Today marks the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in China.
June 4, 1989 and the events leading up to that moment are forbidden discussion in China. 37-years later the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will still target and seek the arrest of anyone who recognizes this monumental date in modern Chinese history. As a few readers will remember, this date also personal to me.
[New Photographs Here]
Through the years CTH has remembered this date, noting the importance of that moment not only in China but also in the rest of the world who were watching events, trying to understand the student protest issues and also learning about the country that was beginning to break into a much larger modern world from the other side of the Pacific.
Part of the interest in communist China was driven by watching what was taking place in Eastern Europe, the collapse of communism. Just five months after Tiananmen, in November 1989 the Berlin Wall came down, signaling the end to communism in Europe. These months were fascinating for curious American Gen Xers who were witnessing an inflection point in history between two generations – and they could sense it.
For myself, June 4, 1989, also represented an awakening as I listened to several media broadcasts talk about the Chinese government response to Tiananmen as a “hard-right crackdown.” No, that didn’t make sense. On the left is bigger government, totalitarianism. On the political right is smaller government. If the government was shutting down freedom and liberty protests, that’s bigger government – not smaller.
So, in reality, what I was witnessing was a “hard-left crackdown.”
…. But the media kept repeating, “hard right,” as if repeating it over and over was going to make reality bend in a different direction. They said it so much it was almost like they were trying to convince themselves. I began thinking about things. I kept my mouth shut and my ears open. I began questioning things that were presented to me. Suffice to say, I began waking up.
They looked like me.
Well, not like me per se’, but that thing in their eyes looked just like mine.
The banner in front of them read, “Liberty or death.”
They were a long way away.
I did not know them, but this was my tribe.
On the other side of the water, my tribe was trying to achieve the same thing.
Millions of Eastern European Gen-Xers also hopeful.
Big hair, same music, similar clothes but different languages.
It was like people from the same tribe who had been scattered all over the globe suddenly standing up in unison.
It was 37 years ago tonight when the Chinese government sent the Mongolian Army into Tiananmen Square to crackdown on the mostly student protestors.
It is against the law in China to recognize today, memorialize the dead, or even speak publicly of this bloody anniversary. Few people know the short and long-term political ramifications to this event which extended far beyond the borders of China.
Many people are familiar with this image:
However, not as many people are as familiar with the wide shot.
That’s some serious courage right there.
The June 4th, 1989, anniversary holds a great deal of personal significance for those who witnessed the events. Many of us remember exactly where we were as the first reports started to leak out.
Few people know that most of the regular Chinese military refused orders to open fire on the protesting crowd. Hundreds of young Chinese military soldiers actually formed lines around the mostly student activists in an effort to protect them.
Chinese military general Xu Qinxian refused orders to deploy troops against the Beijing protests in May 1989. He was stripped from command of the elite 38th Group Army and imprisoned for five years.
The Chinese government eventually bypassed the regular army and instructed the Mongolian military divisions who carried out the orders.
No one really knows how many were killed, and even the families of the fallen were too scared to speak publicly.
Those who were lost live on in whispered memories of lore.
So many.
So young.
We remember.
…Then the tanks came….
“On June 4, the world marks 37 years since the Chinese Communist Party ordered its troops to attack thousands of peaceful demonstrators in and around Tiananmen Square. Chinese students, workers, and other civilians who lost their lives had gathered to exercise their natural rights and demand democratic reforms and accountability for corruption. We remember their lives and honor their legacy. No amount of censorship can erase the past. Those who sacrificed to uphold their unalienable rights of free expression and peaceful assembly will be vindicated someday.”
~ Secretary of State Marco Rubio, June 4, 2026
So, happy anniversary, Tim and Gwen Walz.
You and your communist husband picked a very memorable wedding date indeed!
Minnesota is delighted to see you go!
Go back to ComChina and rot!!
Never forget that bush did nothing to help these Chinese patriots.
So true!
That little rat-face James E. Baker was scurrying behind the scenes back and forth between George H. W. Bush and the CCP-PRC, keeping them all placated on behalf of the American investors who had moved factories to the CCP-PRC and were worried about their investments.
The same little rat-face James E. Baker was horrified and outraged at the notion that Vaclav Havel wanted to make Frank Zappa some kind of envoy in thanks for all that his music meant to the Velvet Revolution; it was part of the sound track which had sustained them all. Harumph, James E. Baker was putting his foot down on THAT; after all, Mr. Zappa had insulted his little wife and other D. C. wives (including Tipper Gore) who sought to shut down Frank Zappa and his music and his words, his free speech.
When you think about it, curious, how James E. Baker and George H. W. Bush were working together to make the CCP-PRC happy to do business and maybe they didn’t like Frank Zappa, either and considered him a problem.
I sure would like to find out how James E. Baker ever explained it to himself why he did not go to heaven with George H. W. Bush that day – “where we goin’ today, Bake?” Bush had asked him that morning when Baker came over to visit – “we’re going to heaven today” was Baker’s reply.
Baker told the story himself, at the funeral; he seemed pretty proud of it, like it was a good story, he apparently thought.
To me, it sounded pretty sick and indicated that Baker knew more than Bush about where he was going.
These are the people that have helped to strengthen the hand of the CCP-PRC all these years.
God knows, and our prayers keep the memory alive!
The people of china are remembering the Tianamen massacre and it seems as though
unrest is growing. It’s become very questionable whether Xi Jingping is in control of some vital sectors of the regime, in particular the military.
Their economy is a mess. Some of their oil reserves turned out to be water. Their military weaponry was discovered to be adulterated and in many cases inoperable…..such as sawdust where missile fuel should be, for one example. And there’s more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch
https://www.youtube.com/watch
I remember that day. However, I was faithfully listening to NPR and I don’t recall hearing the whole horror. Don’t know if that’s because I was young and not paying attention, or if NPR and its correspondents buried the truth.
Free thinking and free speech cannot be suppressed, not really.
I also remember Hong Kong 2019. The only news outlet* I have ever heard mention that China broke the treaty with Great Britain is recently on The Epoch Times.
*Long before I knew this platform existed
My college professor was just beginning her career when she accompanied her students to the Square. She was so proud of them for their courage. She witnessed many horrors that day; does not know how her own life was spared; spent many years doing hard labor in a “re-education” camp in the middle of nowhere in the interior of China; and was finally able to get a visa to America some time after her sentence was over. She came to California and found God, liberty (both physical and spiritual), and a new country to call home. She was a housekeeper until she learned enough English to go back to school so she could teach again. She is retired now, but prays for both America and China to be fully free again from the evils of communism.
As a history student, I felt that meeting a Tiannamen Square Survivor was significant. I could have asked her a million questions, but she is understandably still very emotional about it to this day, and her accent gets thicker as she cries to the point that I can barely understand her. It makes me all the more irritated with our traitorous Senators who won’t protect our Republic!!
Thank you, Sundance. I well remember the horror. Prior to Tiananmen Square, I had just taken a poly-sci course on Comparative Communist State Systems. I had to write two papers and I wrote one on China. I looked primarily (ironic timing as it turned on) at the treatment of artists and dissidents in China under the Communist Party State System. After generations of purges–where Mao would have a ‘flowering’ to lure out all the independent thinkers followed by a purge of all said flowers–I argued that China had effectively killed all culture and that a people critical and capable of opposing the government had been destroyed. I didn’t see any path forward for China. Then, about two months after I had written that, I saw that my calculus had not factored in students. All those brave, ardent, courageous students. And then the horror of watching as they were mowed down. I remained confused about the arbitrary distinction pundits and historians made between the far left and the far right–as it seemed to me an unnatural and false distinction. Misleading. But it took me years and years to have the confidence to see that it was an intentional misdirect. Thank you for the post.
Thanks for this impactful, historic Post, Sundance. I was 39 then and remember it well.
Five years later I traveled to Asia, including China, as President of a Houston based American biz consulting firm that assisted American companies to invest and/or build in China and Vietnam.
But since my family had lived in Taipei, Formosa 30 years before and were friends with the ROC President, General Chiang Kai-shek , I was very aware of the ruthless, power mad CCP on mainland China.
I first learned the difference of Left Big Govt opposed to Right Small Govt in 1964 when I canvassed neighborhoods for another of my family’s friends, Senator Barry Goldwater, who I saw at Tulane Stadium when he gave his campaign speech there (with Ronald Reagan, IIRC).
My grandson visited Taipei on biz six months ago and enjoyed it. I reminded him that when I was there in 1994, they were still angry at the USA for Nixon removing our official support for the ROC in order to get close to China to play them against the Evil Empire, USSR.
None the less, I was as horrified and angered as you must have been when the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred by the orders of the CCP.
I also learned during my trip there in ’94, that China has learned every way to ‘skin a cat’ in the last five thousand years and you simply cant do Biz with them, if you want to keep the shirt on your back in Biz, the Chinese Govt cannot be trusted, at all. I walked away from the deals we went there to consolidate,… they were just far to unreasonable to be able to make a profit on the investments from my clients. Vietnam was a far better story.
Long live the memory of China’s good former President, General Chiang Kai-shek,…. as well as the Tiananmen Square massacre ordered by evil CCP.