Thirty Years Ago This Spring, on June 4th, 1989
One of the most iconic photographs of this grim episode in history. The person blocking the tanks on their way to Tiananmen Square became known to the world as “tank man.” Apparently, the fate of this brave person remains unknown 30 years later.
“One day I believe we will witness the arrival of freedom in the world’s most populous country. In my mind’s eye, I envision a memorial erected on Tiananmen Square to the heroes of 1989, perhaps taking the form of a weeping rickshaw driver with a wounded student.” – from a recent column by New York Times reporter and opinion writer Nicholas Kristoff, who was in China and witnessed the bloody crackdown first-hand.
A Brief Commentary by Doug Draper
Posted June 4th, 2019 on Niagara At Large
Thirty years ago this June 4th, heavily armed soldiers and tanks for the communist government of China moved in on large numbers of unarmed students and workers who had been demonstrating in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square for a more free and democratic society.
Student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in the days leading up to the murderous crackdown by China’s communist regime
What they were treated to instead was a horror show of violence and death as the forces of a dictatorial regime that has an iron grip on China to this day.
The murderous crackdown on non-violent demonstrators in Tiananmen Square and the government’s censorship of what happened that day – so complete that there is still no accurate account of how many hundreds or thousands of people were injured and killed, and how many others were jailed and possibly executed – appears to have cemented the oppressive culture that, by so many accounts, still exists in that country to this day.
To this day, photos like this, taken of the carnage, have been censored in China.
In the few days leading up to this 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, I heard interviews with journalists in the Canada and the United States who were born in China and were just children when the military assault on the demonstrators occurred. They said their relatives in China still cannot talk about what happened on that day for fear of government reprisals.
The wounded.
Thinking and hearing about all of this, I can’t help but wonder why representatives of our governments here in Canada, at the federal, provincial and even the local level often spear so eager to do business with agents of this dictatorial regime.
But then of course it is all about money, and has little or nothing to do with values or principles, does it.
Tiananmen Square in recent years, where the air is too often so polluted with poisons, that people have to where respirators or hold towels over their noses to walk outside. And we let agents of this regime buy up some of our green and environmentally sensitive places here to develop?
To watch a video on “Tank Man’ and the events 30 years ago in Tiananmen Square, produced by Guardian News and available on YouTube, click on the screen below –
To read a 30th Anniversary memory of the Tiananmen Square massacre by Nicholas Kristoff, a New York Times reporter and columnist who witnessed it first-hand, click on – https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/opinion/sunday/tiananmen-square-protest.html .
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