In a resolution to remember the victims of Tiananmen Square, the U.S. Congress may soon formally condemn China’s domestic and transnational repression—“transnational repression” being the term for a country government’s harassment of nationals currently residing in other countries.
Congress may also “establish a new U.S. policy to hold foreign governments and individuals accountable when they stalk, intimidate, or assault people across borders, including in the United States.”
Although we and the Chinese people and other peoples need such resolutions and legislation, they are unlikely to deter the Chinese Communist Party in the short run (“China’s crackdown on Tiananmen memorials shows its obsession with security—and growing paranoia,” The Guardian, June 4, 2024).
Hours after attending a 4 June vigil, a Chinese student overseas is contacted by her father, bearing a message from the security services: do not participate in activities that might harm China’s reputation. In a London theatre, three British actors starring in “May 35th,” a play about the 1989 Tiananmen killings, keep their identities secret and use pseudonyms. They take this step after actors drop out of a previous Tiananmen-related production in Arizona due to perceived risks to family in China.
Thirty-five years have passed since the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on the Chinese people, yet Beijing seems more determined than ever to suppress acts commemorating the deaths of 4 June—even small ones far beyond China’s own borders.
“May 35” is code for “June 4” that Hongkongers and other Chinese sometimes use to pretend that they’re not talking about June 4. It’s been in use for years. But by coincidence, this year, 2024, is 35 years after the Tiananmen Square massacre.
The Guardian attributes the Chinese state’s “obsession” and “growing paranoia” largely to “the psychology of the architect of these changes,” Dictator Xi Jinping.
Xi’s preoccupation with the fall of the Soviet Union—a “tragedy too painful to look back upon”—is well documented. His aim is regime security and protecting Communist party rule. To achieve this, his foundational doctrine may be Document 9, a secret 2013 communique outlining seven ideological threats to the party, including the promotion of constitutional democracy, western neoliberalism and “nihilistic” views of history. For decades, the received wisdom has been that China’s Communist party oscillates between hard and soft authoritarianism, cycling through periods of tightening or shou, followed by periods of loosening or fang. But the years since Xi’s 2012 ascension have been characterised by tightening followed by more tightening.
Case in point: Hong Kong, “whose position as an economic powerhouse has been sacrificed in the interests of national security.”
How pivotal has Xi been in killing off the last of Hong Kong’s rights and freedoms? That process has been underway at least since Britain gave Hong Kong to China in 1997. But it’s probably true that Xi expedited things. The National Security Law of 2020 could not have been imposed on Hong Kong without his okay.
In 2021, Chow Hang-tung (shown above), a Hong Kong lawyer and pro-democracy activist arrested by the Chinese government for helping to organize vigils to remember Tiananmen Square, made a statement in court in which she urged listeners not to “delude ourselves that this is all about COVID-19 and that the criminalization of the vigil is only an exceptional measure at an exceptional time. What happened here is instead one step in the systemic erasure of history, both of the Tiananmen Massacre and Hong Kong’s own history of civic resistance.”
If it wasn’t easy three years ago to see how right she was, it is certainly easy now.
In her statement, Chow Hang-tung also said that remembering Tiananmen Square is no longer about remembering “some far-away suffering whose relevance wanes as each day passes. Now it is a suppression shared across time, across distance, across identities.”
Chow was recently arrested again for social-media posts about Tiananmen Square published a few days before the 35-year anniversary.
