Thirty years ago today, the Chinese government sent the army to violently suppress demonstrations in Tian’anmen Square. No one—or no one outside the government—knows how many people were killed in the square and the streets of Beijing that day, and it’s unlikely the number can ever be known. In China, the fact of the massacre has been crushed and washed away as thoroughly as the bodies and blood of the protesters were. It is a blank space, the anniversary now observable as a yearly glitch in the 21st century information infrastructure, as that blankness is defended and expanded by preemptive censorship. The country is more repressive, with more elaborate and suffocating means of repression, than it was 30 years ago. It worked. The people asked for a better nation, and the nation slaughtered them for asking and then lied about it, and imposed the lies by force and with more lies, and it was all a success. China is prosperous. Communism is hard to find but the Communist Party is firmly in charge. There are people in their 30s who have no idea it ever happened. “Firmness paid,” Richard Nixon reportedly told the Chinese, invoking his own experience with putting down unrest. Richard Nixon was never held to account for what he did, either. Nixon’s people went on to work for Donald Trump. What will June 4 mean, 30 more years from now? What else will have been forgotten, or been made to be forgotten?
