It is sixteen years now since China experienced the darkness of the June 4 massacre, in which the People's Liberation Army crushed thousands of unarmed protestors in the streets of Beijing. Following the events of that dark day, the Chinese government began a nationwide crackdown to punish those who'd had the temerity to speak out against corruption, injustice, and governmental negligence. To this day, we still don't know how many people were killed that night, or how many are still languishing in prisons and labour camps for their participation in what the Chinese government calls merely the "Tiananmen Incident."
For sixteen years the Chinese authorities have done everything in their power to whitewash the events of that day, but the world still remembers. And more importantly, China itself remembers. There are those who point to the economic gains that China has made over the past decade, as if to say: "Perhaps the government was too harsh then, but don't the ends justify the means?" I ask such people to take a closer look at China’s economic miracle, at a country rife with corrupt officials getting fantastically wealthy through the abuse of power and authority, while the people for whom they ostensibly work languish in increasing poverty. While actively working to suppress democratic reform in China ("because the Chinese people are not ready for democracy," they claim) these same officials are throwing the door wide open to business – any business, regardless of its nature. And so the morally corrupt and ethically bankrupt are rewarded, while many of those who strived in 1989 to bring China into a new era of social justice and accountability are still behind bars or under police surveillance.
Beijing's recent expression of outrage over Japan's whitewashing of its history during the Second World War is instructive in more ways than one. Certainly, for the new generation of Japanese citizens to be allowed to remain unaware of the grave crimes committed against the Chinese people by their parents and grandparents can only poison harmonious relations between the two nations. Yet is it any less pernicious that the Chinese government insists that the next generation of Chinese citizens be kept ignorant of the crimes that it committed against its own people? The continuing refusal of the Chinese government to take responsibility for the massacre of June 4, 1989 is nothing less than a continuation of the shame and injustice of that day.
Many assume that the Beijing Massacre is fast becoming distant history to most ordinary Chinese people. But is it really? Don't the ghosts and shadows of Tiananmen still hang in the air, seen but not acknowledged, and heard but not discussed? Consider the state of Chinese society in the days immediately before June 4, 1989 – a society mired in official corruption and exploitation, headed by a government that failed to protect the rights of its own people. Now consider more recent events.
Today's Slaughter of the Innocents
In November last year, 166 coal miners were killed in a horrific gas explosion in Shaanxi Province, at the Chenjiashan coalmine in Tungchuan City. Earlier this year, on February 14 in the Fuxin coalmine in Liaoning Province, no fewer than 214 miners died in a similarly appalling explosion. These events are not anomalies: they are happening with increasing frequency across the country today. But who accepts responsibility for the deaths of these workers? Sadly, in today’s China the answer is nobody. From the owners of the mines, who place personal profit ahead of basic consideration of human life, to the corrupt government officials who accept bribes from the owners in exchange for looking the other way, the real culprit in the deaths of these workers are the same evils that so many gathered in Tiananmen in 1989 to fight against: official corruption, cynicism and the blind pursuit of profit.
And in many ways, things have become worse. Public health policy in China is failing dismally. How many retired and unemployed workers die daily, unable to afford increasingly expensive medical treatments that might save their lives? And how many more workers have died, and are dying, of occupational diseases that could be minimized or avoided entirely by improving basic workplace health and safety? Worse still, how many of these victims of occupational diseases wind up intentionally misdiagnosed by corrupt, bribe taking government-run occupational health agencies so that the companies whose criminal negligence caused their illnesses can avoid paying compensation that might save their lives? Such things are daily realities, nowadays, for countless Chinese people.
Though told in different accents and dialects, the stories coming from all over China these days are remarkably similar in nature: Workers losing their health because factory owners are able to bribe their way out of providing adequate health and safety protections. Children from rural villages forced by rising school fees and skyrocketing living costs to work in factories to help feed their families. Their parents being mangled and even killed, all because of the bosses' criminal negligence over basic workplace health and safety issues. So don't let the fact that the bloodstained bricks of Tiananmen Square have long ago been cleaned up fool you into believing that the social evils present in 1989 have now been corrected. If anything, they have increased and intensified, over the past decade and a half in China, to the point where greater death and suffering is being caused with nary a bullet fired.
Workers' Resistance – Workers' Rights
But despite continuing suppression, the victims of injustice and corruption are once again refusing to keep silent. The past few years have seen migrant workers across the country struggling for their rights and slowly advancing their causes. And there have been real victories. In October 2004, tens of thousands of farmers in Hanyuan City, Sichuan Province were dislocated from their land by a government sponsored hydroelectric project, and their compensation money was confiscated by corrupt local officials. The farmers' mass protests actually succeeded in stopping construction of the dam, despite an attempt by the local government to quell the protests by sending in the military police.
In Zhejiang Province, farmers blocked the entrance of a factory destroying the surroundings with industrial waste. The factory owner called on cronies in the local government to quell the disturbance, and the government again responded by sending in military police. But the farmers were fighting for their very lives, and in their struggle for survival they didn't merely hold their own but actually blocked the military police from entering their village. Similar scenes occurred in towns in Guangdong and Guangxi provinces and elsewhere when villagers refused to roll over and accept being cheated out of their lands by corrupt local officials hoping to sell the land out from under them for a quick buck.
In cities, the peaceful struggles by ordinary Chinese citizens against oppression and corruption are also multiplying. Joining the list of workers fighting against poor working conditions, wage arrears and unreasonable dismissal in recent years are workers at the Daqing Petroleum Factory in Heilongjiang province, workers at the Ferro-Alloy factory of Liaoyang city, textile workers in factories in Suizhou and Xianyang, electronics and shoe factory workers in Shenzhen, and teachers in Shandong, Hubei and Guangxi, to name but a few. The government responds by handing out longer prison sentences to organizers (as in the case of the Ferro-Alloy factory workers, two of whose leaders are now serving prison sentences of four and seven years).
But in the cities, too, there have been victories. After 50,000 retrenched Daqing workers staged a three-month protest, the local government finally promised increase payouts for workers made redundant and promised to hire the children of retrenched workers. And at the Japanese-owned Uniden Electronic Factory in Shenzhen, workers demanded to be allowed to set up a trade union to fight for legal working hours and reasonable wages; after a large and well-publicized protest, the factory owner caved in.
So sixteen years on, despite the fact that the Chinese government has succeeded in quelling any open discussion of the events of June 4, 1989, the real social struggle that took such a bloody turn on that day has only deepened and intensified. And while ordinary people throughout China still have no choice but to remain silent about the events of that day – there will be no openly-held candle-lit vigil tonight anywhere on the mainland tonight – they are anything but silent when it comes to battling the underlying injustices and inequities that caused so many to gather hopefully in Tiananmen Square all those years ago.
So we will keep on commemorating this day, year after year, until justice prevails.
Han Dongfang
June 4, 2005