'Tiananmen’s shadow still falls on China', Benedict Rogers

Thirty-seven years after massacre, Beijing continues to suppress its memory while extending its crackdown on dissent

It is said that you can judge a government by the way it treats its citizens. As we remember the day when, on June 4, 1989, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government turned its guns on its own unarmed people peacefully demonstrating for democracy in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and in cities across China, let us never forget that China’s dictatorship is a murderous, criminal regime that rules through fear and the barrel of the gun.

Indeed, let that iconic image of “Tank Man” — the brave, unknown, unarmed civilian who confronted the tank on Chang’an Avenue near Tiananmen Square — stay uppermost in our hearts and minds as we commemorate the Tiananmen massacre this week.

The exact death toll is disputed, but the Red Cross reports at least 2,600 people died on June 4, and British diplomatic cables claim as many as 10,000.

The important thing to remember — as Louisa Lim notes in her compelling book The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited — is that the CCP will do anything and everything to eradicate the memory of 1989, and so it is even more important that all of us who have the freedom to commemorate it, and to educate others about it, should do so.

History matters, and when we forget the tragedies of modern history — the Holocaust, Stalin’s gulags, South Africa’s apartheid, Pol Pot’s heinous genocide in Cambodia, China’s Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen massacre and other atrocities — our civilization is in trouble.

Yet as with all such atrocities, our commemoration should not only be about looking back. We should remember that, 37 years on from the Tiananmen massacre, it still has ramifications today. It is not simply a massacre in the history books. The bloodshed still speaks to us today.

The first reminder is from the mothers of the Tiananmen dead and wounded.

In a statement released last week by Human Rights in China, the mothers of the victims reminded the world that “this was a tragedy caused entirely by the government at that time, one that gravely violated China’s Constitution, violated the most basic principles of humanity, and trampled upon the civil rights of its citizens. Precisely because it was an act of state power, this human calamity remains, 37 years on, no closer to resolution. To this day, the government continues to evade responsibility, refuse redress, and suppress all public discussion of what took place.”

Moreover, the Tiananmen Mothers observe, “despite extraordinary advances in information technology, truthful accounts of the June Fourth Massacre remain inaccessible within China. People cannot discuss it openly or mourn it publicly. Even commemorations held by the victims’ families have long been subject to intense surveillance. This reality has left many young people unaware that in June 1989, in Beijing, soldiers opened fire on unarmed students and civilians. It is as if nothing ever happened.”

All of us with the freedom to do so — democratic governments, independent media, civil society and ordinary people across the free world — must take up the Tiananmen Mothers’ message and ensure that the massacre 37 years ago is never forgotten, and that their demands for justice and accountability are pursued.

The second reminder is from Hong Kong.

For three decades after June 4, 1989, there was only one part of China where it was legal to commemorate the Tiananmen massacre — and that was Hong Kong.

Every year, in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park, a candlelit vigil was held on June 4, attended by thousands. When I lived in Hong Kong during the first five years after the handover, from 1997-2002, I attended this vigil each year. Catholic churches across the city also held special vigil Masses.

Until 2020 — when a draconian National Security Law was imposed by Beijing on Hong Kong that silenced dissent. The Victoria Park vigils were deemed illegal that year, and two years later, the Catholic Church ceased even holding commemorative Masses. The People’s Republic of Amnesia had arrived in Hong Kong to erase the memory of 1989.

And yet many brave Hong Kongers persisted — and have ended up in jail for doing so.

Among them are pro-democracy entrepreneur Jimmy Lai, a devout 78-year-old Catholic who is now serving a 20-year sentence but has already served time in jail for the crime of lighting a candle to commemorate Tiananmen.

We must also remember the courageous Hong Kong barrister Chow Hang-tung, who has spent the past five years in jail and is currently on trial for commemorating the Tiananmen massacre, along with the remarkable trade unionist Lee Cheuk-yan. Today, even lighting a candle in Hong Kong on June 4 is unlawful.

The third stark reminder is the recent escape in a rubber boat from China of dissident Dong Guangping, aged 68, to South Korea.

It is not Dong’s first escape — he has previously fled to Thailand and Vietnam, and attempted to swim to Taiwan. And he has been returned to China, arrested and served multiple sentences in Chinese jails. His determination is a sign of his desperation to escape the CCP’s repression.

According to news reports, in 1999, Dong — a serving police officer at the time — signed a letter about the Tiananmen massacre, and was jailed for three years for “inciting subversion of state power.” He was jailed again in 2014 for participating in a commemoration of the Tiananmen massacre.

Dong’s is just one case, but it is one of the starkest and most recent. South Korea must now release him and allow him to travel to Canada to join his family, who have been waiting for him there for years.

Just five days before the Tiananmen massacre anniversary, I had the privilege of speaking on a panel at a screening of a new film about one of the CCP’s other egregious barbarities: forced organ harvesting.

The film, State Organs, is a compelling overview of the practice of forced organ harvesting — which the independent China Tribunal chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice KC, who prosecuted Slobodan Milosevic, declares a “crime against humanity.”

And when you take the evidence of the China Tribunal, together with the subsequent Uyghur Tribunal, as well as numerous reports on the human rights crisis in Tibet, the persecution of Christians, the repression of dissidents over the past three decades or more, and the dismantling of Hong Kong’s promised freedoms, you find a CCP state that lives up to the values it exhibited in Tiananmen Square in June 4, 1989: barbarity, inhumanity, criminality, murder, torture, and — in some specific instances — crimes against humanity and genocide. That criminal regime is still in power in Beijing today. And it should be held to account.

This article was published in UCA News on 4 June 2026.

Photo: laihiu / LAI Ryanne, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons