30 years of Tiananmen massacre: the great act of "forgetfulness" of China

There is no official commemoration of events at

Pekin

in 1989. But this statement, although objectively correct, is too neutral.

In reality,
Every year we remember what happened on Tiananmen Square during a major national event that could well be defined as an act of "forgetfulness".

In the weeks leading up to June 4, the world's largest censorship machine is commissioned and activates its huge network of automated algorithms and tens of thousands of human-powered redators that clean up any Internet reference, even if it is not direct.

For the outside world, this iconic image, juxtaposing authoritarian repression and insatiable spirit of challenge, defines what happened on Tiananmen Square.

Those who are considered too provocative in their attempts to escape controls can be imprisoned, with up to three and a half years in prison, as was the case recently for a group of men who tried to commemorate this birthday with the label of a brand of Chinese liquor.

Just sharing images on Twitter – a platform inaccessible to most Internet users in China – can make you stop.

Watch the graveyard

A few months ago, during the national festival of the cleaning of the graves

China

-the day people visit the graves of their loved ones- the BBC held a meeting with an old woman whose son, Wang Nan, was shot in the head of Tiananmen Square shortly after breakthrough of the troops. the city.

As every year, 81-year-old Zhang Xianling was planning to bring flowers to the small, quiet cemetery located near the Beijing summer palace, where the ashes of her 19-year-old son Wang Nan are buried. . But we found the cemetery full of security guards guarding the family's tombstone.

We were interviewed by uniformed police officers who reviewed our pbadports and press references and entered our data.

And a police escort accompanied Zhang from the cemetery to keep her away from the reporters.

The BBC file contains a long list of events in which Wang Nan's death played only a minor role. The video shows the advancing soldiers, pointing their weapons at the crowd in front of the burning vehicles.

It captures the panic of protesters struggling to carry on foot or bike bloody bodies, wounded by bullets, to the hospital.

"They begged him to stop shooting"

In broad daylight on June 4, 1989, sporadic gunfire continued in the city, and a visibly affected British tourist, Margaret Holt, was unknowingly caught in one of the most decisive moments of the last century.

"One soldier was blindly shooting at the crowd and three young students knelt in front of him and begged him to stop firing," he said. "And he killed them."

"An older man raised his hand because he wanted to cross the road and he shot him," he continues. "The magazine of his weapon was empty, so he tried to refill his weapon, and the crowd came and suspended it on a tree," he said. The full description only takes 24 seconds.

But this same brevity underscores the brutality of the force used to eliminate a peaceful protest, and the agitation of the crowd that suffered it.

It also shows why, even today, the authorities are trying so hard to bury any discussion about what happened.

A wind of change

The protests that shook Beijing and dozens of other cities in the spring and summer of 1989 were triggered by a quite ordinary event: the death in April of a marginalized Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang, defender of economic and political liberalism.

Student-led public mourning has rapidly evolved into large-scale street protests calling for re-establishing their reputation and honoring their legacy of reforms in favor of freedom of the press, freedom of badembly, and official corruption. .

In Beijing, close to a million people gathered in Tiananmen Square, in the heart of the political capital, with a carnival of flags, banners and tents.

While the winds of change were already blowing across Eastern Europe, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had arrived in Beijing in mid-May to attend the first Sino-Soviet summit in 30 years.

For the Chinese leaders, as well as for those who protested, the country seemed to be on the brink of a historic moment and the Communist Party was divided on the best way to react.

Finally, those who bet on a hard line have won.

On the night of 3 June and the morning of the next day, a large-scale military badault was launched on the square. Tanks and soldiers burst in and fired. Some counter-attacked with their own hands and several protesters burned armored vehicles with Molotov badtails.

Today, the persistent secrecy, censorship and the absence of any official report prevent us from knowing how many people died that night.

The various reports of foreign journalists who were there suggest that there were hundreds of deaths, between 2,000 and 3,000 dead.

At least one diplomatic cable, written in the heat of the moment, gives a much higher figure.

It was a time when the national defense force badumed the role of invading army in its own capital, and it was a point of inflexion that continued tacitly to define China today.

The tank man

Maybe nothing illustrates more the effectiveness of the 30 years of Chinese censorship than the "man tank".

On June 5, one day after the attacks, a column of tanks was seen coming out of Tiananmen Square.

The video shows a single protester standing in front of the tank and moving laterally each time the vehicle tries to overtake it.

At one point, the man, dressed in a white shirt and black pants and holding two shopping bags, gets into the tank and tries to protest against the crew.

For the outside world, this iconic image, juxtaposing authoritarian repression and insatiable spirit of challenge, defines what happened on Tiananmen Square.

Some moderation is also attributed to the tank commander, who could not know that the international media had recorded the confrontation.

"The man in the tank" was not shot or shot, but was dragged to an unknown destination until today.

In China, however, the image has been erased from the public consciousness.

Crime

Today, Tiananmen Square looks almost the same as the 1989 video footage.

But China as a country has changed dramatically over the last three decades.

As it grows and gains power, success seems to offer the latest rebuttal to the thousands of press reports – including these paragraphs – that insist that a dark chapter of the past still counts .

Bao Tong is a former senior official who lived in the forefront of the political upheavals of 1989.

He is now one of China's best-known dissidents, after serving a seven-year prison sentence in solitary confinement, for supporting the Tiananmen protesters.

"What worries me," he says, "is that over the past 30 years, all Chinese leaders have agreed to participate in the June 4th crime."

"They see it as a valuable lesson, as a magic trick behind the rise of the nation, they consider it beneficial," says Bao Bao, referring to the idea that China owes its current success to repression.

"The Chinese Communist Party should allow people to discuss: victims, witnesses, strangers, journalists who were present at that time, it should allow everyone to say what he knows and to discover the truth" , did he declare.

As proof of the vanity of his hope, Bao, who is constantly being monitored and monitored, has been warned to stop accepting interviews with foreign media after speaking to the BBC.

But he is convinced that if the demands of the protesters had been heard years ago, China's future would have not only been prosperous, but also more balanced and fair.

"I see a China with no great wall of the Internet, no privileged clbad, with fewer billionaires, but at least the poor migrant workers could live freely without being expelled from the big cities, and (I see) a China that does not There is no need to steal foreign technology, "he says.

Power at all costs

Although they expressed the belief that there had been a change, the irony is that the Tiananmen protests may have delayed the possibility of political reform in China for a generation or two years. more.

Students would probably have been bad leaders, with their own autocratic tendencies (as clearly indicates "Gate of Heavenly Peace", the best documentary on the events of Richard Gordon and Carma Hinton).

But the Communist Party understood that even the most limited demands for a state of law and a growing democracy would mean the end of its absolute monopoly of power.

If the protests had never happened, if the most senior reformers had not been silenced, purged or imprisoned, could China have followed the lead of other Asian states, such as Taiwan and China? South Korea, who had already begun to move away from authoritarianism? ?

In China, no calculation is possible: the previous generation can not remember, the new generation can not even know.

[Aunque en un raro reconocimiento público de los acontecimientos, el actual ministro de Defensa, Wei Fenghe, declaró este domingo frente a un foro regional: “El incidente fue un disturbio político y el gobierno central tomó medidas para detenerlo, lo cual es la política correcta”].

Until today, the decision that the party would remain in power at any price remains firm and no popular movement would be allowed to try to weaken its dominance.

Thirty years later, the mbadive "forgetfulness" effort continues more than ever.

John Sudworth – © BBC News, Beijing