With pro-democracy protests still taking place in Hong Kong against the Chinese government, I decided to start reading about the Tiananmen Square Massacre that took place in 1989.
An article in The New York Times from 1989 reports tens of thousands of Chinese troops armed with machine guns shot at pro-democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square.
“Reports on the number of dead were sketchy,” according to the Times. Students said about 500 people were killed. Not all of the hospitals reported how many casualties there were, but three said they’d received 68 corpses in total.
People in fear of the government, and rightfully so, must have been terrified to testify the real extent as to what happened.
It seems crazy to me—as I’m sure it does for other people in the U.S.—to think the current protesters in Hong Kong can’t even read about Tiananmen Square as we can. Some of them might not even know the extent of how horrific the massacre was.
“You can’t go on websites and commemorate Tiananmen Square in China,” said William Boettcher III, associate professor of public and international affairs. “They’ve really tried to wipe it from the collective memory and say, ‘We’re not going to talk about this.’”
I can’t imagine if that happened in the U.S., and the government wouldn’t allow any news sources to cover what happened or allow me to write about it.
According to Boettcher, it took a while to find out what really happened because China shut down U.S. media that had been reporting live.
We’re lucky we don’t have limitations on the news we have access to. The Chinese government has taken measures such as blocking Instagram, according to CNN, so protesters can’t share images of what they’re seeing.
Despite these challenges in getting out their message to other Chinese citizens, the protests have received international attention.
I don’t think the protestors should give up. There have been smaller victories in Hong Kong for people who have protested there before.
In a vox.com article, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a history professor at the at University of California Irvine, noted protests in Hong Kong that have prevailed.
According to Wasserstrom, Hong Kong residents protested “a Patriot Act-style set of security measures on Hong Kong.” In another case they rallied against a more “patriotic education” that was being considered for Hong Kong and would have resulted in a limited and censored curriculum.
After public outrage, neither of the measures was implemented. Even though the current pro-democracy protesters are facing a much larger challenge, I think it’s important they continue to try to enact change.
It is worrisome reading about what happened at Tiananmen Square and thinking about how the government could handle this protest. I really hope the protests don’t escalate to the point that places people involved in danger.
But if they do, I’d hope the U.S. would step in.
After Tiananmen Square, Boettcher said President George H.W. Bush’s administration publicly decried what the Chinese had done, but quickly the National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft took a trip to China where he assured them economic relations between us would stay the same.
I’d hope if the protests escalated into violence on the government’s part, that President Barack Obama and the U.S. as a whole would step in.
The Times reported that Obama is set to visit China in November. If the protests are still waging, it could put human rights on his agenda.
Boettcher said it’s hard to say whether or not the protests will still be occurring when Obama visits China.
Business owners in the area have been complaining that even though some support the movement, the protesters need to move on so they can go on with their business, according to Boettcher.
“The difficulty for protest movements is: You want to disrupt daily life and engage in civil disobedience, but that can produce negative reactions,” Boettcher said.
It will be interesting to see if the protests are still going on when President Obama goes to China. If it is still happening by then, I’d want for him to encourage Chinese leaders to handle this civilly and not like they stifled the Tiananmen Square protest.
If anything to the extent of the Tiananmen Square protest were to happen again, I wouldn’t want Obama to only criticize the Chinese government. I’d want the U.S. to step in and show that it will not be tolerated.