Why are we trading with such people?:
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio marked the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on Wednesday, saying Chinese censorship cannot erase the memory of the protesters killed when troops moved against demonstrators in Beijing on June 4, 1989.
While China continues to censor discussion of Tiananmen Square and suppress public commemorations, the anniversary remains a focal point for criticism of the country's human rights record and a recurring source of tension between Washington and Beijing.
Tens of thousands of students, workers and other demonstrators gathered in and around Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989, calling for political reform, greater freedoms and action against corruption.
On June 4, 1989, the People's Liberation Army rolled into Tiananmen Square where, opening fire on crowds and running over those who seeking to block their advance.
Up to 1,000 civilians were killed, according to estimates by human rights groups and Western outlets based on hospital records, eyewitness accounts, diplomatic cables, and counts of known victims and missing persons. The Chinese government gives a much-lower figure of 200 to 300.
But not everyone has decidedly forgotten:
One aspect particular at risk is a detail less commonly associated with the massacre: the hope that blossomed in the days leading up to the killing of hundreds, possibly thousands, of unarmed protesters by the Chinese army as they demanded democratic reforms.
One collection encapsulating that sense is a set of photographs taken by Austrian sinologist Helmut Opletal who was posted to Beijing as a journalist in May 1989. His photographs show crowds of protesters holding up banners calling for freedom and democracy, many with smiles on their faces and thrusting peace signs into the air.
“One of the things that gets forgotten was that at the early phase of [the protests], there was this incredible kind of joyousness and sense of possibility,” says Wasserstrom.
But in recent years, censorship controls inside China have grown tighter, with state-sponsored amnesia intensifying under the rule of leader Xi Jinping, sparking renewed efforts abroad to document what happened on that night, when Beijing’s streets flowed with blood.
(Sidebar: censorship? Why does this sound familiar?)
The cover of An Eyewitness Account of 1989 by a PLA Soldier, written by Cai Zheng, who was serving in the air force in Beijing at the time. On June 5th, near Tiananmen Square, he was arrested and severely beaten by martial law troops after he protested against the massacre.
The Opletal photographs are among the hundreds of items hosted by China Unofficial Archives (CUA), a grassroots project launched in 2023 as a US-registered non-profit that aims to protect “censored and suppressed Chinese history”.
Sharon, one of CUA’s Chinese editors, who uses a pseudonym to protect her identity because of threats from the Chinese government, says that “history cannot only be written by officials”.
“If you don’t have real information, it’s difficult for you to have independent thought,” she says.
The Tiananmen Square massacre remains one of the most sensitive topics in China. Virtually all mention of it scrubbed from physical and digital spaces within China’s borders. Those who participated in the protests or have tried to memorialise it have been harassed or imprisoned, sometimes for years at a time.
Just last week, a Chinese activist called Dong Guangping, who has previously attempted to commemorate the event, risked his life to sail more than 300km to South Korea in an attempt to flee China, where he has been imprisoned several times. He remains in custody in South Korea.
CUA hosts a range of material about the Tiananmen Square protests, from the diary of a soldier who protested against the massacre to a subversive documentary made by state-employed filmmakers.
“We don’t advocate,” says Ian Johnson, the founder of CUA. “We’re just trying to provide a resource in a neutral way.”
CUA is supported by grant funding and donations from readers. The website is blocked in China and can be visited only with the use VPN, a type of software that allows users to mask their IP address and jump over the censorship firewall. That makes it hard to track how many readers come from inside China, but Johnson says that around 80% of visitors navigate to the Chinese-language version of the website.
Any material that counters the Chinese Communist party’s (CCP) official historical narrative is likely to be a target for transnational repression. CUA’s website has received several hacking attempts and its Chinese staff have been harassed.
(Sidebar: Chinese staff being harassed, huh?)
Surely by now, the Chinese communist government sees that it can do business with the West without censoring this bloodbath.
The collective conscience, too, has been erased.
