and a free press had been underway for weeks.
On those rare occasions when the Chinese Communist Party finds it necessary to acknowledge that something in fact did happen on June 4, 1989, the propaganda version ordinarily goes like this: There was a riot, it was put down, and 200 people were killed inadvertently, some by stray bullets, some in the mayhem and confusion of clearing Tiananmen Square.
This is a fiction that was settled upon several days before the People’s Liberation Army was unleashed on the Tiananmen protesters, another declassified cable authored by Alan Donald, the British ambassador at the time, reveals. Martial law was declared on May 20, and it was around that time that Deng Xiaoping, China’s supreme leader, is reported to have concluded that “200 dead could bring 20 years of peace to China.”
In the weeks and months leading up to June 4, millions of people had been turning out at peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations in perhaps 400 cities across China. The Tiananmen Square protests began as public memorials to Hu Yaobang, the senior Communist Party official who had implemented a series of liberalizing reforms in 1987. Stripped of his authority and forced to resign his post as the party’s general secretary, Hu died on April 15, 1989.
Days later, to honour his memory, nearly 100,000 students marched to Tiananmen Square, and similar student-led demonstrations, hunger strikes and marches began across the country. On April 26, the Communist Party leadership, mindful of the collapse of Warsaw Pact regimes underway in Eastern Europe at the time, laid down a hard line in its propaganda mouthpiece, the People’s Daily: “All comrades in the party and the people throughout the country must soberly recognize the fact that our country will have no peaceful days if this disturbance is not checked resolutely.”
The editorial served only to provoke larger, more militant protests. Every day, word came of demonstrations across the country — Harbin, Shanghai, Fuzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, on and on. Workers were shutting down factories. Students were blocking rush-hour traffic. Communist Youth League members were burning their membership cards.
The massacres began on June 4. It was not long before the spontaneous, joyful eruptions had been suppressed. A popular, democratic uprising was crushed. Apart from an interregnum of sanctions and diplomatic protests, the world’s democracies followed the American and British lead and rushed to forget Tiananmen, to focus on the promises of profits through trade and commerce authorized by the Beijing regime. No country took on this enthusiasm for accommodating the butchers of Tiananmen more fervently than Canada.
The squalid compromises the “West” entered into allowed the Communist Party to cement its tyranny over the Chinese people by means of a range of police-state strategies that have lately gone into hyperdrive under the severe command of Xi Jinping, whose regime is succeeding in its efforts at thought control, viciously enforced mass obedience and the obliteration of memory.
The June 4 massacres are remembered still, however. In Hong Kong, more than 100,000 people turned out for a vigil at Victoria Park on the anniversary, organized by the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China. But the commemorations, which began in 1990, are now contested from all sides. Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing lawmakers say anyone who attends the annual Tiananmen commemorations should be barred from elections. Some among the younger generation of Hong Kong “localists” say the commemorations are pointless anyway, that the Beijing regime is beyond hope, incorrigible, and incapable of reform.
In the world’s democracies, the public memory of Tiananmen has centred on a single, iconic image: a man, holding shopping bags, standing defiantly in front of a line of tanks. All these years later, the man’s identity remains unknown. Around the world last weekend, in a social-media protest sparked by the Chinese-Australian political cartoonist Badiucao, people posed for photographs, standing as that man stood, on June 4, 1989.
In these small and wholly insufficient ways, Tiananmen is remembered.
“He who controls the past controls the future,” the great British journalist and author of the dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four wrote. “He who controls the present controls the past.”
In China, Xi Jinping and his rotten, brutal regime control the present, and increasingly, the past. Whether the Chinese Communist Party controls the future of China, or indeed the world — something the pathologically ambitious President Xi has made clear that he wants — will depend on whether the world remembers, or forgets.
For a brief few months in 1989, millions of Chinese people, in spite of everything, imagined a future for themselves living in freedom. Those of us in the free world today owe those brave millions a duty to remember.
IT IS AS THOUGH THE EVENT NEVER EVEN HAPPENED. — TERRY GLAVIN