5 Jun 2006

Remember - People's Army turns against the people


Monday June 5, 1989
The Guardian


It is, for all who watch and wonder about the Communist world, the ultimate obscenity. Worse even than Hungary or Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan for there the tanks and troops were alien invaders, rolling across borders in the fashion through time immemorial of big powers knocking little powers into line.
But in China it is the People's Army turned against the people: shooting them indiscriminately in Tiananmen Square, on the streets, on their doorsteps, crushing them beneath tanks. A bankrupt, desperate, geriatric government, an edifice of ideology and aspiration, flaking and toppling before our eyes. We have been confronted, this week-end, by one of the great punctuation marks of 20th-century history.

No-one in the largest nation in the world will ever forget the first week of June in Beijing. A surge of desire for greater freedoms - not democracy as we know it, but an opening of society, a spirit of glasnost - has posed ultimate questions to a group of old men and, ultimately, at whatever cost, they have moved to stamp it out.

There was a chance, only a handful of days ago, that a more liberal strain of thinking within the Chinese Communist Party could, by its success in the backroom struggle for power, have harnessed the yearning for glasnost. But the old men won.

Are the manifest death throes of the Communist monoliths manageable? Can they be predicted and relied on? Could Tiananmen Square come to Red Square and savagely end a period of burgeoning hope?

The point is a starkly simple one. We, sitting comfortably in the West, assume that a spark in the individual human condition - a spark called freedom - must, in the end, make a bonfire of the system that seeks to snuff it out. We assumed, from Nixon on, that China could gradually evolve, that the business culture, the Americans with cheque books, would inevitably bring some form of democracy in their wake. Tell that, this bloody, awful morning, to the marines.

How frail is the Soviet spark? The Soviet people - because glasnost came first - may have acquired a patina of sophistication that the students of Beijing lacked. The Soviet Union is seeking to devolve power, to provoke argument, to manage change. The pensioners of the Chinese establishment had, long since, run out of ideas.

They must not get away with it. In the eyes of the West, because of the spark. And in the eyes of those who watch from Moscow, too, because the nightmare of Deng is theirs as well. We all, at root, know the Chinese march towards liberty must be resumed.



[From Angry Chinese Blogger]



6 comments:

Anonymous said...

We should remember LKY wise quote as well..

""If I have to shoot 200,000 students to save China from another 100 years of disorder, so be it." - Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, Straits Times, Aug 17, 2004"

Anonymous said...

Hey there're 1.3bn Chinese in China! What's 200,000 less?!

Anonymous said...

unruly youth blocking public square are hardly good examples of democracy; cai ling/wuer kaixi turned out to be poor leaders more interested in enjoying life than promoting democracy; history has not been kind to the movement

Anonymous said...

As far as I remember, LKY was quoting what Deng told him when they met before, so it is not his own opinion.

(I am very much pro-democracy in Singapore (means LKY is not much of my liking), but we should not misquote him.)

dfgd said...

Aug 2004 : Shortly after Lee Hsien Loong was sworn in as the country's new Prime Minister, he promised an "open and inclusive society."

But his father, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, told an international audience at the Global Brand Forum that "political reform need not go hand in hand with economic liberaliastion." He also invoked the ghost of Deng Xiaoping and said, "He took over, and he said: 'If I have to shoot 200,000 students to save China from another 100 years of disorder, so be it.'"


LKY was quoting what Deng Xiaoping had said to him.

Anonymous said...

The Tiananmen massacre was yet another victory of Chinese culture over dissent. Whilst some got run over by tanks, close to a billion people turned the other cheek...in apathy. It is time to question how this culture serves as the basis upon which gross authoritarianism seems to always arise. No racism please. Let's get objective here.