Tiananmen Square Massacre Quotes

According to a 2006 study, 90 percent of China’s billionaires (calculated in Chinese yuan) are the children of Communist Party officials. Roughly twenty-nine hundred of these party scions—known as “the princelings”—control $260 billion.54 It is a mirror of the corporatist state first pioneered in Chile under Pinochet: a revolving door between corporate and political elites who combine their power to eliminate workers as an organized political force. Today, this collaborative arrangement can be seen in the way that foreign multinational media and technology companies help the Chinese state to spy on its citizens, and to make sure that when students do Web searches on phrases like “Tiananmen Square Massacre,” or even “democracy,” no documents turn up. “The creation of today’s market society was not the result of a sequence of spontaneous events,” writes Wang Hui, “but rather of state interference and violence.

China’s economy last year grew at its slowest pace since 1990, when the country faced international sanctions in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Feinstein has been a China-booster from the early 1990s, often backing pro-Beijing legislation in the Senate. Her husband has strong business links in China, which she denies have had any influence on her. In 1997 she compared the Tiananmen Square massacre to the shooting of four students at Ohio’s Kent State University in 1970, and called for a joint US–China commission on the two nations’ human rights records.35 Lowe left Feinstein’s office after the FBI warned her about him. China’s intelligence agencies also target Westerners not of Chinese heritage for information-gathering. In 2017 a long-serving State Department employee, Candace Claiborne, was indicted for accepting money and gifts from Chinese agents in exchange for diplomatic and economic information.36 She had been targeted by the MSS’s Shanghai State Security Bureau after she asked a Chinese friend to find a job in China for a family member. Claiborne maintained secret contact with MSS agents for five years, supplying them with information in return for help with her ‘financial woes’. She was sentenced to forty months in prison. In the early 1990s Britain’s MI5 wrote a protection manual for businesspeople visiting China; the advice remains relevant today: ‘Be especially alert for flattery and over-generous hospitality … [Westerners] are more likely to be the subject of long-term, low key cultivation, aimed at making “friends” … The aim of these tactics is to create a debt of obligation on the part of the target, who will eventually find it difficult to refuse inevitable requests for favours in return.

In China, they officially call it the “June Fourth incident” because the state-controlled media doesn’t like referring to that 1989 incident as the Tiananmen Square massacre. It might give people the right idea. Students have often been at the forefront of pro-democracy protests, which is why repressive regimes love to cut funding to education because they need lots of stupid people to say fuck yeah this totalitarian regime is awesome. See: Trump voters.

It’s starkly clear, looking at all these cases, that the US government is demanding an impossible burden of proof to ban products from China. Surely, the policy makers who worked on these laws are aware of the loopholes. Why are they so reluctant to close them? Some argue it is because corporate America would not want them to. In 1989, after the massacre of student protestors at Tiananmen Square, the United States said China’s most favored nation (MFN) trading status would be contingent on improvement in human rights.

To look squarely at the suffering of the ordinary people whose misery is recorded in the transcripts makes me feel that I am not qualified even to be called a “survivor.” It is true that I was one of the last people to leave Tiananmen Square on June 4th, but I did nothing to volunteer myself during the bloody terror of the massacre’s aftermath, nothing to show that a kernel of my humanity had survived. After I left the square, I did not go to Beijing Normal University campus to check on the students from my alma mater who presumably had also left the square. Still less did I consider going out into the streets to minister to dead and wounded whom I did not know. Instead I fled to the relative safety of the foreign diplomatic housing compound. It is no wonder that the ordinary people who lived through the butchery might ask: “When great terror engulfed the city of Beijing, where were all those ‘black hands’ ”? Fifteen

Neither China nor Israel needs the other to repress their unwanted minorities, since both have spent years developing techniques to do so, and yet their collaboration and collusion is increasing.42 A burgeoning defense relationship surged at the end of the Cold War, solidified by Israel’s selling of weapons to Beijing after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, when many other nations imposed an arms embargo. Israeli company Magal Security Systems, builder of high-tech fences and walls along Israel’s southern and northern borders and the long separation wall between Israel and the West Bank, has installed detection systems at China’s airports.