The Gate of Heavenly Peace

The Tiananmen Massacre happened today in 1989. The Chinese regime massacred unknown thousands of people in Beijing and throughout China after weeks of unprecedented mass protests inspired by popular uprisings against Communist regimes in eastern Europe that year. I remember how a lot of pundits at the time compared the events of 1989 to the revolutionary year 1848 in Europe that saw popular uprisings against established power all over the continent (there were similar uprisings across Africa in 1989 that are not so well remembered). The uprisings in Europe from Poland to Romania mostly succeeded. By 1991, Soviet style Communist rule in Europe was but a memory. Only the Chinese uprising truly followed the 1848 precedent. As in Europe in 1848, brute force and violence defeated a brave and hopeful liberal revolution.

The rebellions in Europe ended the Cold War. The massacre in Tiananmen Square ushered in the brutal new world of post-modern capitalism. Deng Xiaoping discovered that liberal democracy was not necessary for a flourishing market economy. What followed was a tyrant’s paradise. Strongmen everywhere discovered that they could deliver a certain measure of prosperity to most of their subjects and get rich too. Cash and consumer goods guaranteed their grip on power even more effectively than the police and their terrors -- however those remained. The democratic hopes of 1989 perished beneath an iron fist in a silk glove full of lottery tickets. The neoliberal West fell for it, gushing about China’s amazing economic growth and rapidly rising economic power. Some Western writers (such as Ezra Vogel) even claimed that the Tiananmen Massacre was a necessary blood sacrifice for this success. The dissident Fang Lizhi was having none of it:

Moreover, the claim that Deng “lifted” millions from poverty confuses the doer and the receiver of action. To the extent that economic “lifting” has happened in post-Mao times, it has been the menial labor of hundreds of millions of people—working without labor unions, or a free press, or a neutral judiciary, or protections like OSHA rules—that has done the heavy lifting. This workforce has improved not just the lives of the millions themselves but, even more, of the Communist elite, who in many cases have soared to stratospheric heights of opulence. World Bank figures show that in China the Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality in populations, has skyrocketed from 0.16 before Deng’s reforms to a current 0.47, near the high end of the scale. This dramatic change has much less to say about “hundreds of millions” than it does about one of the maxims that Deng delivered at the outset of reform: “Let a part of the population get rich first.

And now, a cabal of plutocracy and white supremacism wants to work the same “miracle” in the USA. Tyranny conspires to crush the world’s first constitutional democracy – by violence if necessary.