CHINA's Communist Party has mobilised every arm of its massive state apparatus to ensure the 20th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on its citizens in Tiananmen Square passes unnoticed.
Authorities censored a host of online services yesterday, launched armed patrols around the centre of Beijing and placed prominent dissidents under arrest.
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On the evening of June 3, 1989, China's leadership moved to impose martial law on the centre of Beijing after almost seven weeks of protests begun by students, culminating in the peaceful occupation of Tiananmen Square outside the Forbidden City. Thousands of troops and tanks stormed the city streets and the square, crushing and shooting unarmed citizens.
Since then, the event has been wiped from Chinese history books with most young Chinese having only vague knowledge of the massacre and many happy to dismiss it as history.
Perhaps the most famous photograph of the event was of "Tank Man". Indeed it has become one of the most famous photographs of the 20th Century. I think that if I was someone in that photograph, I should most like to be someone inside one of the tanks.
The fate of "Tank Man" remains unknown. I have read reports that he's still alive, and possibly living in Taiwan, Hong Kong or even Beijing itself but the fact that the Chinese Government has repressed his story along with the fate of an unknown number of thousands of students who died as a result of the massacre, makes me think that he is probably dead.
What is the fate of those students who survived, or were never caught? There must be quite of a lot of them who by now would be in their mid 40s; possibly in responsible positions. Surely the memory of twenty years ago still lives with them?
China did host the 2008 Olympic Games, but there were still questions asked about its human rights issues. As least the protesters in the lead up to the games weren't summarily executed. There are also other great issues such as the repression of information generally; that included the so called "Great Firewall of China" which sits around China's ISP keeping out "unwanted" ideas and information out.
Of course it is very easy just to point the finger of China's lack of awareness of their own history (mind you, if we look in our backyard we find that most students in the west don't know much about history because of ignorance and laziness more than repression), but it still doesn't explain why those people who went through it, haven't done something about changing it - unless of course they're still prevented from doing so.
Aside:
I also find it starkly ironic that 20 years after this event with the collapse of General Motors, one of the symbols of all that was/is American in the brand Hummer has been sold to Chinese investors. I guess that Money is even louder than democracy... even in the land of the free, and the home of the brave.
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