Today is the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing: an event of unconscionable tyranny and cruelty in which hundreds of student protestors were murdered with assault rifles and tanks by order of the CCP.
The event is still not permitted as a topic for discussion in China. Speech about the massacre is censored on the Internet. Books and school curricula contain no references to it. Young people growing up in China often do not even know that this tragedy occurred. They’re not allowed to know.
A bunch of kids were slaughtered for asking the government for rights such as the right to free speech, and now, thirty-two years later, their deaths are commemorated by sending people to re-education camps for daring to speak about the massacre.
However, breaking with its time-honored tradition of never, ever mentioning the 1989 event, a CCP-written op-ed appeared in Western media today, claiming vindication for China’s actions in “aborting” the rebellion.
After all, look at China’s rampant economic success! Look at her unshakeable political unity! Look at her happy, prosperous people! Don’t look at that pile of corpses over there, though. Ignore the Uyghur concentration camps. Don’t worry about the whereabouts of Jack Ma. Pay no mind to the tyrants behind the curtain.
Ironically, no such statement appeared in Chinese media. It would be awkward for the Chinese government to boast victory in its own media over those poor Tiananmen Square kids, when half the country doesn’t even know about them in the first place.
No, the op-ed was crafted specifically for Western eyes and ears. The message, and it’s one that’s become common in recent years, is this: Where China goes, the West must follow, and if it doesn’t, well it’s only a matter of time before China owns your country’s infrastructure, so…
Look. I’m not saying China is the be all and end all of state tyranny. Far from it. We in the U.S. have our own homegrown dystopia to unravel. And with the recent swings toward totalitarianism via pandemic policy, the whole world has quite enough tyranny to be getting on with.
But Chinese dystopia is not to be ignored in the West, because there are plenty of Western elite who would love to implement Chinese-style authoritarianism back home, and who, by framing authoritarian tenets in terminology that appeals to the Western progressive mindset, are gradually succeeding at doing so. Step by step.
Meanwhile, with the power transfer to China still underway, an annual remembrance ceremony in Hong Kong was banned (purportedly to prevent Covid spread). However, hundreds of people gathered in defiance of the orders. As we must.
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