May 2009

With anniversaries being important to communist states, 2009 engendered mixed feelings for Beijing. The sixtieth anniversary of the creation of the People’s Republic of China, demanded huge synchronised displays of state deification, flag waving and panegyrics singing the praises of the China’s rise and naturally for the Communist Party. This was also the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in which PLA soldiers opened fire on their compatriots, killing an unspecified number. With China still basking in the esteem gained from its space flights and successful hosting of the Olympics, the last things she wanted were groups of party-poopers waving placards about human rights, rough treatment of dissidents, and lack of transparency about the corruption and shoddy building practices leading to the collapse of thousands of schools in the Szechuan earthquake, along with obstruction of petitioners seeking justice.
  The crackdown permanently changed Hong Kong people’s outlook of China. Before 1989 there was a widespread feeling, almost amounting to indifference, about the prospect of returning to Chinese rule. People shrugged, nodded at the Basic Law and assumed there would be little difference between the new regime and colonial rule. The massacre changed all that. It further highlighted a dichotomy between two polarised perceptions of patriotism; Chinese loyalists in Hong Kong said that true patriots would insist on vindication for the Tiananmen demonstrators and an apology from China. Pro-Beijing partisans persisted that suppression of the democracy movement had been necessary for China’s stability, and to prevent the country from slipping into chaos, therefore advancing the present economic growth.
  Pro-communist parties often cite China’s inexorable economic development since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms as justification for the crackdown, but an eminent enough personality saying so at the wrong time is a frequent pitfall for the unwary. Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Donald Tsang Kam-yuen blundered into the very same this year when he totally misjudged the Zeitgeist, thinking that now everyone was benefiting from the burgeoning economy and that twenty years was long enough for people to have become forgetful of the past, and had consigned the butchery to yellowed pages of history and therefore to become innocuous and inert.
  How wrong he was. He blandly sidestepped a request by Ms Ng of Civic Party to vindicate the students killed in the crackdown and Tsang and stressed China’s ‘tremendous results’ and ‘economic prosperity [it had brought] to Hong Kong. I believe Hong Kong people will make an objective assessment of the nation’s development.’
  Ms Ng retorted hotly with ‘Are you saying that as long as the economy is developing well we cannot admit people were killed? Should we bury our conscience to share economic benefits?’
  ‘My view represents the opinion of Hong Kong people in general, and the opinion of citizens has affected my view. What I have just said is how I feel about the views of the people of Hong Kong.’
  If there’s one thing Hong Kong people hate, it’s being told what or how they should think. The resulting furor made it necessary for the CE to back down and apologise, and probably fuelled a significantly increased number people attending events commemorating the crackdown.
  With the heightened emotions on this anniversary year and the spirited response expected from those pushing for exonerations and apologies, it was natural to expect Beijing supporters to trumpet the party line in the letters columns and in articles. However this response is often contradictory and confused. Lau Nai-keung, Beijing’s glove puppet in Hong Kong, frequently and stalwartly defends the party line, showing a befuddlement that is symptomatic of him having to reconcile communist doublethink. In May this year he said ‘All objective evidence suggests that students dispersed peacefully from the square that night. Nowadays, many Hong Kong people still believe tanks crushed students in the square to death … if the army really did this, it would be a true massacre and would not be forgivable. But it is not what happened that night’ This is a manipulation of the facts as he knows full well that most of the shootings happened in the streets around the square, and not in the square itself. Anyway these comments were not in any article about the crackdown, which he chose not to submit this year.
  The other tack he takes is similar to Donald Tsang’s blunder, is to defend the crackdown by setting social stability in higher store. He said that the use of force was inevitable because the situation in Beijing and many other cities was ‘out of control.’ This is sheer fabrication because at no time were there any disturbances at other cities.
  This quote was not in an article anyway; it was levered out of him when cornered by journalists.
  What he has consistently failed to answer is how exactly a crowd of partly exhausted students gathered in a square could pose a threat to one of the largest countries in the world, and in what way could they have contributed to social instability. The party’s vice-like grip on the media meant that few common people in China even knew about the movement.
  Undoubtedly if anti-Iraq war protesters assembled in front of the White House they’d soon be moved on; however there are many way of doing so without endangering lives. The Chinese could have easily cleared Tiananmen Square with non-lethal means such as riot police with fire hoses, tear gas, batons and sheer numbers, without any recourse of firing live rounds on unarmed teenagers. The Beijing loyalists lack a rational and defensible premise from which they can uphold their positions, because they equivocate misleadingly between denial of the events and then egregiously claiming that it was justified. The violent response to a harmless display of opinions betrays the fact that we witnessed the actions of a weak and ineffectual government which can bear no dissent, and only those with a deep sense of insecurity would endorse and approve it.
  If the supporters of the crackdown had the courage of their convictions they would write vigorous defences of the massacre at specifically sensitive times like these; yet this year they significantly failed to do so. Theirs and their country’s essential cowardice about facing up to their responsibilities for their actions was painfully manifest in the absence of prominent articles supporting the crackdown in this anniversary year.

Slide show of more shots of the May 2009 march commemorating the Tiananmen victims