A combination of college-age, labor groups, and retired Chinese had gathered in key spots - eventually joining up in the major center of Beijing called Tiananmen Square - demanding political reforms to coincide with the economic reforms the post-Maoist government was trying to implement during the 1980s.
It went along with a growing protest movement in Eastern Europe, where Soviet Russian control was slipping away as Gorbachev's government could no longer afford the massive military and political buildup of the Soviet Bloc.
For a month, the Chinese leadership tried their best to keep a lid on it all, but international media coverage made that impossible, and the Communist regime itself had fissures between reformists and statists vying for control of the whole government.
By June 4, someone along the official chain of command decided "Fuck it," and unleashed the Army into Tiananmen Square.
The official accounts minimized the casualties. The unofficial accounts put the death toll in the thousands.
It led to the China we know today: An economic powerhouse that's also a massive prison for its own citizenry. The facts of that massacre are constantly whitewashed and censored (I bet this minor little blog has been blocked. My librarian blog, however, gets a lot of Chinese spam so who knows...). The few places in China that know the truth - Hong Kong, which was under British rule in 1989 for example - are forced to keep a lid on their outrage.
This is the world that China sees anymore (via AP News):
Dissidents silenced. Security tightened. References scrubbed from the internet.
China went into customary lockdown Tuesday for the 30th anniversary of the bloody military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, a telling reminder of the ruling Communist Party’s emphasis in the ensuing three decades since on stability above all.
Extra checkpoints and street closures greeted tourists who showed up before 5 a.m. to watch the daily flag-raising ceremony at Tiananmen Square, the main gathering point for the 1989 protests. People overseas found themselves blocked from posting anything to a popular Chinese social media site.
The seven-week-long Tiananmen Square protests and their bloody end — hundreds if not thousands of people are believed to have died — snuffed out a tentative shift toward political liberalization. Thirty years later, social restrictions such as family size and where people can live have been loosened, but political freedom remains for the most part strictly controlled with little prospect for change...
There is a terrible conflict at play here. China's international role is growing - unavoidable due to being the largest populated nation on the planet, its military strength, its economic engines - but its accountability to the world hampered by its own paranoia and sadism.
China's failures at openness makes it difficult to be trusted as an economic partner, even as other Pacific Rim and Asian countries - Japan, Australia, Canada, South American nations, India - are forced to deal with them to keep their own trade deals and economies running well. (I'd include the United States in this argument but trump's tariffs make that a joke)
The leadership fears the truth of Tiananmen, and fears its own citizenry as part of that. But they can't imprison everyone... so they imprison just enough to keep the rest terrified and in line. That leads to the problems of Fear and Hate: Machiavelli's warning to not rely too much on Fear because that drives victims into Hating you, and once that happens you lose control.
This paranoia forces China into massive human rights abuses against entire groups like the Uighurs in western China, a Muslim population forced into "reeducation camps" and forced to renounce their religion through humiliating acts of torture. The authoritarian leadership won't stop there, a nation as big and diverse as China has tens of ethnic and religious minorities that the bosses can't trust, have to correct, need to put down...
The sad thing, there's little the international community can do. Our own protests and government sanctions can only go so far. The best we can do on the sidelines is cheer on the protesters and hope they don't get killed again. Any change in China is going to have to come from within (the very thing the Chinese Communist Party fears the most).
In the meantime, it's been thirty years since we've seen this man, and once again we need a reminder that this brave soul stood up for freedom at a terrible personal price:
Tank Man is my brother. I hope he's still alive even after thirty years. I hope I can meet him some day. So I can ask him what it was like. So I can buy him a cup of tea and drink it in Tiananmen Square.
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