Riyan Chishti
May 31, 2019
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HONG KONG — IN THE three decades since the People's Liberation Army staged its bloody 1989 massacre of pro-democracy students amassed at Beijing's Tiananmen Square, foreign journalists, human rights activists and outside observers of China have been confidently predicting two events likely to follow.
The first was an expected reversal of the official Communist Party verdict that labelled the Tiananmen Square protests as a "counterrevolutionary riot" and absolved the leaders who ordered the crackdown of any wrongdoing.
The second was the assured presumption that the next mass popular uprising was just a hair trigger away. The Tiananmen Square uprising and crackdown left a festering sore just beneath society's surface. The next explosion of popular unrest, it was thought, would likely bring the end of the Chinese Communist Party's rule.
In both cases, the haughty predictions have proven to be fallacies, expressions of hope over harsh reality. Thirty years after the soldiers brutally cleared the square on June 4, 1989, and as the party has moved to systematically erase the memory of the massacre from the history books and the collective memory, there has been no revisiting of the verdict, and no repeat uprising.
