波士頓環球報社論 Boston Globe Editorial

GLOBE EDITORIAL

Burying history in Beijing

June 3, 2009

FEARING tomorrow's 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre, Chinese Communist Party censors have warned the media not to report anything about those mass protests or the killings that followed. Much has changed in China since the world first watched a lone man in Beijing facing down a tank of the People's Liberation Army. What has not changed is the party's monopoly on power - or its fear of the popular will.

So fierce has been the government's effort to suppress remembrance of the millions who voiced their grievances all over China in 1989 that many young people have only a foggy idea of what happened then. The official version taught in school and parroted in the press is that "counter-revolutionary riots" were put down with great restraint by patriotic soldiers.

The reality is that the original spirit of Tiananmen was not confined to small groups of conspirators, but diffused among diverse sectors of the population, including even some top figures in the Communist Party. The outpouring of discontent in that spring of 1989 was directed mostly at the blatant corruption of party officials, rampant inflation, and a lack of personal liberty. And when party leaders ordered the soldiers to open fire on protesters fleeing Tiananmen Square, most of those killed were workers and local residents, not the university students who appeared to the global village as the protagonists of a televised tragedy.

The party's continuing campaign to cover up the truth of Tiananmen can be glimpsed in indirect ways. The most obvious is its adamant refusal to reconsider and revise its official verdict on the events of that time. Another is the sad fact that scores, or perhaps hundreds, of citizens are still in prison because of their activities in 1989. Then there is the shame of the Internet giant Google capitulating to the government's request that it cleanse its Chinese website of references to the Tiananmen bloodbath.

Perhaps most revealing is the recent publication of the taped memoirs of Zhao Ziyang, who had been general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in the spring of 1989. Zhao had argued for restraint and reform at the time. But though he was the titular leader of the party, he was overruled by party elder Deng Xiaoping and a coterie of hard-liners. For being on the losing side of that argument, he was stripped of power and confined to a strict house arrest until his death four years ago.

China is much richer today than it was in 1989. But the major grievances of the Chinese masses back then - against corruption and the party's arbitrary exercise of absolute power - are still to be addressed. That is why the communist leadership in Beijing still fears the spirit of Tiananmen.