Anniversary: In Remembrance of Protests We Honor In Spite of the Dictators

(Update: Many thanks to Infidel753 for including this article on Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please take the time to look through this long-running blog which I admit is a far better effort than trump ever made bwhahahahaha... sorry, had to rub it in)

This is June 4 again, a reminder that in 1989 the calls for democracy in China were silenced by the gun and tank:

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...

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...

And the sad truth is, the rest of the world powers let it go, because they dare not press China - a military and economic behemoth - about their darkest sins. The Western powers especially Great Britain - which had insisted on Hong Kong remaining independent from Mainland China's sway - have let the bosses shut down protests there (via James Griffiths at CNN):

For an event that happened almost 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) away, the Tiananmen Square massacre has become deeply embedded in Hong Kong's psyche. That's because for the past three decades, Hong Kong was the only place where major commemorations were held, including marches, church services, and huge candlelit vigils in the city's Victoria Park.

After Hong Kong became part of China in 1997, the continuation of these events was always seen as a major litmus test for the city's ongoing autonomy and democratic freedoms, supposedly guaranteed until 2047 by its de facto constitution, the Basic Law, under the principle of "one country, two systems."

The 30th anniversary in 2019 saw one of the biggest turnouts at the Victoria Park vigil, with organizers claiming some 180,000 people joined the commemoration (though police said it was closer to 40,000). That anniversary came amid escalating tensions over a proposed extradition bill between Hong Kong and China: just five days later, over a million people marched against it, and in the months that followed, the city was consumed by increasingly violent protests and police crackdowns.

In the wake of those protests, Beijing introduced a national security law for Hong Kong, bypassing the city's semi-democratic legislature to criminalize secession, subversion and collusion with foreign powers. That law has been used to crack down on a host of political activity, and almost every prominent pro-democracy politician and activist is either in prison -- or headed there.

As talk of the law rumbled ahead of its abrupt passing on June 30 last year, many saw June 4, 2020, as potentially the final opportunity for a major commemoration. Despite authorities banning the Victoria Park vigil on pandemic grounds, tens of thousands still turned out to mark the event peacefully, and police took a hands-off approach -- though subsequently arrested and charged a number of activists deemed to have "organized" the protest.

This year, the gloves are off. The city's Security Bureau said Saturday that any rally on June 4 would be deemed an unauthorized assembly, and "no one should take part in it, or advertise or publicize it, or else he or she may violate the law."

Offenders could face up to five years in prison, while those promoting the event could be jailed for up to 12 months, the bureau added.

China isn't getting better about its responsibilities as a global power, the ruling elite are getting more violent. And it's not just in Hong Kong. What the Chinese government is doing to the Uyghurs is literally genocide... and nobody else is doing a damn thing to stop that.

I lament the possibility of Tank Man, a sole protestor who stood against the tanks back in 1989, ever survived China's bloody crackdown, I lament the possibility I will ever meet the man and greet him like a lost brother.

Freedom should matter, everybody. Tiananmen should remind us of that.

Thoughts On Hong Kong (w/Update)

The months-long protests in the Chinese province of Hong Kong has moved to a more chaotic stage, with the protesters taking over the international airport and pretty much shutting it down.

Originally started in response to the Mainland China's efforts to accelerate its control of the regional government - something that the United Kingdom negotiated during the 1997 transition to not happen until 2047 - through an aggressive extradition deal, the protests have continued on since March of this year and escalated into marches and sit-ins across every street and business center.

Hong Kong residents are well aware of the kind of suppression and loss of civil liberties that await them if the Chinese central government takes over everything, and they're not waiting for that to take away the rights they're used to having.

Unfortunately, the Chinese government - still self-serving and corrupt - has faced this problem before... and the last time it happened it got real bloody real quick and the only thing left afterward was the international condemnation and little else. China kept chugging along after Tiananmen, because other nations needed to do business with that country for its resources and workforce.

Hong Kong is different, though. It still has the unofficial protection of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. The province itself is viewed as "special" as a global city. Any overt crackdown and the world could respond with more than angry words this time.

The problem of a violent reaction by the corrupt regime still troubles me. It's the only move - invading Tibet, crushing democracy reformers, shoving religious ethnics like the Uighurs into re-education/torture camps - the government knows.

But the residents of Hong Kong can't back down either. Their entire way of life, even tied to the rest of China as they are now, revolves around the ability to speak their minds, question any acts of corruption, stand for rights as people against any political force that would treat them poorly. They'll listen to offers of compromise but not demands for surrender.

This is not going to end well. I wish it would, I hope saner heads may prevail and some compromise reached... but we're talking about authoritarian bullies who had no problem sending in the tanks before and won't have any doubts about doing it again.

Stay safe, Hong Kong.

Update: Woke up to this Atlantic article that spells out in better detail just how bad the situation is. The Chinese government is shackled by a zero-sum, our-way-or-the-highway mentality that makes compromise next to impossible. To quote Michael Schuman's article:

All governments, of course, have a habit of insisting they are in the right. But China finds altering course especially difficult, mainly because of how its domestic political system functions. As an authoritarian regime—and one that is more and more centered on a personal cult surrounding Xi Jinping—admitting fault is perceived as a threat to credibility. Nor is it clear how much bad news filters up to top decision makers through a bureaucracy fearful that policy disagreements could be mistaken for disloyalty. Compounding matters is the historical narrative marketed domestically by Beijing, in which the party stars as the defender of the Chinese nation against foreign imperialists who have preyed upon the country for more than a century. “They haven’t been treated well; now they have a right to stand up and be a great power,” Glaser said of the thinking. “All of this leads the Chinese to believe that their interests are more important than others.”

It's a serious - and lethal - flaw in governance that is not going to end well either way.