The anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre is an opportunity to reflect on the Chinese Communist Party’s wanton cruelty.
The anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre is an opportunity to reflect on the Chinese Communist Party’s wanton cruelty and the ever-present danger to anyone that stands in its way. This is something that Chinese democrats, Hong Kongers, and the people of Taiwan know well: Given the chance and a reason to do so, Beijing has shown that it has few qualms about using indiscriminate violence to achieve its political ends.
That barbarism is encapsulated succinctly by firsthand accounts from the day, including in a British diplomatic cable about what took place. The author of the document wrote that he had spoken to a contact whose close friend was a member of the State Council and could thus pass on the following about the military response:
ON ARRIVAL AT TIANANMEN TROOPS FROM [Shenyang Military Region] HAD SEPARATED STUDENTS AND RESIDENTS. STUDENTS UNDERSTOOD THEY WERE GIVEN ONE HOUR TO LEAVE SQUARE BUT AFTER FIVE MINUTES [armored personnel carriers] ATTACKED. STUDENTS LINKED ARMS BUT WERE MOWN DOWN INCLUDING SOLDIERS. APCS THEN RAN OVER BODIES TIME AND AGAIN TO MAKE QUOTE PIE UNQUOTE AND REMAINS COLLECTED BY BULLDOZER. REMAINS INCINERATED AND THEN HOSED DOWN DRAINS.
The cable goes on to discuss some of what went on within the ranks of various military units, including speculation about why a particular group, the 27th Field Army, composed of illiterate soldiers “called Primitives,” was selected — it is the “most reliable and obedient.”
BEIJING [Military Region] COMMANDER HAD REFUSED TO SUPPLY OUTSIDE ARMIES WITH FOOD, WATER OR BARRACKS. SOURCE SAID MANY BARRACKS IN BEIJING BUT NOTE TV PICTURES OF TENTS. 27 ARMY WERE USING DUM-DUM BULLETS. 27 ARMY SNIPERS SHOT MANY CIVILIANS ON BALCONIES, STREETSWEEPERS ETC FOR TARGET PRACTICE.
The Party, of course, has suppressed discussion of the killings on the mainland, and in the wake of the National-Security Law has attempted to prevent Hong Kongers from participating in an annual vigil to mark the event that took place in the city’s Victoria Park. Images from Hong Kong today show people gathering just outside of the park with cell-phone lights and candles, and the other creative ways in which they have defied the city’s police force.
Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen also marked the bloodshed in a Facebook post, noting that the arrival of a vaccine shipment from Japan coincided with the commemoration of June 4. “We will also not forget about the young people who sacrificed themselves on Tiananmen Square on this day 32 years ago, and that year after year, friends in Hong Kong who always mourn June 4 with candlelight.”
It is perhaps fitting that today in the U.K., a panel of international legal experts assembled to hear testimony about a modern day Communist Party atrocity. During the first day of a tribunal to evaluate evidence that sheds light on the Uyghur genocide, the audience heard shocking testimony about the treatment of detainees within the concentration camps and the broader open air prison that Beijing has constructed in the Xinjiang region. While there’s currently no evidence of mass killing in the camps, the Party is on track to achieve an ambitious feat: the gradual eradication of an entire people by other means, including forced sterilization and sexual violence. Like the destruction of Hong Kong’s protest movement and the military harassment of Taiwan, this too is an outgrowth of the disregard for human life that made Tiananmen Square possible.
The truth is that the Party’s opponents everywhere stand a better chance of resisting its efforts if they work together. The failure of U.S. policy up until now has been the failure to recognize that a regime that inflicts such senseless violence upon pro-democracy demonstrators is one that will do the same elsewhere time and time again.
There can be no compartmentalization of the response to the Chinese regime’s actions: A civil–military industrial base that is boosted by open economic exchanges with the West can be used to repress ethnic minority populations, bring pro-democracy movements to heel, and fuel a military buildup that threatens Taiwan. The idea that climate and global public-health cooperation can be siloed off from those essential threats is shortsighted. Beijing proved capable of advancing its interests under the cover of collaboration in the post-Tiananmen era in a way that’s been devastatingly effective.
As we remember the bravery of those whose advocacy of democracy was met with violence 32 years ago, it’s worth recalling the essential realization that the massacre provoked. The Party’s leadership ordered, defended, and covered up the deliberate mowing-down, flattening, and incineration of peaceful student demonstrators, and it has only doubled down on its predisposition for that sort of brutality in the years since.