It is the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen
Massacre and whatever China is doing (and has been doing) to suppress the
voices of protests demanding political reforms and more space to democracy, the
visuals of the annual ‘protest’ event in Hong Kong are symbolically strong
enough to tell the world the flame is still burning, and some day, it will find
its way, when the tanks and the armed soldiers would not be able to crush the
dissent.
And it is something – the dissent – that every subsequent
Chinese dictator has worked on tirelessly - to push away, as far as it can be,
to the abyss, from where it would not be able to question the authority of the
rule of the communist party.
The China
that we know today as the economic powerhouse of the globe was never free politically
if we assess it today on the benchmark of the universal norms of political freedom
in a democratic set-up.
In fact, the political freedom and the related individual
rights died in the world’s most populous country of the day on the day it got
its freedom from the Chinese civil war in 1949.
Since then, it has been an open secret how China has consistently
killed the voices of political dissent and demands of enhanced democratic
rights. The Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Massacre tell us how ruthless
the Chinese communist regime has been.
Also, the opening of economy that China started
in late 1970s was very cunningly leveraged to buy out and dry out the demands
of political freedom. It, in fact, was practiced at a much enhanced pace after
the Tiananmen Protests.
Today, China
is an economic superpower and is on the way to become the world’s largest
economy.
Today, the world order cannot be expected and imagined
without China.
And still, China
is the same repressive regime that it was, during the Cultural Revolution and during
May-June 1989, when thousands were killed by the party’s order.
China has done all to silence the
pro-democracy voices and to erase the Tiananmen Square
protests from the Chinese memory and history. Activists have been jailed. Many disappeared.
Media is as free the ruling dispensation thinks to be. Masses have been forced
to toe the line or have been co-opted.
But, with a large middle class, that is more educated,
more connected to the world and professionally more aspiring, it is going to be
difficult, once the dream of the ‘economic boom’ starts stagnating. That is
bound to happen and then, it could be the ‘undoing’ of all that. It will take
time but it is bound to come, because the spark is there and when it spreads to
the millions of the voices, it will be unstoppable.
Reports say today was the strongest protest demonstration
in terms of the number of protesters, around 1,80,000 (the New York Times says
quoting the organizers), largest since 1989, a heartening sign for everyone
except the Chinese ruling elite and its coterie.
What should be more worrying for the Chinese communist dictators
is the youth participation, the youth born around and after the massacre of
1989. They are increasingly turning up in large numbers.
What should be more worrying for the Chinese communist
party is a China
that is more connected and more traceable in spite of the sophisticated
monitoring machinery the government has. Had it not been so, we would have
never known about the Wukan protests, about many self-immolations of Tibetan activists
and about the Xinxiang
riots.
The relatively free island of Hong Kong (in the People’s
Republic of China)
can become the symbolic beginning of the undoing as it has preserved the
tradition of the vigil night revisiting the horror of the June 4, 1989 every
year since 1989.
The protest visuals of vigil night today are strong enough
to push us to think the spark is still there and ‘all was never lost’. In fact,
it has always been there, protesting silently, with its spiral building up. And
the Chinese government, its ‘dictators’ and the ruling Communist party realise
it.
©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com