Blog

Why is the party so frightened of a date? Because it knows it holds power without a mandate. No Chinese voter ever put it in office. It governs through censorship, propaganda and, when those fail, force. Its apologists like to claim that the Tiananmen protests were never peaceful, that they were a CIA-funded colour revolution. Yet a government that had truly defeated a foreign plot would say so loudly. It would teach the episode in schools, mark the victory each year and let people argue about it freely. China does none of this. The very fact that the word “Tiananmen” still cannot be spoken, decades on, gives the lie to the story.