There has been surprisingly little comment on the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Dare we hope that someone might finally have looked into exactly who those demonstrators were? I for one would love to know. After all, one certainly does not need to be an advocate of liberal democracy to be an opponent of the regime in China. And various other types of such opponent are decidedly more numerous and long-established in China even today, never mind twenty years ago.
There are the Koumintang, and those to the right even of that. There are the Xinjiang Islamists, the people who want to restore life expectancy in Tibet to half its current level by bringing back theocratic feudalism, and a number of equally unpleasant separatist tendencies elsewhere. There are the Trotskyists, and those Stalinists who are not Maoists. There are now, and up to a point there were even in 1989, those who hold to the old, old Maoist faith against China’s transformation into the giant standing contradiction of the theory that capitalism and freedom go hand in hand. And many more besides.
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Maybe there will be more comment next month, when we reach the twentieth anniversary.
ReplyDeleteThey normallystart these jamborrees a lot earlier than this.
ReplyDeleteBut if they do get going, then let's be ready with the questions.
As with the the Afghan enemies of the Taliban, as with the Iraqi enemies of Saddam, as with the soixante-huitards, as with so many others besides, who, exactly, were they?
It really does matter.