By Brad Ruszala, Founder and News Director, NMI News Service
I was in high school when the tanks rolled into Beijing on June 4, 1989. I watched the nightly news like everyone else, saddened and stunned. Here were ordinary Chinese people, students, workers, families, standing up to their government and saying the things that we Americans took for granted. We want democracy. We want freedom of the press. We want to be free. They built a statue of freedom in Tiananmen Square and it felt like a great awakening, like the start of something historic. Could the Chinese people free themselves from the yoke of the CCP? When Nixon went to China years before, the idea was that commerce and progress would bring the Chinese people into the free world, that they’d see what freedom looks like and want it for themselves. That engagement, that hope, it all seemed to be unfolding.
And then the government murdered them. Thousands of unarmed students and civilians. And then it erased them.
Thirty seven years later, the Chinese government doesn’t allow its own people to visit the graves of those who died. It scrubs the internet of any mention of what transpired in Beijing. It’s as if they never existed.
The real Chinese people, the ones who come here to experience what freedom actually feels like, they’re not the enemy. They’re people living under the thumb of a government that surveils them, controls them, and crushes dissent.
So when people try to tell me that China is a great future partner, I remember 1989. I remember what we all hoped for, and I remember what their government did when its people asked to be free. That’s not ancient history. That’s a preview of what the Chinese Communist Party does when it encounters resistance. It crushes it, denies it, erases it, and moves on.
The NMI News Service is one more place on the internet that remembers. One more place that won’t pretend it didn’t happen. One more place that remembers when the Chinese people asked their government to breathe free air.
