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The Price of Freedom; Remembering Tiananmen Square 30 Years Later

If you live outside of China today, chances are you are free to speak about what happened on this day, June 4 1989, in Tiananmen Square in Beijing without fear of reprisal, including jail, exile, or severe social and economic penalties to you or your family. You probably haven’t been gaslighted into believing that merely having the knowledge about what happened on that day could be dangerous to your country’s social fabric. You probably haven’t been cajoled into thinking that the economic tradeoffs your government has made have been worth the cost of crushing your freedom of speech, political freedom, and your right to criticize your rulers.

If you live in China today you may not even know that on this day 30 years ago hundreds to thousands (exact numbers are still disputed) were killed by the Chinese authorities during protests where mostly college students called for a more open and democratic government. You may not know that your government drove tanks over your countrymen and women in a public square that is now one of the most surveilled places on earth, and where evidence of what happened was quietly dissolved and scrubbed. You may not know that your country declared martial law and deposited 250,000 troops into your own city to quell what started as a peaceful protest for basic human rights that those in the “West” often take for granted, and even have begun to intentionally give up.

If you live outside of China, and do not know what happened on June 4, 1989 in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square (the “Gate of Heavenly Peace”), please change that today, so that those who died that day will not have died in vain.

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten. The living sap of today outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand entrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continued oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot; only by unintermitted agitation can a people be sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.”
American Abolitionist and liberal activist Wendell Phillips on January 28, 1852.

“Tank Man” at Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989.
Jeff Widener/AP, FILE

— This has been your very banal report —

Hover over any * to see some Extra Facts for Nerds within the article text.

Learn more from the other sources (in addition to the above chart) used for this article:

On a personal note, since today is also my mother’s birthday, I wanted to relink to the very first Banality Report which was inspired by, and dedicated to, her: Local Child Not Infected With Polio!