Observation-Tiananmen and the US: Same Picture, 31 years apart

On June 4th 1989, I was in Graduate School in Atlanta and I was having dimsum with other Chinese graduate students. It was at Hong Kong Harbor on Cheshire Bridge Rd. It was in between the main educational institutions in Atlanta where Chinese students are matriculating. As we were enjoying our social gathering and our food, bits and pieces of news were coming through about the crackdown in Tiananmen square. We had been well aware in the days and weeks previously of the protests in Tiananmen Square. We were all at various stages of hopefulness. We had hoped that the mere fact that the students who are in the square protesting are still alive is a good omen for China and for Chinese democracy. Zhao Ziyang was the main communist party leader that had allowed the protests to continue even after Premier Gorbachev had ended his state visit to China, and he became the beacon of hope for us. We remained hopeful even after he was ousted in May of 1989 and there were no movement in the government stance, little did we know that martial law had been declared.

The News was ominous that morning, as the televisions in the restaurant were showing CNN and the coverage showed the  Chinese Army tanks moving in overnight into the square. We all rushed over to Emory University where some of the graduate students there had set up an impromptu rally in the student union. We all took turns speaking our minds and letting go of our emotions. Obviously, there were lots of tears, lots of anger, and despairingly, lots of dashed hope. The Chinese graduate students that I knew from China were mostly sympathetic with the protesters, some even bragged that they knew people who were camped out in the square. It was to them that we turned to earlier that month in order to decipher the signals from Beijing, for the most part they were cautiously optimistic in reading the tea leaves from the Chinese government. All of that disappeared in that one day. The mood changed swiftly from hope and optimism to despair and pain as they became fearful for the lives of their families, their friends, and most all, for the people who were still in Tiananmen Square throughout that week.

Our moods changed yet again as the camera trained on the solitary man with the bag who confronted the tank. He was not going to budge; he was not going to let them through to what we all expected to be a massacre of the people in the square, that was a momentary flash of defiance, we never found out who the lone protester was.

The Chinese government had pulled out all of the local troops that had been on the square during the protests, they were considered to be suspect because they were from the capital city and they knew many of the students, they probably had  families among the protesters. The Chinese government moved in troops from the North who had no connection with the capital city. They had no familial or friendly relationships with any of the protesters. They were to be the cudgel with which the Chinese government will put down the demonstration. That was the plan all along.

Here we are 31 years later. Many things have changed, although the kind of democracy that the protesters were hoping for had never come to fruition. Many of those protesters have escaped to the West and they have found a place to reside in the West, it was not exactly a home but also not exactly a jail either. China has changed significantly since that day but what is important is that Chinese policy about dissent has not changed. China’s actions in Hong Kong recently has shown that they are actively changing their mode of governance in Hong Kong. The laws made in the days immediately after the turnover from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China in 1997 has been either changed or suspended. We expected this to happen all along because we knew it would be very difficult for a Tiger to change his stripes, but once again we were very hopeful that over time the global political situation would change enough to make progress in the Chinese society, enough so that the idea of a democratic self-government would squeeze into China, in between the cracks. It never happened.

Now let us turn the camera to cities here in the United States: Minneapolis, San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Louisville, Atlanta, Columbus, and your own town.

The chaos on June 4 from the United States in 2020 is similar to the chaos in Tiananmen on June 4 in 1989, we see tear gas, we see rubber bullets in 2020 while they used real bullets in 1989. In China we saw armored troops, we saw the police in their militarized equipment using the riot shields. One of the significant differences is that the armored troop carrier's or tanks in the streets of Beijing are not present in the USA of 2020, yet. Although this present administration seem eager to put those weapons at the disposal of the police and troops.

There was an instance in Washington DC of a military helicopter using aggressive flying tactics to disperse the crowds, tactics that our military had used in Iraq and Afghanistan as a show of force against our military enemies. Think about that a second, same tactics being used against citizens as they did against enemies.

We saw pictures of National guardsmen in military equipment battle ready to take on an imaginary enemy on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a very jarring visual to say the least. We see flashbang grenades and tear gas launched into the crowds to disperse them and we see also see some aggressive tactics being used on the demonstrators.

Yet we also see the police taking a knee with the protesters. We see the Sheriff in Flint MI take off his helmet and join the protesters in a march. We saw many police taking knees and then hugging the protesters because they were ashamed of what some of their brethren had done. We also saw a black woman police officer chase and shut down a fellow policeman after he was acting aggressively to a protester that was already on her knees. Thank goodness for the differences. It differentiates the United States of America year 2020 and the People's Republic of China 1989. Yet the similarity is what is troubling, or should be troubling, and no amount of dissimilarity should obfuscate the fact that we as a nation and culture are closer to being the totalitarian police state of China od 1989 than to the United States that we had assumed to be the norm in our dreams.

The present administration had threatened to mobilize the federal troops into each of the cities and sovereign states to forcefully put down the protests and riots. It sent chills down my spine as I recalled the Chinese government bringing in northern soldiers to replace the police and soldiers stationed near Beijing because they were too close emotionally and were too familiar with the protesters. The media footage of the police taking a knee and their show of  empathy with the protesters is not what a totalitarian regime wants to see.

How did it ever come to this? How did we, the land of hopes and dreams for those Chinese dissidents in 1989 come to be so familiar to what they were experiencing in China? How did United States of America in 2020 become more similar to People's Republic of China 1989 than to the United States in 1989?

I hear people proclaiming that we are better than this behavior, on both sides of the divide. We protest that these rioting and looting is not the real us, yet, we see that there are white people who are looting and rioting in order to fan the flames of hatred against the protester. The latest tabulation says that out of the arrests made in Minneapolis, 20% of the people are from out of state, agitators, and fomenters of chaos? Definitely. For what cause? We do not really know. Rumor is that there are both left wing and right-wing agitators among the groups. The present administration wants the blame the antifas for everything, even though no one has the true breakdown of numbers yet, that is lying at best and promoting a race war at worst. I don't know how many of the rioters fall under either camp, but I could see the white supremacists’ agitators from Charlottesville being encouraged by the present administration of taking advantage of the chaos. So actually, it is us, a microcosm of us.

Going back to the comparison between the United States and China, The Chinese laws and legal system and infrastructure in 1989 were not race based, although some are, specifically the racial minorities in the northern China. The governance rules were built to protect the public order, the public order being any dissent against the communist party. It was totalitarianism.

Here in the United States in 2020, the protesting was against the uneven application of laws because of inequalities in the economic and judicial systems. The governance rules were also supposed to be built to preserve the public order, except in our case the intent was not supposed to be totalitarianism, it was supposed to protect and promote dissent and plurality.

So how did the two events in supposedly different systems end up looking so much alike? Is it because we have grown to be closer to totalitarianism?

The problem with drawing the parallels with the two events is that on the one hand we have 20/20 hindsight, after all, 31 years had elapsed between Tiananmen Square and June 4, 2020, whereas the protests around the nation for George Floyd is still ongoing and no one knows how it would end. But the similarities are jarring all the same and portends more sinister things to come. One does not need to be very imaginative to see that.

I hope I am being pessimistic.