Thirty-one years ago, the Chinese government massacred thousands of pro-democracy protesters in Beijing, but the international community moved on in relatively short order. Today, this same regime is killing the freedom of 8 million people in Hong Kong. The survivors of the Tiananmen Square massacre are warning the world not to repeat the mistakes it made in 1989.
On June 4, 1989, Chinese troops imported from outside the Beijing region slaughtered protesters petitioning for reforms as the world watched in horror. The following day, then-British Ambassador Sir Alan Donald penned a secret cable back to London estimating 10,000 innocent civilians had been murdered and detailing gross atrocities, including crowds of people run over by tanks and their “remains incinerated and then hosed down drains”. Similar scenes played out in cities across China.
International condemnation was swift, sanctions were imposed, and the Chinese leadership was treated as a pariah, for a little while. But while President George H.W. Bush publicly condemned the massacre, privately he quickly and quietly resumed his drive to pursue friendly relations with Beijing, signaling to Chinese leaders their brutal crackdown would have little long-term cost.
Economic engagement quickly resumed, most sanctions were soon lifted and China’s economy surged for the next three decades. But the political reforms Washington policymakers had hoped for never materialized. After Xi Jinping formally took power in 2013, the Chinese Communist Party’s brutality and repression only accelerated.
“That’s a very big lesson the American government should learn from 1989”, said Wang Dan, a former student leader who survived the Tiananmen Square massacre. He spent several years in prison before being exiled to the United States, where he has championed democracy, freedom and human rights for the Chinese people ever since.
“In 1989, why did the U.S. government lift sanctions so quick? They thought there was still hope for China. They thought that Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms would definitely lead to political reform”, he said. “There’s only one way to push China to have some real reform, and that’s pressure”.
Wang was part of a group of Chinese dissidents who met Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this week. He told Pompeo that the United States and the international community must do more to help people in mainland China have free access to information — and do more to punish Chinese leaders for their assault on freedom in Hong Kong.
Last week, China’s rubber-stamp legislature approved a sweeping new national security law for Hong Kong, after which Pompeo announced, “Hong Kong is no longer autonomous from China, given facts on the ground”. President Trump gave a speech promising to roll back the special economic and trade status Hong Kong has enjoyed, along with other as-yet-unspecified measures.
Wang said the U.S. and international responses must target sanctions at high-level officials in Beijing, including under the Global Magnitsky Act, and that issues of human rights and freedom of information in China must be included in any future trade talks. The CCP’s abuses hurt not only Chinese citizens but also U.S. companies trying to do business in China.
The Bush administration could be forgiven for thinking China’s leaders were moving toward opening and reform in 1989. In 2020, nobody can make that argument. The CCP has abused its access to the international economy for economic aggression while protecting its own markets from free competition. China’s internal repression has blossomed into wholesale ethnic cleansing of Uighurs and other ethnic Muslim minorities, severe repression of millions of Tibetans and the snuffing out of any space for political dissent.
“We hoped China would change. Unfortunately, we helped China become the second-largest economy in the world, but their political system didn’t change”, said Henry Li, another student leader who faced down Chinese troops in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and lived to tell the tale. “Right now, finally, the world is waking up”.
It would be easy to say that the current political and social upheaval in the United States means we shouldn’t stand up against China’s crackdown on human rights and freedom in Hong Kong. It’s a feature of China’s public diplomacy and propaganda these days to amplify the unrest in American cities and point to it as proof the U.S. push for human rights abroad is both cynical and hypocritical.
Our public institutions — especially our police — have serious problems that have caused systemic suffering for large groups of Americans. But it would be pathetic if we used that as a reason to abandon our duty to also stand up to repression in China. In fact, the drives for greater justice at home and abroad reinforce each other. This is actually the perfect time to press the issue.
The biggest difference between 1989 and now is that, back then, the Chinese government could cover up the truth. Today in Hong Kong, everyone can see the tragedy unfolding. For the sake of our values and their freedom, we cannot afford to let Beijing get away with it again.
Josh Rogin is a columnist for the Global Opinions section of The Washington Post. He writes about foreign policy and national security. Rogin is also a political analyst for CNN. He previously worked for Bloomberg View, the Daily Beast, Foreign Policy, Congressional Quarterly, Federal Computer Week and Japan's Asahi Shimbun newspaper.