Tianenmen Square

There are generations of Chinese people who do not know that their government murdered hundreds in that famous landmark:

With the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre approaching, why would China's defence minister decide to defend the Communist Party's day of infamy?

Not only did he justify the military's murder of untold numbers of peaceful student protesters in the centre of Beijing's national square in 1989, he reversed the onus of moral scrutiny: "How can you say that China handled it improperly?" General Wei Fenghe demanded of an international audience in Singapore on Sunday. ...

Sure, Wei was asked about it. Would the People's Liberation Army "finally recognise" what had happened in Tiananmen Square when it took arms against unarmed students?

But he didn't need to answer. Indeed, he chose to skip a number of awkward questions when he had the podium at the annual Shangri La defence dialogue. So it was his choice to reply to this particular question.

"It was political turbulence" and "the Chinese government acted to stop the turbulence", he said. The thirty years of stability and development since has proved that it was the "correct" decision, Wei said.

But why say it, and so stridently, now? First, it's a telltale sign of a regime that is unapologetic and increasingly confident.

Ever since the global financial crisis exposed the weakness of the West a decade ago, China has been more and more assertive of its own authoritarian model, less and less tolerant of any criticism. Human rights are out, nationalist hubris is in.

Second, it reinforced the point of Wei's overall performance in front of an influential international audience - to assert China's inherent right to greatness and to warn Washington against any thought of challenging China militarily.

Third, it's the core of Chinese Communist Party's rule. Chinese President Xi Jinping once said that the Soviet Union collapsed because no one was "man enough" to defend the Communist Party's rule. China, implicitly, would not make that mistake.

General Wei was showing that the Chinese Communist Party is "man enough" to murder its civilians to preserve its rule and never look back. As Mao said, "political power grows from the barrel of a gun". And the regime has a firm grip on the gun.

This Mao:

During his visit to China, Trudeau and other Quebec intellectuals were guests of Mao’s regime, dining in splendor and eagerly swallowing massive dollops of propaganda as they toured the country. In Two Innocents in Red China, a 1961 book Trudeau co-authored with Jacques Hebert, Communist China emerges as a global force for good. Under Communism, they wrote, the small-wage earner “is no longer just a speck of dust in the proletarian mass … The genius of Mao is to have persuaded hundreds of millions of people — by astonishingly effective methods — of the grandeur and nobility of their task.” Persuaded might not be the right word to described Mao’s methods.

Trudeau met Mao, and called him “one of the great men of the century.” Trudeau wrote of his “powerful head, an unlined face, and a look of wisdom tinged with melancholy. The eyes of that tranquil face are heavy with having seen too much of the misery of men.”

It was the face and eyes of a mass murderer. As Mao shook hands with Trudeau, millions of Chinese had already died across the country as part of a national “Superpower Programme” to industrialize and modernize China. The malevolence of the agricultural and production reforms, their cruelty and abusiveness, are documented in horrific detail by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday in their monumental book Mao: The Untold Story. The resulting 38 million deaths were what Chang and Halliday call “the greatest famine of the 20th century — and of all human recorded history.” Mao, they say, “knowingly starved and worked those tens of millions of people to death.”

Chang and Halliday singled out Trudeau’s “starry-eyed” book among other Westerners complicit in denying Mao’s atrocities. Instead of searching for the truth, Trudeau claimed to have seen the benefits of Mao’s policies. With Hebert, he wrote that “China’s methods are going to be imitated by the two-thirds of the human race that goes to bed hungry every night. And the moral indignation of the West will be powerless to stop it.”

Over the decades, Trudeau failed to acknowledge his massive lapse in judgment. In a 1997 article in Saturday Night magazine, editor Kenneth Whyte reviewed several of Trudeau’s works published during the 1990s. “Two Innocents in Red China may well be the worst book ever published in Canada,” wrote Whyte. “Certainly no significant Canadian public figure has ever been so dreadfully wrong about a major event as Trudeau was — and, perversely, continues to be — about Mao and the Great Leap.”

More than three decades later, Trudeau was still talking up the thrills Mao gave him. “There is no acknowledgement (in any of Trudeau writings) of Mao’s tyranny, or Trudeau’s error,” wrote Whyte.

Somewhat related:

Top Soviet officials were aware that the lack of a reference in the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty to the sovereignty of islands seized from Japan in the closing days of World War II could be exploited in postwar negotiations with Tokyo, declassified documents obtained by Kyodo News have shown.

Under the treaty signed by Japan and 48 other nations, Tokyo gave up territories it had seized, such as Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula and southern Sakhalin. The Soviet Union did not sign the treaty, which was implemented in 1952 to end the Allied postwar occupation of Japan.

The documents revealed Sunday refer to the Communist Party’s strategies for negotiations launched in June 1955 with Japan. They show that Moscow decided to demand Tokyo’s recognition of Soviet sovereignty over the seized islands, which are still at the heart of the current Japan-Russia talks toward a peace treaty, because the San Francisco treaty did not back Moscow’s territorial claim.

Deception and land-grabbing: hallmarks of a communist state.