Twenty-five years ago, the world was shocked. Tanks rumbled through the streets of Beijing and shots were fired at students and other civilians who had gathered to protest against inflation and corruption. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed. Across the world, communism was in retreat. A quarter of a century later, Deng’s successors feel vindicated. “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate?” Xi Jinping asked while pondering the collapse of the Soviet party. He concluded: “In the end nobody was a real man, nobody came out to resist” and so “a great party was gone”. The party has also stoked nationalism in the form of a “Chinese dream” of national grandeur. Love of country is being equated to love of the party. What fanned the flames of opposition in 1989 was not so much the desire for democracy as outrage at official corruption. This corruption has continued to thrive. Sum Chan, convener of pro-Communist group Voice of Loving Hong Kong, goes as far to claim there was no casualty at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. The party must find shameful what it did on June 4, 1989. Why else will it not allow those historic events to even be mentioned in public?
Filed under: China, Current Affairs Tagged: | China, Current Affairs
Most of the world knows the truth but the people inside China don’t have access to the information. Their government has managed to rewrite or blot out history. I would like to read more about this as I don’t know very much, just what I remember watching on the news when it was happening.
About seven years ago, in 2004, when I visited China for the first time since I left Hong Kong for America in 1987, I took the wrong bus by accident that ended up taking me to a rural village in Beijing instead of the Great Wall. Just mere 150 miles from the capital, I was shocked some of the villagers had no idea what happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989. The Communist Party has hidden the truth from many of its nationals. Now they try to downscale the atrocity subjected to the students and dissident by calling it a crackdown instead of a massacre.