Tiananmen Square in 2023

Tiananmen Square in 1989

From Reuters (Jessie Pang and Ben Blanchard):

Hong Kong police searched and detained scores of people on Sunday, four arrested for "seditious" intent, as authorities tightened security for the 34th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Restrictions in Hong Kong have stifled what were once the biggest vigils marking the bloody crackdown by Chinese troops on pro-democracy demonstrators, leaving cities like Taipei, London, New York and Berlin to keep alive the memory on the June 4 anniversary...

Hong Kong activists say such police action is part of a broad campaign by China to crush dissent in the city that was promised continued freedoms for 50 years under a "one country, two systems" formula when former colonial power Britain handed it back in 1997.

Security is significantly tighter across Hong Kong this year, with up to 6,000 police deployed, including riot and anti-terrorism officers, according to local media.

Senior officials have warned people to abide by the law, but have refused to clarify if such commemoration activities are illegal under a national security law China imposed on Hong Kong in 2020 after mass pro-democracy protests...

Despite the warnings in Hong Kong, some individuals including some book shop owners, have been quietly marking June 4.

Jailed Hong Kong activist Chow Hang-tung, one of the leaders of a group called The Alliance, which used to organise Hong Kong's annual June 4 vigils before it was disbanded in 2021, said on Facebook she would hold a 34-hour hunger strike.

In mainland China, any mention of the Tiananmen Square crackdown - where troops opened fire on pro-democracy protesters, killing hundreds if not thousands, according to rights groups - is taboo and the subject is heavily censored.

China is, by the by, an absolute mess (Article is from Bloomberg but it's firewalled, so you get Yahoo! instead):

Hegang, a city with nearly a million people near the Russian border, had debt of more than double its fiscal income when it hit the headlines almost 18 months ago. It was the first time a city administration had taken official emergency steps since the State Council unveiled rules in 2016 on how local governments, from counties to provinces, should deal with debt risks.

Hegang’s residents are now feeling the brunt of the fiscal clampdown. During a recent visit to the city, locals complained about a lack of indoor heating in freezing winter temperatures, and taxi drivers said they were being slapped with more traffic fines. Public school teachers worried about rumored job cuts, and street cleaners endured two-month delays to their salaries...

Hegang represents just the tip of the iceberg of a local government debt problem that’s making investors increasingly nervous and that threatens to be a drag on the world’s second-largest economy for years to come. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimates China’s total government debt is about $23 trillion, a figure that includes the hidden borrowing of thousands of financing companies set up by provinces and cities.

While the chance of a municipal default in China is relatively low given Beijing’s implicit guarantee on the debt, the bigger worry is that local governments will have to make painful spending cuts or divert money away from growth-boosting projects to continue repaying their debt. At stake for Xi is his ambition of doubling income levels by 2035 while reducing the gap between rich and poor, which is key for social stability as he seeks to rule the Communist Party for potentially the next decade or more.

“Many cities will become like Hegang in a few years’ time,” said Houze Song, an economist at US think tank MacroPolo, noting that China’s aging and shrinking population means many cities don’t have the workforce to sustain faster economic growth and tax revenue.

“The central government may be able to keep things stable in the short term by asking banks to roll over local governments’ debt,” Song said. Without loan extensions, he added, “the reality is that over two thirds of the localities won’t be able to repay their debt on time.”

There had been a massive construction boom going on across China in the past two decades, as though the central government was using all of that to overcharge their economic numbers to look better than they were. Stories abound about entire cities built without residents and massive construction projects that sit unused because there was no actual demand for them. Most of these "ghost towns" look to be owned as commodities rather than residences, creating the kind of economic bubble that led to the 2007-08 housing market crash that created the Great Recession.

If China is heading down that path, how soon will their investments and financial stability collapse to where it affects their manufacturing and exporting? At what point does the economic disparity between the vast poor and the elite (party leadership) rich become another protest?

How soon before Tank Man's children rise up, Xi? 

As the Years Pass on September 11

It feels a bit bittersweet that given how chaotic and busy this year's been - so many other things to report on today - that this year's remembrance of September 11th seems less important than other years.

For all the chest-thumping and flag-waving over December 7th - the attack on Pearl Harbor - it too fell in importance as the generations most affected by it aged away, leaving behind the echoes of sorrow and fear that reverberated that day.

For all the rehashings of November 22nd - the assassination of JFK - it too is fading into legend, the constant re-enactments of phantom riflemen hiding at the Grassy Knoll turning into punchline rather than serious debate over what really happened that day.

As someone who can still remember vividly what it was like that Tuesday: Being at Main Library in downtown Ft. Lauderdale, running into my former supervisor Barbara tearfully telling me about the second tower getting hit, watching the first tower fall on a snowy-screened television with poor reception, telling a young couple why the county government center was closed and that "one of the towers is just flat out gone," returning to Northwest Regional in Coral Springs where it was the quietest I had ever heard that place, going to a blood donation center in Lauderhill and waiting well into darkness with the long queue of people in the parking lot wanting to do something in that moment...

And time moves on, children grow up, there is a generation going into college now born well after that tragic day.

It's getting harder to remember.

Anniversary: Thirty Years Later, Tiananmen Remains a Unfulfilled Promise

Back in 1989, by this date June 4, the democracy protests in China had been going on for a month or so.

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.

In Memoriam: Gainesville 1990

There is a wall on 34th Street in Gainesville Florida reserved for graffiti.  Technically, it's illegal to vandalize walls, but the locals have decided it was easier to let the kids and University of Florida college students tag it with their work over the years rather than cope with the hassles of stopping it or repainting over it.

According to local experts, most sections of the wall have over 250 layers of paint now.  In some places they had to replace concrete blocks because the weight of all those layers were weakening the stone.

It adds color to the scenery, in a way.  It's gotten its own Wikipedia page.

There's also a memorial there that the city and the college students honor.  It's rarely painted over, and when it is there is someone on hand to quickly repaint the memorial back in place.

1990 was my third year at UF.  Studying towards a Journalism degree, although my middling grades were telling me I would have been better off going into Political Science or something.  That August I started trying to do stringer work - freelance - for the school paper the Alligator and had gotten an article about the Harn Museum published (it would be the only one the Alligator would ever take from me, and I moved on to work for a local alternative monthly instead).

Classes were starting back up.  The college town was packed with young men and women returning or arriving for the first time.  Bicycles and cars everywhere.  Apartment complexes surrounding campus packed with 35,000 students.  Football season with Coach Spurrier starting up for the first year.

I had recently moved in with my twin brother.  I went first year to live in a dorm whereas Phil went to apartment living, and the second year my dorm roommate and I tried a year at Gatorwood Apartments before Phil needed a replacement roommate for the third year.  So there I went to Oxford Apartments on Archer Road while Mike moved on with some of his marching band-mates (funny story: if you ever watch the Florida-Notre Game bowl matchup (1992?), you'll see Mike being the one photobombing Coach Lou Holtz during a halftime interview.  The Irish went on to beat the crap out of the Gators during the second half, so yeah, the loss is totally Mike's fault.  But I digress).

That first week back in college... in my mind, I keep remembering it as being cold that week.  A chill wind for some reason, even though it was Florida in the late August month.  Maybe I'm remembering it that way because of what happened.  Because of the sorrow.

A serial killer had arrived in Gainesville and began killing students that weekend.

The first day killings shocked the campus.  The second day confirmed there was a serial killer on the loose and targeting young women.  Rumors got out about what the killer did to the third victim's body.  That weekend nearly every woman that could fled the city.  My brother and I stayed.  I have to admit, it was because as guys we wouldn't be targets.  We were worried, obviously.  Our female friends were threatened, but the ones we knew had fled to safety and they were going to be okay.

The third day of killings had a couple - girlfriend and boyfriend - dead in their apartment at the Gatorwood complex.  I remember biking by the apartments - it was just down the block from Oxford - and all those cop cars, all that yellow tape, and I feared the worst.

Everybody - even the guys - panicked.  Some of Phil's fraternity brothers came over to crash at our apartment that night.  The thinking was "safety in numbers" although fear was rampant.  Classes were cancelled for a few days.

Things calmed down once there was no sign of continuing atrocities, but things didn't fully return to normal.  Every apartment building went through massive security redesigns.  Some of the departed students never came back.

The police finally caught a suspect who used the same tools to commit burglaries elsewhere, and the man confessed.  He was executed by lethal injection about ten years ago.  Never say his name.  The sonofabitch wanted to be remembered as a mass murderer like Ted Bundy.  Screw him.

In time, memorials popped up.  Five trees planted outside of Library East.  The 34th Wall Memorial began that winter, and for all intents remains to this day and for as long as there is a wall there.  Five palm trees bearing signs of the victims names - Sonja, Christina, Christa, Tracy, Manuel - are planted along the street median where the Wall Memorial resides.  There may be others.

Gatorwood was bulldozed down years ago.  It had been an aging complex when Mike and I lived there.  There's a fancy expensive apartment tower there now.  Oxford Apartments was still there last I visited Gainesville with my brother Phil and my nephews for a football season opener.  Some of the places in town have changed.  Places always do.

The memories and memorials never should change.

We shouldn't forget the lives taken that didn't need to go.  There are so many of them taken from us every day across the globe, and the sorrow of it is how much waste and loss and pain there is when that happens.

If the killer had never been, right now Sonja or Christina or Christa or Tracy or Manuel would be my age or close to it, in their 40s.  Likely married or with kids of their own.  Kids old enough to be attending UF themselves by now, twenty-five years later.  All five of them could be working somewhere, as doctors or engineers or teachers.  Writing books, or painting, or composing music.  Creating, adding to the world.

We are them and they could have been us.  Maybe doing better, maybe not.  But we'll never know, we'll never see.  

All that loss during a cold week in August 1990.

In memoriam.

For All I Know About How the March For Jobs Turned Out

It would have been nice if I had gone so I could report in person what the crowds were like, how the scene was set, the mood of others worried for their jobs...

There's not much online I'm finding at the moment other than this article from The Atlantic Wire, which mostly just focuses on the debates on what the turnout meant and what turnout they actually had (and if the turnout was bigger than Beck's).

The problem is that "official" numbers from the National Park Service aren't given out anymore, so it's left to the rally leaders to proclaim GREAT VICTORY in the millions of people who turn out for their shows.  For Beck, he was gloating he had 500,000 at his rally (CBS did their evaluation and got it at 87,000.  Other observers did their own math and considered numbers between 100,000 to 150,000).  The One Nation crew is pushing that they got better numbers than Beck, but on-the-ground reports are suggesting they got a smaller turnout (like 80,000 to Beck 87,000 kind of comparisons).

The one thing that does seem worthy to note: the largest amount of representation - and what was the stronger effort at the local level to organize buses - came from the unions.  This pretty much got to be a March for Unions than a March for Jobs by the sound of it.  Which makes sense when you think about it. Unions are all about jobs: keeping the union jobs they've got and wanting more jobs created for workers to join unions later on.

The phrase "enthusiasm gap" is going to get played up nowadays: comparing the eagerness of the Far Right to the lackluster responses of the whole Left toward the current political mood and potential results this November.  All I want to say on this matter is WAKE THE HELL UP AMERICA.  You don't want the Republicans to reclaim control of Congress and drive us back to the economic horrors they created from the 1990s and through the Bush the Lesser years.  Okay?  Do I need to re-hash what I've said about the damage the Republicans have caused with their insane obsession with tax cuts and deregulation?

One month to go.  Please DON'T VOTE REPUBLICAN.

Just a Friendly Reminder for this New Year 2010

Just to remind all seven people who've read this blog over the last three years, considering this is a Congressional midterms election (2010 midterms):

The Republican Party were the ones in charge from 2000 to 2006 in Congress alongside eight years 2000 to 2008 in charge of the White House under Bush the Lesser, and during those six years their financial and budgetary performance was one of the worst in American History. The Republicans spent and borrowed like drunken teenagers with their parents' credit cards, wasting money on two wars (billions lost and unaccounted for), wasting money on an unfunded Medicare / Big Pharma payout (still one of the biggest under-reported scandals of the last decade!), and creating massive unjustifiable tax cuts that never 'trickled down' or 'paid for themselves' but instead creating massive deficits THAT DO MATTER. The Republicans do not have the right to call themselves 'Fiscally Responsible' for the next ten generations... and yet here they come in 2010, claiming the banners of "Let's Worry About Deficits Now" and "Let's Tighten Spending" simply because they no longer control the purse strings.
Try to remember people, when the Republicans controlled the purse strings they didn't worry about deficits and they were worse with spending than the Democrats have been since LBJ. And try to note this: the maniacs currently in charge of the Republican Party WANT TO GO BACK TO WHAT THEY WERE DOING FROM 2000 to 2006! They want, if they get back in charge of Congress, they want to CUT MORE TAXES! They want to CUT MORE REGULATIONS IN FINANCE AND BUSINESS where previous times of deregulation (SEE: 2002 and 2008) nearly killed the entire planet's economy! They want to START MORE WARS in the Middle East (Bomb Iran! Bomb Yemen (well, worse than we already are now)! Bomb Iraq some more!) Okay? Do you get it, America? Can you wake up for a moment and take a good look at the current GOP? THEY THINK THEIR IDEOLOGY WAS WORKING IN THE LAST DECADE, THEY DIDN'T CARE THE ECONOMY WAS IN THE CRAPPER AND THEY DIDN'T CARE THE WAR ON TERROR WAS MISMANAGED ALL TO HELL, ALL UNDER THEIR WATCH. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT VOTE THE REPUBLICANS BACK INTO POWER! PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT'S HOLY!

If you seriously think the Democrats today after one year in power are far worse than how the Republicans were (and still are) from 2000 on, and that we need to go back to the GOP leadership that nearly bankrupted this country, there is something seriously wrong with you.

This message has been brought to you by a disgruntled ex-GOP Moderate who's putting in membership for the Modern Whigs. So there.