Members of Congress and Chinese pro-democracy dissidents gathered on Capitol Hill on Tuesday to mark the 35th anniversary of the day some 200,000 Chinese troops launched a brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters occupying Tiananmen Square.
The 1989 massacre all but extinguished a growing national trend for democratic reform in China, a trend that included elements of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that were seeking a move away from the repressive political system.
The outbreak of pro-democracy protests mirrored similar revolutionary movements that would soon oust communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
But after the massacre, the ruling Chinese Communist Party, fearful of being driven from power, carried out a decadeslong purge and aggressive propaganda drive that imposed stringent ideological conformity that today is a hallmark of policies of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
A group of bipartisan members of Congress, including former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, gathered outside the Capitol Tuesday to condemn the massacre. Several Chinese dissidents spoke out as well, including some who were in the vast Beijing square on June 4, 1989 when troops fired automatic rifles at thousands of unarmed protesters. Others died under the treads of tanks.
Wang Dan, a prominent student leader during the protests, said the massacre showed that Chinese Communist Party rule can only survive through the use of violence against those seeking democracy and freedom.
“Today is the 35th anniversary of my nightmare,” Mr. Wang said during the press conference.
During a congressional hearing Tuesday, Zhou Fengsuo, another student leader during the Beijing protests, said he was inspired by a group of protesters in Tiananmen two years ago who shouted, “Down with Xi Jinping, down with the CCP!”
“At that moment, I was in tears,” he said. “I realized that after 33 years we are finally seeing the younger generation they are standing up, carrying the torch of freedom that I carried with me since 1989 from Tiananmen Square.”
Mr. Zhou, now executive director of the group Human Rights in China, said he was among the last to leave Tiananmen Square on June 4 as troops and tanks moved in.
Miles Yu, a former State Department policymaker, said the CCP learned from the 1989 protests that political control can never be loosened.
The CCP believed “the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev was a betrayal of Marxism-Leninism,” Mr. Yu said.
In response, every CCP leader since then has imposed a draconian system of draconian political repression and surveillance, he said.
“So basically you have seen the most sophisticated regime of repression in the history of the world in China,” Mr. Yu said, adding that the crackdown included one of the world’s most efficient systems of censorship in support of CCP control.
Today, in China all mention of the massacre has been scrubbed from online media.
China has never acknowledged the massacre and some officials have asserted that nothing happened. Several Chinese were arrested this week in China and Hong Kong attempting to mark the anniversary.
Rep. John Moolenaar, chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said hundreds of thousands of students and workers in Tiananmen joined millions more throughout China to demand democracy.
“The CCP chose to stamp them out, crushing calls for freedom under Communist tanks,” the Michigan Republican said.
China’s people have been the greatest victims of the CCP with a death toll in the tens of millions and countless more reduced to forced labor, he said.
“Throughout decades of communist oppression, generations of courageous Chinese patriots — including the dead, the disappeared, the imprisoned, and the exiled — have kept the light of liberty burning and sought to bring a brighter future to China,” Mr. Moolenaar said.
During the press conference, Illinois Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, ranking Democrat on the select committee, held up the iconic photo showing “tank man” — a lone Chinese demonstrator who stood down a line of People’s Liberation Army tanks heading for the square and tried to block their advance.
“The tank represented the thuggish, brutal Chinese Communist Party, which sought to squash the freedom of this man and countless others, not only then, but today,” Mr. Krishnamoorthi, Illinois Democrat said.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement that “we remember the tens of thousands of peaceful Chinese pro-democracy protestors who were brutally assaulted for standing up for freedom, human rights, and an end to corruption. Thirty-five years later, the true toll from that day is still unknown, but we honor all those killed and imprisoned on June 4, 1989, and the days that followed.”
Randall Schriver, a former State Department and Pentagon policymaker on China, said the protesters’ bravery is not forgotten in China. Since 1989 there have been small-scale pro-democracy protests in China against Mr. Xi’s “one-man rule of Mao.”
“In Tiananmen, such calls were met with indiscriminate gunfire,” said Mr. Schriver, now with the Project 2049 Institute. “Since then, protesters have faced beatings, mass arrests, tear gas, pepper spray and other draconian measures.”
Nationwide protests
Democracy protests in China in 1989 were nationwide and a reflected a crisis of communism for both China and the world at the time.
Some sanctions on sales of military goods to China were imposed after 1989, but rather than support the popular democracy movement, then-President George H.W. Bush sent his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, to Beijing to reassure and support Mr. Deng after the massacre. The policy was part of what now viewed as the failed U.S. engagement policy toward China, Mr. Yu said.
“That was such a monumental strategic miscalculation,” said Mr. Yu, now with the Hudson Institute.
The protests in Tiananmen in the days leading up to the massacre included as many as 1 million Chinese and were viewed as China’s attempt to break free of the communist system. Internal CCP documents on Tiananmen published in 2001 revealed factionalism and power struggles among the seven most powerful leaders over how to deal with the democracy movement.
The decision to crack down was ultimately made by Deng Xiaoping, though then-Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang was sympathetic toward the protests, viewing them as largely patriotic. A hard-line leadership faction led by Li Peng, however, prevailed and replaced Mr. Zhao with a new leader, Jiang Zemin.
Chinese human rights activist Wei Jinsheng said during the press conference that the 1978 democracy movement in China culminated in the Tiananmen protests, but that the movement was violently suppressed.
The movement’s ideas were anti-Marxist, pro-democracy, and pro-liberal values and had a huge impact on the world, and eventually produced the collapse of the Soviet Union and the democratic revolution in Eastern Europe, Mr. Wei said.
“The next ideological and revolutionary movement in China, we hope, will be able to change China’s Communist Party’s autocratic regime, alter the world’s geopolitical landscape, promote the trend of global democratization, arrest the current global democratic retreat, and bring lasting peace to the world,” he said.
• Bill Gertz can be reached at bgertz@washingtontimes.com.