Tiananmen Square: Why we should not forget

AI generated by Gemini

The spring of 1989 began with hope. Students, workers, and intellectuals gathered in Beijing's central square, calling for political reform, freedom of the press, and an end to official corruption. At its peak, the protests drew more than a million people, not just in Beijing, but across hundreds of Chinese cities. The demonstrators were largely peaceful. Some went on a hunger strike. Many simply sat and sang.

The image of a lone man standing before a column of tanks on Chang'an Avenue came to define the resistance. It captured something profound. It was ordinary human courage confronting the full weight of state power. The photograph at the time resonated in the rest of the world because it gave a human face to the confrontation between citizen and state, and that man became an icon of resistance. The man's identity has never been confirmed, and what happened to him is unknown.

On the night of June 3rd, the government ordered the army to open fire on people gathered in Tiananmen Square. Tanks crushed tents and the men and women inside them. In the hours that followed, hospitals overflowed, and families searched desperately for their children.  Beijing was under martial law, and within days, the Chinese government declared victory over "counter-revolutionary turmoil." What makes Tiananmen important today is that the massacre in 1989 led to further repression of the people through censorship, surveillance, and what can be described as ‘enforced amnesia’.

The events of that fateful day have been systematically erased in China: internet searches are blocked; social media posts are deleted within seconds, and Chinese students in school learn nothing of what happened to the demonstrators. It is fair to say new generations have grown up inside a country where one of the defining events of the 20th century simply does not exist in the official record.‘The Mothers of Tiananmen, who are a group of bereaved parents, have spent decades trying to compile a list of the dead, but have been harassed, put under surveillance, and silenced year after year. Their petition to the National People's Congress has been submitted every June for more than three decades. It has never received a formal response.

In Hong Kong, the annual candlelight vigil at Victoria Park, which once drew tens of thousands, was banned in 2020 under the National Security Law. Organisers were arrested. The city that had kept the flame of memory burning longest in Chinese territory was extinguished. We should remember this event because, although it happened in another country, to another people, the victims of that terrible massacre reveal a dreadful truth about totalitarian regimes at a time when democracy throughout the world is in crisis. The people who died in and around Tiananmen Square in June 1989 were not enemies of their country. They were students and ordinary people who wanted a more just society. Many were barely adults. They have been denied justice, denied acknowledgement, and in many cases denied even a confirmed death. Remembering them is the least we can do.

The Chinese Communist Party emerged from the crackdown not weakened but emboldened. It learned that violent suppression, combined with economic growth and tight information control, could be politically durable. That lesson has shaped Chinese governance ever since, and its awful consequences can be seen in Xinjiang, in Tibet, in, sadly, to the UK’s shame, in Hong Kong. The liberties we take for granted are completely repressed across civil society in China.

The Chinese government offers a form of prosperity without political liberalisation, in exchange for silence. It is a repressive model emulated by many dictatorships across the world. China is now the world's second-largest economy, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and a country with which nearly every nation on earth has deep economic ties. The political cost of raising the Tiananmen massacre in diplomatic settings is high, and most governments rarely do.

This makes public memory held by journalists, historians, and ordinary people across the world all the more important. Governments may stay quiet for reasons of national interest, but the rest of us should not have excuses. The massacre in Tiananmen Square is a test of whether the world is willing to hold the powerful accountable, even decades later, even when it is inconvenient. It is a reminder that political progress is not inevitable, that democracy can be crushed, and that the process of crushing the people can be made to disappear from the record if we let it.