Spinor Info

Beijing celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre with umbrellas.

This weirdness came about as plainclothes policemen were trying to interfere with foreign television crews by blocking cameras with open umbrellas:

Umbrellas in Beijing

Whatever reason they have for doing this, it is strikingly pointless. Thanks in part to the tireless efforts of Chinese police, there are no mass demonstrations on Tiananmen Square, no protests, no silent vigils. Journalists who went there would be coming back with boring shots of a square that looks just like it looks on any other day… were it not for the umbrellas.

So why the umbrellas? Why not just round up and haul away foreign journalists? Is this a regime with a (guilty) conscience? When that happened in Hungary, when members of Hungary’s communist Politburo began relabeling the “counterrevolution” of 1956 as a (popular) uprising, the end was not far down the line: within a couple of years, the country opened its borders to East Germans fleeing to the West, transformed itself into a multi-party democracy, and arguably began the chain reaction that led to the collapse of the Soviet empire.

I think we should officially declare June 4 from now on Umbrella Day. (Hey, if we can have a Towel Day…)

It has been 20 years ago this week that Chinese authorities cracked down on the Tiananmen Square protests, killing an unknown number of people.

Arguably, many (most?) Chinese are better off under a regime that produced unprecedented economic prosperity, while providing limited, but not insignificant, civil freedoms. Who knows what would have happened had the protesters succeeded. The record of Eastern Europe is spotty at best; some countries turned into fairly decent democracies, in others ethnic nationalism reared its ugly head, yet elsewhere one dictatorship was just replaced by another.

Yet it’s curious how shy the Chinese are about the events that took place 20 years ago. One can almost see parallels between this and how the events of 1956 were treated in communist Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s. First, it was the “counterrevolution”, that is, if they talked about it at all, which they preferred to avoid. Then, one party official had the courage to stand up and acknowledge that it was an “uprising”, even a “popular uprising”. These words, we now know, marked the beginning of the end for the monolithic one-party system: a dictatorship, no matter how benign or well-intentioned, cannot afford to have a conscience. Is the same thing happening in China?