'Tiananmen massacre should never be forgotten', Benedict Rogers

We can learn from history, and at the very least ensure it is remembered and not repeated

In the center of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, facing the Forbidden City, there is a metaphorical plaque placed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime that says: “On this spot, on June 4, 1989, nothing happened.”

Of course, there is not really an actual plaque, but that is the message the CCP wants the people of China and the world to believe.

That is why, 35 years on from the Tiananmen Square massacre, it is so vital that the world does not forget. Instead, those of us who have the freedom to do so should commemorate this anniversary as loudly and visibly as possible.

Estimates of the death toll vary, from several hundred to several thousand, but a secret cable from the British ambassador to China at the time put it as high as 10,000.

Who were the people and why were they killed? They were young students, peacefully demonstrating because they wanted democracy and freedom in China. They were killed mercilessly by the regime’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) — which neither represents the people nor liberates them, but instead turned its guns on its own people.

I first went to China in 1992, three years after the Tiananmen Square massacre. I was 18 and taught English in Qingdao for six months. I made many friends among my Chinese students, who were only a few years younger than the Tiananmen generation. China’s struggle for freedom has been seared in my heart ever since.

For 25 years, I traveled regularly throughout China. I have probably visited the country 50 or 60 times. On my many visits to Beijing, one of my favorite things to do was to go for dinner in a beautiful restaurant in an old Chinese courtyard house on the edges of the Forbidden City.

After dinner, often around midnight, I would walk in the moonlight along the walls of the Forbidden City, with the waters of the moat lapping on the other side, soaking in the ancient history. I would then walk through the final ramparts of this ancient fortress, past PLA soldiers on sentry duty, and out under the ‘Gate of Heavenly Peace’ — Tiananmen — under the portrait of Mao Zedong, into a floodlit, empty and eerily silent square.

As I did so, I could feel the spirits of those who had gone before me. As I shielded my eyes from the floodlights, in my mind I could almost hear the echoes of the gunfire and feel in my own spirit the voices of those who had died in 1989 crying out: “Stand up, speak out, never forget.”

Within China, the CCP has very successfully ensured that people do forget — or at least, do not talk about it. Louisa Lim describes this very well in her excellent book titled, appropriately, The People’s Republic of Amnesia.

And in Hong Kong now, the days when people could commemorate June 4 have gone.

Until 2020, when Beijing imposed a draconian National Security Law, resulting in the dismantling of Hong Kong’s freedoms, Hong Kong was the only city under China’s sovereignty that could still openly mark the anniversary.

Each year for 30 years — from 1990 until 2020 — thousands of Hong Kongers and others would gather in Victoria Park on June 4 for a candlelit vigil. When I lived in Hong Kong from 1997-2002, I joined this vigil each year.

On the tenth anniversary, in 1999, I recall being in Victoria Park to see Wang Dan, one of the student leaders and number one on the CCP’s most-wanted list, on a giant screen addressing the crowd. In exile in the United States, he was then connected by telephone with his mother in Beijing, and their emotional conversation was relayed to us all.

When I worked as a journalist in Hong Kong during those first five years after the handover, the city still enjoyed a high degree of freedom and autonomy. I wrote editorials about the Tiananmen massacre. In one of them, I wrote: “To fail to remember the June 4 massacre would be to abdicate ourselves from any vestiges of morality. It would also be against our self-interest. The moment we forget the sacrifice of the students made in Beijing; we lose our will to defend the freedoms we have.”

Tiananmen, I argued, “should never be forgotten” — to drop Tiananmen from our memories would be to “drop our conscience.”

Those words apply today more than ever.

Today, some of Hong Kong’s most prominent political prisoners are in jail partly for their efforts to commemorate the Tiananmen massacre. Barrister Chow Hang-Tung has spent 1,000 days in prison already and is serving multiple sentences including one for helping to organize the Tiananmen massacre memorial vigil.

And media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai, currently on trial under the National Security Law, has already spent almost three-and-a-half years — 1250 days — in prison on multiple unjust charges, including a 13-month sentence for lighting a candle and saying a prayer at a Tiananmen vigil.

Let’s remember also that the reason he founded the pro-democracy Next magazine in 1990 and the Apple Daily newspaper in 1995 was because he was so moved and shocked by the Beijing massacre.

We owe it to people like Chow Hang-Tung and Jimmy Lai to continue to commemorate this anniversary when they and others in Hong Kong can no longer do so.

For all the CCP’s efforts to make us forget, outside China, they cannot succeed if we do not let them. As Canadian journalist Jan Wong told me when I interviewed her for my book The China Nexus, “we have the books and the documentaries, and the people who were alive at the time. You can’t erase that.”

Wong was in the square on June 4. She saw the soldiers shooting and the tanks rolling in. She narrowly missed a bullet herself. She also witnessed first-hand the most iconic moment of the night — the individual, known today simply as “Tank Man,” who stood in front of a tank to try to stop it. From her balcony in the Beijing Hotel, she had seen tanks running people over, and then her husband pointed out 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. It was amazing and I was crying,” Wong recalled.

Last week in London I had the privilege of speaking at the opening ceremony of exhibits commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre, curated by former student leader Zhou Fengsuo, who was fifth on the CCP’s most-wanted list.

I spoke in a question-and-answer session after a performance of the powerful play, May 35, which depicts the struggles of an elderly couple whose son was killed in the massacre. I also took part in a panel discussion hosted by Lord Alton, together with Zhou Fengsuo, Chinese author Ma Jian, and others, in the British Parliament last month.

Around the world today and in recent days protests have been organised to mark this anniversary. Such activities are vital, to ensure not only that we keep alive the memory of those who sacrificed so much 35 years ago for the cause of freedom, but also to keep a spotlight on the continuing brutal repression in China today.

The failure of the international community to accompany words of condemnation with robust action in 1989 helped create a climate of impunity in which the CCP was emboldened to continue its repressive behavior.

Would the genocide of the Uyghurs, the intensification of atrocities in Tibet, the dismantling of Hong Kong’s freedoms and the crackdown on dissidents, civil society, and religion across mainland China, as well as the increasingly alarming threats to Taiwan, have happened if the CCP had been made to pay a price for its massacre of students in 1989?

We can learn from history, and at the very least ensure it is remembered and not repeated.

On the 30th anniversary, US Congressman Chris Smith said five years ago: “In between the tank and the Tank Man, you have to choose one side. There is no middle way; there is no in-between.”

He is right. That’s why today — and every day — I stand with the Tank Man. Will you?

This article was published in UCA News on 4 June 2024.