Today marks a quarter of a century since
China's government ordered its army to massacre students protesting peacefully
in the centre of Beijing. It is too early for history to reach its verdict on
the June 3, 1989, mass murder in Tiananmen Square. But we can draw three
preliminary conclusions.
First, the Chinese Communist Party broke all the prevailing
international norms to use force, but it did so regardless and achieved its
objective. Second, it has successfully censored and repressed the Chinese
people's memory. The 500 million people born since the massacre in Tiananmen
Square do not know about it. The older generation has stopped trying to
publicly commemorate its anniversary.
Third, it got away with it. The party remains in power, the
most successful dictatorship on earth. In order to carry out the repression, in
which hundreds and perhaps thousands of students were killed, China's premier
had to be sidelined. Zhao Ziyang was put under house arrest for the rest of his
life for the crime of resisting an act of mass murder. He died in 2005.
Zhao didn't think the Communist Party could endure. The "Western
parliamentary system is the one that has demonstrated the most vitality",
he wrote in his memoir. He thought China's repressive system would vanish into
history. He was wrong.
After an initial burst of indignation, the great nations of
the West quietly let lapse their sanctions against Beijing. Instead of shunning
China, countries everywhere got on with the business of selling to it. Bill
Clinton denounced China's leaders as "the butchers of
Beijing" in the 1992 election campaign. A year later, the US
president visited Beijing and shook hands with them. China proved too big, too
powerful, too profitable to shut out.
"In just a single generation, the party elite has been
transformed from a mirthless band of Mao-suited, ideological thugs to a
wealthy, besuited and business-friendly ruling class," says Australian
journalist Richard McGregor in his book The Party. The party's success
is so overwhelming that, in the West, today it's considered poor form to even
mention the Tiananmen Square massacre in any mainstream business conference.
So it's no real surprise that the party is confident it can
pull off another brazen use of force to get its way. Week by week, push by
shove, China is muscling its neighbours aside to assert ownership of large
tracts of ocean. What other nations regard as disputed seas, China's
propagandists call "our blue national soil". By ignoring
international norms and laws in intimidating one country after another, China
is asserting itself according to the precept set out by its former foreign
affairs minister, Yang Jiechi, in 2010.
"China is a big country and other countries are small
countries, and that's just a fact," he told his counterpart from Asia's
smallest country, Singapore.
In 2009, China lodged with the United Nations a new claim
to 90 per cent of the South China Sea. The claim is marked by the
much-contested "nine-dash line" on the map. It's in the shape of a
giant scoop, dipping southwards from China to collect territories also claimed
by Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei. China also has
overlapping claims to islets and rocks administered by Japan in the East China
Sea.
When China towed a massive oil rig into the middle of
waters claimed by Vietnam last month, the Vietnamese sent 20 to 30 ships to try
to interfere. But Beijing sent 80. It put a protective ring around the rig.
China's coast guard vessels used water cannon on the
Vietnamese and rammed and sank a Vietnamese fishing boat.
"We cannot accept the coercion," complained
Vietnam's foreign affairs minister, Nuguyen Quoc Cuong. But the rig is now in
place.
China is rewriting history. The leaders of two of the
nations in dispute with China, Benigno Aquino of the Philippines and Shinzo Abe
of Japan, have likened China's assertiveness to that of Germany under Hitler
and warned against appeasing a bully. Senior political figures from the US and
Japan spoke the obvious at a big defence conference on the weekend, the
Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel and Abe said
that China was destabilising the region.
But the most senior Chinese military officer at the
conference reacted angrily. China's deputy chief of the general staff,
Lieutenant-General Wang Guanzhong, rejected the speeches by Hagel and Abe as
"unacceptable". Hagel's speech, he said, was "full of words of
threat and intimidation" and part of "a provocative challenge against
China". But Wang knows that China is safe from any imminent challenge from
the US. That's one of the reasons China is pressing its case for territorial
aggrandisement so insistently now – it assesses the US to be weak-willed.
President Barack Obama disappointed observers in the
capitals of the US's Asia-Pacific allies last week with a speech on foreign
policy. It was generally judged to signal no serious intention to try to rein
in China's behaviour. And American relative power is only growing weaker with
each passing year.
"If China expands its submarine fleet to 78 by 2020 as
planned, it will be on par with the US navy's undersea fleet in quantity,"
writes an American expert, Robert Kaplan of Stratfor.
But China has the advantage that its diesel-electric subs
are quieter than the US nuclear-powered fleet.
"At some point," Kaplan says, "China is
likely to, in effect, be able to deny the US navy unimpeded access to parts of
the South China Sea."
There is much for Tony Abbott to discuss with Obama when
they meet next week. As it did 25 years ago in a very different situation,
China is using force, rewriting history and getting away with it.
By Peter Hartcher Sydney Morning Herald political and international editor
By Peter Hartcher Sydney Morning Herald political and international editor
Illustration: John Shakespeare.
The Tiananmen amnesia
ReplyDeleteEvery June 4th, a collective amnesia grips the leaders of China.
On that day in 1989, thousands of soldiers smashed a pro-democracy demonstration of almost a million students and their sympathizers in Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing. In the carnage that ensued, thousands of demonstrators were believed to have died.
The days that followed saw a massive wave of repression spread across China. Hundreds were arrested to quell the dissent the “counter-revolutionary riot” at Tienanmen had spawned.
The carnage in the square was strongly condemned by the international community, but the Chinese government was in no mood to listen, bent as it was in stemming what it saw was a dangerous challenge to its supreme authority.
But it was never the intention of the small group of students that had initially marched to Tiananmen several days before the bloodbath to defy authority. They were there to mourn the death days earlier of former Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang. Hu’s reformist leanings had earned him the admiration of the students and the suspicion of party hardliners.
The students had come to the square to eulogize Hu and hold open discussions on the reforms he espoused. But the gathering quickly grew from several hundred to the thousands. Within days, workers, intellectuals, artists caught the whiff of freedom from Tiananmen, and soon multitudes filled the square. The mood also changed, with the tributes to Hu drowned out by demands for sweeping reforms in government.
The authorities at first tolerated the demonstrators and even held dialogues with them. Flushed with a new sense of people power, the protesters pressed their demands, which ranged from publishing the income of state leaders and their family members to an end to press censorship and more funds for education.
On June 2, party elders led by Deng Xiaoping prevailed on their more liberal colleagues in the politburo to order the army to clear the square of protesters, by force if necessary.
On the night of June 3, a juggernaut of Army troops in full battle gear supported by tanks moved into Tiananmen, mowing down protesters with rifle and machine gun fire. The carnage had begun. Gunshots and cannon bursts would reverberate across much of central Beijing until the following morning.
In the months that followed, security forces all over China carried out hundreds of arrests, as they hunted down the remainder of the protesters and their leaders. It was a methodical, surgical stifling of dissent.
Several countries, including the United States, raged at the bloody crackdown. Some nations clamped a boycott on Chinese goods. Foreign lending agencies suspended loans to China, foreign tourists skipped Chinese destinations. In the midst of it all, Beijing was unremorseful.
It still is to this day, preferring instead to blot out any official memory of what happened in Tiananmen in the spring of 1989.
Mike Chinoy, who was CNN’s bureau chief that year, sees a paradox in Beijing’s denial of Tiananmen. Mr. Chinoy writes: “A quarter of a century later, the Communist Party still feels compelled to use all the powers of the state to convince people inside China that nothing worth remembering happened on a date that, outside the country, will be an occasion for reflection and analysis of what remains the gravest crisis the Party has faced since the revolution of 1949.”
It is this same approach that Beijing is taking in justifying its territorial claims in the West Philippine Sea and East China Sea with Japan. It is using the huge political machinery to brainwash its people into believing that it has the almost divine right to assert its sovereignty on the reefs, islets and shoals that, in fact, belong to its neighbors.
It is a dangerous approach, one that has created potential flashpoints that raise deepening concerns in the Asia-Pacific region.