#Tiananmen32: A reflection and a call to action

In memory of those who stood up for their rights, lost their lives and for those still unjustly imprisoned today in China.

Students peacefully demonstrating in Beijing in 1989

Thirty two years ago tonight it began.

The Pro-Democracy Movement that had taken to the streets in April of 1989 was violently crushed by the Chinese communist dictatorship beginning on the evening of June 3, 1989. By dawn on June 4, 1989 scores of demonstrators had been shot and killed or run over and crushed by tanks of the so-called People's Liberation Army.

Thousands more would be rounded up, arrested and sentenced to prison in show trials. As many as a thousand received death sentences that were carried out.

The response of the West and the United States at the forefront?  Pro forma protests to satisfy the outrage of their citizens while secretly meeting with the men who had ordered the mass killing to let them know that what was important was their economic relationship.

Bodies at Shuili hospital mortuary. All died from bullet wounds. Credit Jian Li

 The failure of the Western Democracies to side with China’s democratic forces due to narrow economic interests to trade and subsidize a murderous communist dictatorship that murdered more than 45 million of its own people has cost much both materially and spiritually.

The behavior of Western tech firms in China, who collaborated with the secret police in identifying dissidents who were rounded up, jailed, tortured and in some cases killed and censoring information on the internet to erase the crimes of Tiananmen, the Cultural Revolution, and the mass famines of the Mao era laid the groundwork for silencing and censoring courageous Chinese scientists, and journalists who tried to warn the world of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is shocking to think that the 3.7 million dead worldwide in the COVID-19 pandemic is not even 10% of the number killed in the People's Republic of China by the Communists. Estimates range in the 45 million range.

Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 prior to the crackdown

In 1989 the struggle for freedom was occurring in Beijing, today it is happening in Hong Kong, with communist repression being visited on Hong Kong residents, Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, and the Tibetan people who live under a communist occupation of their homeland Tibet.  Now we witness American actors and athletes kowtowing to Beijing and apologizing for correctly referring to Taiwan as a country.

We must not remain passive before this avalanche of injustice and genocide.

Elie Wiesel at his Nobel Lecture in 1986 observed: "There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest." Bearing witness and taking action continues to be necessary to avoid forgetting. Wiesel in the same lecture explained the consequences of not remembering: "To forget the victims means to kill them a second time. So I couldn't prevent the first death. I surely must be capable of saving them from a second death."

We owe it both to the dead and the living to remember, and continue to seek justice. The last year of death and disease should be a wake up call for the high price of being complicit with Communist China.  

Tonight in a candlelight vigil in Washington, DC listened to the wise counsel of Chinese dissidents Yang Jianli, Sean Lin, and Chen Guangcheng. May the world listen to them, and repent.