Pro-democracy demonstrators occupy Beijing’s Tiananmen Square just days before the June 4, 1989 crackdown. (AP Photo/Jeff Widener)
26 Years After Tiananmen, Things Are Worse in China
Chen Guangcheng – The Washington Post
Twenty-six years ago Thursday in China, the protests by students and other ordinary citizens calling for democracy, liberty and an end to corruption were crushed by the Chinese Communist Party …
A quarter-century later, fantastical tales of China’s economic might and rapid development dazzle the world. But these stories obscure a cruder reality: Connection, corruption and fraud have funneled most of the nation’s wealth into the hands of the elite … the rule of law has deteriorated and human rights have been trampled under an iron heel …
Global attention is critical if there is ever to be change. I call on the people of the free world to stand with the Chinese people. I implore the international media to focus more on everyday people instead of those in power. I know from experience that in China such media attention can be like lightning splitting the darkness.
People attend a candlelight vigil in Hong Kong on June 4, 2015 to mark the 1989 crackdown on student-led protests in Tiananmen Square. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)
China’s ‘Slow-motion Revolution’ Has Stalled
Timothy Cheek and Jeffrey Wasserstrom – Los Angeles Times
Whatever happened to the Chinese revolution?
Not the dynasty-toppling 1911 revolution. Not the Communist-led 1949 uprising. Not the 1989 struggle …
No, the revolution we have in mind is a very recent one, which the journalist Ian Johnson, in his 2005 book “Wild Grass,” memorably called a “slow-motion revolution.” … China’s rise continues. But that slow-motion revolution has been stopped in its tracks.
Writing in 2009 to mark the June 4 anniversary, Lijia Zhang, who marched in 1989, described the situation well. Twenty years before, she said, people like her had felt trapped “in a cage” and longed to be free. Since 1989, the bars of the cage had moved farther away. They knew that the cage still existed, but it was easier to imagine that it didn’t.
Today, however, the bars are closing in again.
Chinese police officers try to block a journalist from filming the court house in Beijing, China, June 20, 2012. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)
China Is Exporting its Censorship, and We Are All Victims
Louisa Lim – Foreign Policy
China’s code of silence is reaching beyond its borders …
Corporations solicitous of China’s growing economic clout also help export its censorship. In June 2014, the social networking service LinkedIn began blocking Tiananmen-related articles posted inside China or by members hosted by its Chinese site … Through its acquiescence, this company headquartered in California is acting as Beijing’s censor …
In May 2013, I conducted a crude survey to gauge how much today’s students know about June 4. I showed 100 students from four different Beijing universities the iconic photo of “Tank Man,” the skinny young man facing down a column of tanks on the Avenue of Everlasting Peace. 85 percent of them could not identify the picture …
This year has been quiet, too quiet. While the 26th anniversary is not a symbolic one, the absence of noise is ominous. One reason, Sharon Hom from Human Rights in China posits, is a loss of hope.