Never forget Tiananmen Square

China's authoritarian regime has long lied to its entire population about what happened in the early morning of June 4, 1989. Those who know it’s a lie don’t dare speak out. And those who don’t know, especially the young, are limited in their access to the truth.

Beginning in late April 1989, peaceful student demonstrators filled Beijing's iconic Tiananmen Square. They demanded democracy, freedom of speech and of the press, and an end to government corruption. Their gathering, which predated the fall of the Berlin Wall by more than two years, drew more than a million people together of all ages and from all professional backgrounds. Their gathering inspired hundreds of smaller demonstrations throughout China.

For weeks, there were sharp divisions within China’s Communist regime about how to handle these protests. But in the end, they did what communists do, suppressing dissent and silencing criticism with rivers of human blood.

In late May, the throngs of protesters prevented the People’s Liberation Army (communists are masters of irony) from advancing into Tiananmen Square and ending the protests. A standoff ensued, but it didn’t last. On the evening of June 3, the army received its orders to crush the protests “by any means.” The army began using live ordnance and even dumdum bullets, mowing down those who stood in their path to Tiananmen. They killed between 300 and 3,000 unarmed demonstrators and injured thousands more. To this day, the exact body count is unknown because the government suppressed all discussion of this in the aftermath.

According to the government’s initial accounts, the vast majority of those wounded were military and police. In any other context, this obvious lie would provide an amusing commentary on the efficacy of Chinese soldiers. It can’t be easy to lose a fight in which you have all the guns and tanks on your side.