June 4th in Hong Kong was commemorated with the usual gusto by Hong Kongers, mostly the youth, with a strong core of oldies that were around in 1989 when the Tiananmen incident took place. All the regulars that emerge on every Sunday for disputes with government over one thing or another were there of course.
Organisers place the figures at 180,000 and that must be the more accurate figure as those playing down the attendance at such demonstrations have various means of chipping away at the actual by having their own criteria – in this instance those outside the ground not counted by (defensively) pro-Beijing organisations, for instance.
While the main thrust was and still is a highly charged accusation against the Chinese Communist Party’s use of the military (the People’s Liberation Army) against students and workers on the days of the incident, given that the CCP is a People’s Party and the military an armed force of and for the people, the matter is a hot issue.
What is required by the general body of protesters is a reassessment of the event as quite different from an anti-state action, rather, the demonstrations in Beijing need to be seen and formally accepted as a legitimate expression for valid reasons (mainly anti-corruption) by the public. However, the government of today’s China find that too much of a climb down and refuses to do so. In time this change of tack will very likely come about, but not in the very near future.
While Tiananmen is a big thing and it was a game changer for China both domestically and internationally, this has come about because of the media coverage at the time and the emphasis given by western-interest media groups getting over-excited at the immediacy of the coverage from the balconies of the Beijing Hotel looking down Chang’an Avenue towards Tiananmen Square a few hundred meters away in a place so media-hot as China.
As Mike Chinoy wrote about that moment as CNN’s Beijing Bureau Chief in 1989: “I could see armored vehicles of the People’s Liberation Army moving just in front of the famous portrait of Chairman Mao hanging above the vast square. Below me crowds gathered, surged forward, and then broke and dispersed as soldiers opened fire at them. Several people were hit. I watched as others loaded the dead and wounded onto flatbed bicycle carts.” We have all seen images of that time.
Chinoy commented that the weeks of student-led protests had become the largest movement for political reform in the history of the People’s Republic. The military crackdown he covered had far-reaching consequences, not only for China’s development but also for its relations with the rest of the world.
“The protests generated unparalleled international coverage, and became a defining moment in the Information Age. It was the first time a popular uprising in an authoritarian state was broadcast live across the globe, he added.
Thus the brave soul who stopped the line of tanks is broadcast as a hero of the revolutionary moment, which he indeed was, but not a jot of thanks was given to the tank driver and crew, and their instructions from above, which had the killing machine twisting and turning in order not to hurt the magnificent loner with his shopping bag.
Tianamen became a very tender sore spot for China and the West lost no opportunity to give it another jab, all those human rights groups falling over themselves to document and highlight the infringements, and the wide range of figures for the actual deaths.
China gives top priority to stability. In 1989 there was great danger of wholesale instability and if there was the mobile phone then and social media as per today no one knows what might have happened. Even then news slowly got out to the provinces and trainloads and buses of youths began converging on the capital – too late.
The USA in particular has a horror of the Communist ideology and socialism too is a bad word and of course Europe just follows on in the wake of that big power. As is well known, real Communism never arrived, just the same as Real Democracy is not applied, thus in the years after 1949 the system in China solidified to a hardline bureaucracy where human rights were far down the list of priorities.
However, looking at the realities on the ground, China has surged ahead and is a vital component in the economics of this modern world that is so heavily influenced by the superficialities of western culture – it’s not like the East is taking the best from the West! There are ‘things western’ or USA-American, that not only do not fit in the ‘East’ (also South), but are detrimental to cultures that rely on group solidarity, on a certain uniformity, an acceptance of norms that are collective as against individualistic.
Despite being a rather worn term, imperialism continues to run its course that was once so blatant and obvious with the British Empire not hiding its intent in the least. Well, those days are over but the ‘running dogs’ of its schema around the world still inflict their dominating ways on people and should make a repenting pledge that they will immediately stop all their ‘divide and conquer’ efforts in Asia, for instance between China and Japan, supported by their agents in the Philippines and Vietnam, and, in and around the old Soviet Union, among the pro- and con- West factions in Russia’s effort to reunify the Soviet Union.
As political commentator Lau Nai-keung has said, in the early days of Hong Kong’s commemorative Tiananmen event Szeto Wah, Martin Lee and their pals monopolized the authority to define who is and who isn’t a democrat. But can’t a person who approves of the progress being made on the mainland still be a democrat?
Local resident and ex-Legco member Elsie Tu – who turned 101 June 2 – lost her Legco seat simply because she was castigated as pro-Beijing by Szeto Wah whose campaign targeted Tu’s perceived “pro-Chinese” stance. Elsie was one of the very few British who fought against the injustices of the British colonial government towards the Hong Kong people, and she fought the hardest. There is a body of local Hong Konger’s that seem to have lost sight of their essential Chinese features that are set in deep cultural values.
As a Chinese-American friend Joe Ching puts it: “China should revive the Asian tradition of cultural unification, which was instrumental in absorbing Mongolians and Manchurians into the large Chinese family and made China the most ethnically harmonious country in the world.
“If Mao Ze-dong can be credited with cleansing out the Western barbarian elements from China and knocking down America’s nuke fence with a ping pong ball, Deng Xiao-ping should be remembered for having kept China in one piece at Tiananmen Square. Now it’s time for Xi Jing-ping to unite Asia against the century-old America [European] imperialism in the Asia Pacific.”
An accompanying consideration must be given to China’s distinct regions where there are problems of autonomy and the lack of it, that points at the problem of standardisation as the latter is wanted by central governments for reasons of control – but how to allow for differences? Force might be necessary but violence never.
That’s the crux of the matter when it comes to Tiananmen!
