The Spectator: 'What the Tiananmen Square massacre teaches us about Xi’s China', Benedict Rogers

As millions of Brits celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, others will be gathering outside the Chinese Embassy in London to mark a different event: the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Beijing has done its best to wipe this day from the history books, but it’s vital we don’t forget an event that has foreshadowed the direction the Chinese Communist Party has taken in the years since.

33 years ago on the streets of China’s capital, we saw the true nature of the Chinese regime as it turned its guns and tanks on thousands of peaceful protesters.

‘They were shooting, people were running, and people tried to rescue others,’ said Jan Wong, a veteran Canadian journalist who was in Tiananmen Square on the day of the massacre. ‘They brought out bodies on bicycle seats and pedicabs. They just ran into gunfire’.

Wong saw the infamous ‘Tank Man’ scene – when a single protester faced down the Chinese army – unfold in front of her: ‘The army had been running people over, and I had watched the tanks. Then my husband pointed to this man standing in front of a tank…I saw this whole dance between ‘Tank Man’ and the tank. He tried to stop the tank like a soccer goalie. Then he climbed onto the tank, tried to talk, then climbed down again, then he melted into the crowd’.

If Tiananmen taught us anything, it’s that authoritarian leaders can never be trusted. In a year in which China’s President Xi looks set to extend his reign once more, it’s a lesson worth remembering.

Throughout the early 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, China appeared to be opening up. Despite the bloodshed in 1989, the subsequent two decades heralded an era of relative liberalisation. Of course the Chinese Communist Party remained repressive; dissidents continued to be locked up during this period. But Beijing allowed some space for independent media and bloggers to operate.

Some years ago, I met some Chinese human rights lawyers in a restaurant in Beijing and heard of their work defending religious freedom, labour rights and land rights. They knew where the red lines were; they knew they were under surveillance, but within certain limits they could work freely.

Over the past decade those freedoms have evaporated. Around the time of the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the Chinese Communist Party began to feel threatened, and started to crack down. That fear grew in light of the world’s ‘colour’ revolutions and the Arab Spring, so that when Xi Jinping was chosen as China’s new leader in 2012 the regime was poised to severely step up its repression.

What we have seen since has amounted to a series of subtle, slow-motion repeats of the 4 June massacre: genocide of the Uyghurs, the dismantling of freedoms in Hong Kong, the worst persecution of Christians since the Cultural Revolution, forced organ harvesting, increased atrocities in Tibet and growing sabre-rattling against Taiwan. Even those outside China’s borders aren’t safe: Beijing has adopted an aggressive attitude towards those who dare criticise it, wherever they might be in the world.

We should have learned 33 years ago that a regime that turns its guns and tanks on its own people is at its very heart a brutal, inhumane and rotten tyranny that is an enemy of human liberty. For many years and with grave naivety we thought China could change.

The past decade of Xi Jinping’s rule has provided us with a stark reminder that the regime that starved tens of millions during the Great Leap Forward, killed millions in the Cultural Revolution and murdered at least 10,000 in 1989 is the same regime that has incarcerated at least a million Uyghurs and persecutes and represses million of other people across China.

Today in China, very few under the age of 30 have any memory of the tragic events of 1989, and the regime, through its sophisticated censorship and propaganda, has done its best to ensure that will remain the case.

Even in Hong Kong, which only a few years ago enjoyed relative freedom, the regime seeks to erase memories too. Until two years ago, Hong Kong was the only place in China where June 4 could be commemorated. Now all vigils, church services and other memorials are banned and statues have been torn down. That makes our commemorations in Britain of the dreadful events of June 4 1989 all the more vital.

This article was published in The Spectator on 4 June 2022.