Tiananmen Anniversary 2022

Another June 4th, another round of China squelching protestors out of fear (via AP News by way of NPR).

Heavy police force patrolled Hong Kong's Victoria Park on Saturday after authorities for a third consecutive year banned public commemoration of the anniversary of the deadly Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, with vigils overseas the only place marking the event.

For decades, Hong Kong and nearby Macao were the only places in China allowed to commemorate the violent suppression by army troops of student protesters demanding greater democracy in Beijing's Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. Hundreds, if not thousands, were killed.

The ban is seen as part of a move to snuff out political dissent and a sign that Hong Kong is losing its freedoms as Beijing tightens its grip over the semi-autonomous Chinese city...

And it's not just been the Tiananmen freedom protests that China's government has cracked down on.  Eduardo Baptista at Reuters documented how the quarantine lockdown earlier this year drove up anger and protests across Shanghai and other provinces (paywalled so I can't provide any quotes).

Also a reminder that China is conducting an ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs population (via Zoya Wazir at US News & World Report): 

Multiple reports from human rights and civil society organizations have found that Uyghurs have been detained in prisons and internment camps since at least 2017, with other abuses starting even earlier.

While the Chinese government argues that these re-education camps are meant to provide Uyghurs with vocational training to combat poverty, separatism and Islamic extremism, Jewher Ilham – a Uyghur rights advocate with the Coalition to End Forced Labor in the Uyghur Region whose father, prominent Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti, has been detained in Chinese prison since 2014 – says that the Chinese government’s definition of extremism is intentionally broad to allow for mass detentions...

Today, 1 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs and Muslims are estimated to be in internment camps in Xinjiang, according to the Associated Press.

(Kelley Currie, the former U.S. ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues and the U.S. representative at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women) adds that the Chinese government’s persecution of Uyghurs hinges on ethnic discrimination and a discomfort with their assertion of their distinct ethnic identity...

Foreign policy experts keep telling us that China is one step removed from being a true global superpower. They keep forgetting China can't unleash its full might because it's tied down suppressing their own citizenry.

One day, China will be free. Their leadership's own corruption will consume itself sooner rather than later, and all we can hope for is that a lot of innocent people both in China and across the globe won't suffer from that selfl-immolation.