In May 1989, the world watched and anxiously waited to see how the Chinese government would respond to mass protests in Tiananmen Square - just outside the seat of government. On the night of 3 June, the leaders in Beijing gave their answer. Thousands of the unarmed protesters were arrested, wounded or killed in cold blood by military forces. The Communist dictatorship decided that a massacre was a small price to pay to remain in power..
Now it is time to use a little first person English - a rare event in this journal. In the first installment of this three-part series, it was contended that the annual candlelight vigils in Hong Kong to honor the Tiananmen protesters had been fading in recent years. Happily, I was wrong, and I regret the error. In fact, the yearly, 4 June vigil turned out a record number of participants on the twentieth anniversary of the tragedy (2009) - an amazing 150,000. Last year, 113,000 people came together for the event. While this correction is inspiring, it also underscores a larger and more disturbing point. As opposed to the good people of Hong Kong, why have Western governments (US, UK, Europe) swept the crimes committed by the Chinese government in 1989 under the rug for the past two decades? First, an analogy is needed.
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Over the last few months, the Syrian government has fired on peaceful demonstrators in the streets calling for democracy. Women, who have led many of the protests, have been targeted by the security forces. While many female activists have been thrown in prison, others have been shot and killed outright. In response to the brutality shown by Damascus, President Obama and the EU called for President Assad to step down and imposed economic sanctions. This was a proper course of action. Now I (a little more first person) would like you to imagine something. Imagine if President Obama and the leaders of the European Union reacted to the heinous crimes of the Syrian government with greatly expanded trade, large capital investments and virtually no criticism. That would be irrational and unethical, right? Well, that is exactly how the West, particularly the US government, reacted to China after the Tiananmen Square massacre. How can that be explained? In order to answer this question, it will be necessary to revisit the mindset of the foreign policy elites in the late Cold War.
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In 1972, President Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994) made an historic visit to China for the twin purposes of courting the Soviet Union's most formidable Asian rival and diverting the attention of the American people from the lost cause of the Vietnam War. While cynical in nature, the new relationship between Washington and Beijing was a brilliant stroke of grand strategy by both the US and China in balancing the expansionist designs of the Kremlin. Although Nixon deserves some credit for the initiative, the actual architect of the new China policy was US National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger (b. 1923). As an intellectual disciple of nineteenth century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), Kissinger, a Harvard PhD, is a proponent of Bismarck's realpolitik - whereby strategic interests are placed above all other considerations - including values. To suggest that realpolitik is not consistent with the ideals of a democratic state would be a gross understatement. Realpolitik is a cold, ruthless form of statecraft that ultimately pivots on the Machiavellian notion that 'the end justifies the means.' Not only is this profoundly wrong and unethical but it is also bad policy.
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In his new book On China (2011), Kissinger praises Chinese Communist state founder Mao Zedong (1893-1976) as "the philosopher king." Despite the fact that tens of millions of Chinese lost their lives under his despotic regime, Kissinger believes that Mao's "excesses" may ultimately be forgiven if China becomes a superpower and "remains united." One of those "excesses," the famine caused by Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' policy (1958-61), resulted in at least 20 million needless deaths in a drive toward industrialization. One historian with access to key Chinese archives has recently placed that number closer to 45 million. Again, that is just one "excess" during Mao's tenure. According to scholars Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao was responsible for more than 70 million Chinese lives lost during his 1949-1976 reign.
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On Tiananmen, Kissinger writes, "Like most Americans, I was shocked by the way the Tiananmen protest was ended. But unlike most Americans, I had had the opportunity to observe the Herculean task Deng (Deng Xiaoping, 1904-1997) had undertaken for a decade and a half to remold his country; moving Communists toward decentralization and reform; traditional Chinese insularity toward modernity and a globalized world." Note Kissinger's calculated phraseology - "how the Tiananmen protest ended" - with no reference to violence. Kissinger's realpolitik-based foreign policy simply discounts people. It is a game of the powerful, for the powerful and by the powerful - a game where people are pawns on a chessboard. If one's opponent sacrifices half of his pawns (the means) to achieve victory (the end), he is a master and deserves admiration. That, essentially, is Kissinger's view of not only Mao and Deng but also of the world, and it is a view that must be categorically rejected.
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The basis of American foreign policy had thus been set toward China well-before the beginning of the presidency of George H.W. Bush (father of George W. Bush) in January 1989. Six months after the Tiananmen Massacre, Bush defended his decision to send a high-level delegation of American diplomats to Beijing stating, "(China) is a billion-plus people. They have a strategic position in the world that is important to us...I do not want to isolate the Chinese people (17 December 1989, New York Times)." Sound familiar? This was the Kissinger-Nixon line at work. Over the next year, relations between Washington and Beijing were 'normalized,' and Western corporations and companies began to accelerate the pace of relocating their manufacturing facilities to the "billion-plus" country with an almost unlimited supply of cheap labor.
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Western governments believed investment in China would create a middle-class capable of negotiating more rights for the people as a whole in the future. While perhaps not an unreasonable policy toward a benign, semi-democratic state, the idea of maintaining normal, diplomatic ties and investing in a state that brazenly murders its own people is antithetical to every ideal Western democracies are founded upon. As a result of this twisted policy, Western consumers, who buy untold quantities of cheap, Chinese goods every year, now finance Beijing's oppression.
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When the people of Hong Kong stand together on 4 June every year to say "I Remember Tiananmen, Spring 1989," they are doing more than remembering a crime by the Chinese government - a crime erased from the history books and from official memory in China. They are reminding us both of the past and current nature of the Chinese regime. In short, the world has an inescapable obligation to the Chinese people and itself. Beijing must be held accountable for its human rights abuses and blatant disregard for the standards of the international community. This will be the subject of the final installment (part three) next Tuesday.
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(Photo: Of all the images of Tiananmen, this one of a man who halted several tanks by refusing to budge is probably the most famous. He has been known as 'tankman' ever since that day.)
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To watch an incredible video of 'tankman' facing down a column of tanks on 5 June 1989, please click onto the following link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-nXT8lSnPQ
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J Roquen