Tiananmen is no forgotten revolution
Twenty years after the pro-democracy uprising in China's Tiananmen Square the Communist Party remains haunted by its reaction
As anniversaries go, there’s little but loathing when it comes to marking the 20 years since hundreds, possibly thousands of people were mowed down by tanks on the order of the Chinese Communist Party. It is 20 years since
It may well have fooled the world into allowing it to host the last Olympics, but its dirty little secret of just how many died, on whose orders and why, won’t be dispensed with as easily as those brave citizens who were fighting for democracy.
Much can happen in two decades, unless you are one of the possibly hundreds of political prisoners rotting away in a Chinese prison for daring to question communism and official corruption.
Twenty years ago David Lange resigned, Sir Arnold Nordmeyer died, TV3 launched, and so too did Paul Holmes. Margaret Urlich had the top album with ‘Safety in Numbers’. Not so safe if you happened to be occupying
Then, as now, the almighty CCP had no idea how to deal with any challenge to its authority. It mowed down its own citizens under the cover of darkness. Now it just pulls the cyber-space plug, denies visas, chucks in prison any dissenter, dusts itself off and gets on with the business of being the biggest economic threat to the
It is easy to forgive the young in
We can all breathe a sigh of relief to know the US Congress has called on China to launch an inquiry into the whole affair and, come to think of it, would they be so good as to release all the political prisoners while they are preparing to hand over the necessary dossiers to the United Nations?
Forgive me but wasn’t the US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi actually IN
It does however go to the heart of why politics is always so easily labeled a dirty business. It is dirty because it is so damned complicated, particularly when diplomacy, human rights and the pursuit of the mighty dollar are involved. The
The unraveling of communism with all the potential social upheaval that could spread to China terrified Deng Xiaoping, almost as much as missing the economic train he had so trumpeted. The flesh and blood of a few troublesome students was no match for the fear of social unrest, let alone a lacklustre yuan (corrected).
And now, twenty years later, China has kept unity of the party, still controls the police and displays a masterful, albeit blunt, control over the propaganda machine – be it blogs or Twitter or Flickr or other terrifyingly macho named enemies of the ‘people’, they are no match.
The trouble for
To those who are still in jail, or to those families who still mourn their dead, or to the young man in the iconic photo that came to define the will of the protesters, they should know they are remembered this week.