Thirty-six years ago today, the Chinese people were on the cusp of self-liberation.
An ambitious generation of young people, who were not jaded and cowed by the brutality of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, attempted to join the West in peacefully throwing off the bitter yoke of communism.
Nationwide freedom fever gripped the flower of China’s youth, from universities to labor unions, in town squares and beyond, all spring long.
In every city of consequence there gathered a crowd of millions hopeful for a democratic future. The crowd in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square is the one we remember most. First for the beauty, and finally for the horrors.
By Spring 1989, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was bankrupt after decades of failed communist policies. People lived among the ruins of a once great civilization. Poverty was the standard. Money printing had inflated away the savings of the people, and yet those connected to the party enjoyed wealth and privilege that could not be ignored.
As the protests grew the Party’s power began to slip. The situation became dire for the CCP, but they had brute force on their side.
On June 4, the CCP unleashed the People’s Liberation Army to crush the peaceful demonstrations. In Beijing, soldiers poured into the city shooting unarmed civilians indiscriminately. The death toll is not known, but some estimate it was 20,000 or higher. The flame of liberty in China was once again snuffed out.
And how did the West reward the CCP? By making them a most favored nation in the World Trade Organization. Under the uniparty leadership of the Bush and Clinton dynasties, the United States freely sold out the industrial and technological might of the West to a communist regime that had nothing to offer but the labor of their oppressed masses at great expense to our own homeland.
Since then, the CCP, which was on the brink of collapse, has grown into a formidable adversary. As we commemorate the atrocities of Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, we are reminded that, hidden within the Chinese people, a dim flame of liberty still flickers. We pray our leaders never underestimate the depravity of communism and that they remember the great and noble Chinese civilization that suffers beneath the shackles of that wretched ideology.