Keeping the Tiananmen Square Debate Alive: Memorial to an unknown activist
By Cliff Cawthon
On June 6, 1989 one iconic Chinese dissenter globally illustrated the struggle in China for Democracy by standing in front of a tank, and twenty years later the movement remains under extreme repression. Despite the conditions in China, the conditions created by “Empire” (globalization-driven development & hegemony) have strengthened the ability for digital dissent, and the Chinese economic powerhouse is vulnerable. The ‘tweet’ from the dissenters is: no democracy, no peace! It is important to continue pressing the issues debated at Tiananmen Square beyond the anniversary of the massacre, as the Chinese government is no doubt counting on coverage to fade.
In Beijing according to the New York Times anniversary coverage, the police attempted to block said coverage by a “comical dance” of plain-clothes security personnel with umbrellas; nevertheless, an estimated 150,000 people attended a vigil in Hong Kong to mark the day. Since the aforementioned “Tank Man” incident on June 6th 1989, the government of the People’s Republic of China has operated a global PR campaign out of fear that the public memory of the past, the actions of the dissenters, and current economic inequalities in China may dissolve their authoritarian capitalist machine.
Twenty years ago, the proletariat of the “People’s Republic” of China demanded basic Democratic reforms in Beijing with Tiananmen Square being the spatial center of protest. The three common reforms were: free speech, press freedom, and an end to party/ government corruption. The day after the army’s ‘clearing of the square’ the “Tank Man” was a citizen of Beijing who literally stopped the machines of the state by blocking them with his body. Since then there have been thousands of protests suppressed by the Chinese government and its control of the media (according to Fareed Zakaria’s “The Post-American World”, there were 74,000 in 2004 alone) around issues ranging from housing to human rights to the environment.
Despite the activism of the present, China is still rigidly totalitarian. The ‘official line’ of the PRC (People’s Republic of China) government is that, these were peaceful protests and any riots/ violence were caused by “counter-revolutionaries” that the police “pacified” with the “greatest restraint”. The governments’ smokescreen is obvious, but domestic media manipulation is the key to their success and survival. Within the PRC (excluding Hong Kong) the Chinese government uses digital operatives to shut down online social networking sites. Independent networks continue to be suppressed and the major communications/ IT companies are the enablers. Microsoft, Yahoo Inc., and Google; the IT companies that we deal with every day, according to Amnesty International, “voluntarily” enable repression via agreements that allow them to operate in a Market with 180 million internet users.
In addition to information suppression, social sedatives are the main prescription for the Chinese people in the age of globalization. Jeffery Wasserstrom states in his article in The Nation magazine, “Tiananmen at Twenty”:
“To minimize the likelihood of a recurrence of 1989 and avoid succumbing to what some Chinese leaders call the “Polish disease” (a Solidarity-like movement), the party has encouraged consumerism (many youths can now buy those Nikes), [and] pulled back from micromanaging campus life (today’s students have much more personal freedom than their predecessors)”.
Manipulation by comfort is the social sedative employed in present-day China. The Faustian promise is: if the people keep their mouths shut, then they will be fed but if they demand bread and political freedom they will get neither. This Faustian promise is best expressed by the youth consensus presented in TIME magazine’s November 2007 edition by a young entrepreneur: “there’s nothing we can do about politics…..so there’s no point getting involved” (p. 48).
The force-fed socioeconomic sedative fed by the PRC’s government is supported and funded by the west. Our leaders pay lip-service to Democracy for cheap Wal-Mart goods at the end of the day, thereby the poor people of both countries remain sedated. In a recent trip to Beijing, covered by Politico.com, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi received criticism for her silence in light of China’s ongoing impunity towards human rights. Ms. Pelosi was well known for her 1991 visit in which she challenged PRC abuses openly. Currently she’s stated that she “always” engages her Chinese counterparts on Human Rights concerns; however, her stance is that she must take a “more diplomatic approach” because of her position.
“Diplomacy” as House Speaker Pelosi defines it, enables the authoritarian Chinese capitalist state. According to Human Rights Watch, 10,000 people are tried and executed per year without legal representation, within a legal code that proscribes death for no fewer than 68 crimes (the actual number of crimes is a state secret). Authoritarianism has not just politically alienated the Chinese people but it threatens their very safety; macroeconomic prosperity came at a grotesque civil and human price.
The resistance’s response to authoritarianism has been intellectual and digital. Dissenting exiles have drafted a manifesto of their demands titled, “Charter 08” which calls for obliteration of repressive silence via free speech and freedom of the press and the abolition of corruption. From individual frustration and creativity, previously benign blogs, chatrooms, and social networking sites have become venues to learn about atrocities in China and platforms to counter the PRC’s smokescreen of televised propaganda and digital philistinism. In tandem to the digital and intellectual dissent, the “great recession” has dulled the economic sedative and revealed to the Chinese public that the people lifted themselves up, not the party!
The resistance has been digitized, and the power of the keyboard is counteracting the power of the tank. The PRC is a dynamic pillar of Empire and the rope is there for its citizens to pull it down. Insofar as the Western enablers are concerned, Ms. Pelosi and her colleagues cannot be allowed to be “diplomatic”, allowing human rights abuses only in countries that economically benefit the US. And we must also combat our own human rights abuses before we can point our greedy fingers at China.
The Nuclear Threat on the Korean Peninsula
The Western consensus that it was the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (colloquially North Korea) that started the Korean War in 1950 has been challenged by information released by the United States Congress.
The United States gave birth to the army of the Republic of Korea (South Korea) as part of a plan that had been in the making for years to remove the Soviet- and Chinese-backed DPRK and install a single, pro-US government on the Korean Peninsula (http://www.cpcml.ca/Tmld2009/D39126.htm#1).
North Korea, meanwhile, has spent the better part of their existence persistently applying Kim Il-Sung’s Juche idea, which holds that a country must develop self-sufficiently. They have relied comparatively little on Soviet/Russian or Chinese assistance than South Korea relied on the Americans for.
After decades of steadfast refusal on the part of the United States to bring a peaceful solution to the ongoing Korean War (a ceasefire was agreed upon, but never a peace treaty), the DPRK was faced with a serious threat in 2002 when then-president George Walker Bush listed them alongside Iraq and Iran on his “Axis of Evil”. This turned out to be a euphemism for “hit list”, as exemplified by the fate of Iraq.
Had Iran and the DPRK not taken this threat seriously, and had the invasion and occupation of Iraq gone smoother, they would undoubtedly have faced a similar assault by the imperial American army.
It is, of course, very important to remember that the farcical “War on Terror” supposedly justified the proclamation of Bush’s Axis. Yet in Iraq, the particular case that Bush et al spent the most time and energy attempting to forge terrorist links with, six years have passed since the invasion and still no conclusive (or even suggestive) links between the Islamist al-Qaeda and the secular Ba’ath Party.
What, then, are the odds that the DPRK is sponsoring terrorism?
More importantly, the United States does not have the moral authority to cast the first stone. The Contras in Nicaragua are only one of many examples of American-funded death squads operating against leftist forces in the United States’ sphere of influence.
Having already reared its head, the question of moral authority can be pushed further. The United States is currently in possession of the world’s second largest supply of weapons of mass destruction and what may be the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, according to some sources. They are also the only nation whose armed forces have used nuclear weapons in combat (Hiroshima and Nagasaki, circa 1945).
Faced with these facts, is it any surprise that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea feels the need to arm themselves with a few nukes?
Not that nuclear weapons should be possessed by any government – it is far too much power to be placed in anybody’s hands.
But it is clear that North Korea faces a threat from a much larger, much richer, and much more influential country whose government has proven itself to be warmongering and homicidal. In light of this, the development of nuclear bombs on the Korean peninsula should not be greeted with acceptance, condemnation, or surprise. If the United States government truly cares about protecting the Korean people from nuclear holocaust, they need to start with themselves.
It is also important to note that in the fifty-plus years since the Korean War, the DPRK has not been to war once.
Can the same be said for the United States?
