CLAUDIA ROSETT: Xi Jinping’s Tiananmen Vision Is Coming for Us All.
If you want to understand what China’s Communist Party, wannabe boss-of-the-world, envisions for us all — just look today to the grim transformation of Hong Kong’s Victoria Park.
This pleasant area near the harbor, with its greenery, sports pitches and big central lawn, is where, for more than 30 years, Hong Kongers have gathered and lit candles to celebrate the courage and dreams of liberty that animated China’s 1989 Tiananmen uprising, and mourn the slaughter with which China’s communists crushed that movement for freedom, centered in the heart of Beijing. Since 1989, Beijing’s commissars have gone all out inside mainland China to obliterate the truth of Tiananmen, 1989. This year, one of China’s state propaganda outlets, the Global Times, celebrated the 1989 Tiananmen “incident” as having “inoculated the Chinese people with a political vaccine, helping us acquire immunity from being seriously misled.” (The article did not mention the vast apparatus of surveillance, diktats, censorship, prison terms and other strictures and punishments with which the CCP continues to ensure that China’s 1.4 billion people do not again embark on any “misled” movements to speak freely, choose their own leaders or decide for themselves the direction of their country.) Beijing’s grotesque rewrite of history is part of a vast CCP campaign of propaganda and coercion dedicated to ensuring that the people of China do not attempt a replay of the 1989 democratic movement that was, in truth, the People’s Republic of China’s finest hour.
But in Hong Kong, people remember. Year after year, it has been an inspiring sight, as tens of thousands have come to Victoria Park at dusk, and, with candles (and, in recent years, mobile phone flashlights), transformed the park into a field of light. Those June 4 vigils have been one of the glories of Hong Kong, the only territory under China’s red flag where people were free to commemorate Tiananmen, 1989.
As Claudia writes, “Not this year:”
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Related: Tiananmen Square: The Anniversary The CCP Wants The World To Forget. (Or Else!)