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Pick A Number Between 200 And 3,000: China’s Big Con

The Chronicle Review:

On June 4, 1989, the Chinese military, under orders from the highest levels of government, violently crushed peaceful civilian demonstrations in Beijing, most symbolically in and around Tiananmen Square. In the end, the Chinese government claimed that the death toll was approximately 200, but the Chinese Red Cross reported 2,000 to 3,000 deaths. The true number of casualties remains unknown.

The days that followed June 4 rang with cries of shocked outrage from around the world, but two decades later those calls for justice and change are but a whisper, thanks in large part to China’s dominant global influence. This fact was most succinctly expressed during Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s visit to China in February, when she said that human rights cannot interfere with economic and security concerns…

In response to my commemoration invitation, I also received an e-mail message from a professor who had worked with three Chinese students: One student was a doctor whose Beijing emergency room received a long, steady string of gunshot victims the night the massacre began; the other two, once employed by China’s Ministry of Finance, assured the professor that the whole incident had been blown out of proportion, and that any video of violence was produced in and by the United States for propaganda purposes.

This is why Tiananmen Square is still important: Because what really happened remains unreconciled.

Despite efforts by academics, activists, writers, and filmmakers to properly document those fateful days in 1989, the impact of Tiananmen has been diminished by the Chinese government’s control of what is said about the massacre. It is widely known that inside China many young people know very little, if anything, about “the June Fourth Incident,” as it is known, and those who dare to speak about it are swiftly silenced. As a result, the fading concern over Tiananmen, in China and around the world, has devolved into indifference in the face of economic and other priorities.

With the awesome ceremonial displays of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, it became obvious to me that China’s government had won the public-relations battle it had been waging for the past 20 years. The world’s vision had been reset on a new face of China: past and present Olympic champions; a pretty little girl who floated with majestic grace as she sang above the crowd; and a little boy who had dug classmates from the rubble of the Sichuan earthquake, holding hands with Yao Ming, China’s most famous athlete, the two of them striding proudly together while waving Chinese flags.

A show of artistic beauty and collective strength no doubt, but we must recognize that this new face is an illusion meant to replace the image of one man standing down a line of tanks..

Over the last two decades, if China’s government had at least recognized that a massacre had taken place and taken responsibility for it, then China — both its government and its people — could have begun to heal the open wound that is Tiananmen and move toward a more politically open society respectful of civil and human rights, which was part of the goal of the 1989 Democracy Movement. Instead, we have witnessed the steadfast renouncement of culpability amid blatant attempts to rewrite history. China’s recently announced human-rights action plan is at best the most transparent kind of political chicanery, and even then it is 20 years too late.

In the end, we may never know the truth: who officially gave the order for the crackdown, or how many died, or what it’s like for those who lost loved ones and who cannot publicly grieve without risking persecution, or the identity of that young man who stood down the tanks…

Read it all.

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