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?