This is the anniversary that most of the world appears happy to have forgotten. Indeed, they've been working hard to bury the memory of what happened in Tiananmen Square and here am I, almost two decades later, still boycotting China. Why? Because there has been no advance whatsoever in the acknowledgement of fundamental human rights in China in all this time. None. Children are still being enslaved, free-thinkers are still being executed, rebellions are still being extinguished.

I don't say there have been no changes.

You can make money. Indeed, nowadays in China you must make money, which is like saying mandatory abortion is the same as freedom of choice. There are those to whom the freedom to make money is the only freedom, and those people are thrilled to the core of their being, which is just under the (very) thin skin. The rest of us, however, have seen no meaningful change in China except a creeping shamelessness about their authoritarianism. It's time to admit that capitalism does not make democracy inevitable; in fact, slavery is inherently capitalistic.

Hooking multinational corporations on the cheap (slave) labour, blowing up schoolchildren who are forced to work with explosives instead of taking lessons, poisoning townspeople, hoping to drive them from your rival's restaurant to your own, the New China can in no sense be considered an improvement on the old.

Just ask Taiwan.

As these multinationals, with vast international influence and no human accountability, become dependent on the cheap labour and salivate at the possibility of a billion-customer base, they sing the praises of a nation whose sole achievement is to give them something they want desperately.

Whores always praise their dealers.

I say it's time we all detoxed, came down off the cheap labour high and realized that China, which once enslaved their own people and co-opted local leaders, has now enslaved and co-opted all of us.

From the Guardian today, news of suppression and arrests. Quel suprise. 

China Marks Tiananmen Square Anniversary

Sunday June 4, 2006 2:16 PM

AP Photo XHG104

By ALEXA OLESEN

Associated Press Writer

BEIJING (AP) – Chinese police tore up a protester's poster and detained at least two people on Beijing's Tiananmen Square on Sunday as the country marked 17 years since local troops crushed a pro-democracy demonstration in the public space.

An elderly woman tried to pull out a poster with apparently political material written on it, but police ripped it up and then took her away in a van.

A farmer tried to stage a protest apparently unrelated to the 1989 crackdown, but he also was taken away in a van.

After dawn, a group of tourists tried to open a banner while posing for a photo, catching the attention of police, who quickly forced them to put the nonpolitical material away. They were not detained.

Discussion of the crackdown is still taboo in China outside of the semiautonomous regions of Hong Kong and Macau. Chinese television news and major newspapers did not mention the anniversary.

In Hong Kong, several hundred people holding candles gathered at Victoria Park, creating a sea of lights covering four soccer fields.

“I hope the Chinese government will recognize this dark history,'' Eric Lau, 14, said.

Retiree Yan San, 74, said he has attended the annual commemoration in Hong Kong since its debut in 1990.

“I have persisted in coming here for 17 years because I love freedom and democracy,'' he said.

China's authoritarian government has stood by the suppression of what it has called “counterrevolutionary'' riots, saying it preserved social stability and paved the way for economic growth.

The events of June 4, 1989, shocked Hong Kongers at a time when the territory was still a British colony but preparing to return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. The bloody suppression fueled fears that Beijing would extend its authoritarian rule to Hong Kong.

Chinese police monitored Tiananmen Square closely Sunday.

About 2,000 police were on guard in and around Beijing's “petitioner's village,'' a cluster of cheap hostels popular with people from the provinces who have come to the capital to complain to the central government.

Wang Dan, a leader in the 1989 protests who was jailed and then exiled to the United States, said in an article published in Hong Kong's Ming Pao newspaper Sunday that he holds out hope China will loosen its political controls.

“Although so far we can't see any loosening, personally I'm confident that day will come,'' he said. “Until the government reverses its position (on the 1989 protests), ordinary people won't easily forget the crackdown.''

Hong Kong leader Donald Tsang, while in China's southwestern Yunnan province to attend a regional cooperation conference, urged his fellow citizens to look at the Tiananmen crackdown practically.

“Mainland China has undergone a level of change that has gained the world's attention in the past 17 years. These changes have brought much prosperity to Hong Kong … so Hong Kong people can make an objective judgment,'' Tsang said.

Hong Kong Cardinal Joseph Zen, a fierce democracy advocate, disagreed with Tsang.

“How can we let it go? Should we just let it slide, forgive, pretend nothing happened? This is irresponsible. The successors of those responsible for the June 4 incident should give an explanation,'' Zen said.

From the Guardian Archives:

People's Army turns against the people

Monday June 5, 1989
The Guardian

It is, for all who watch and wonder about the Communist world, the ultimate obscenity. Worse even than Hungary or Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan for there the tanks and troops were alien invaders, rolling across borders in the fashion through time immemorial of big powers knocking little powers into line.But in China it is the People's Army turned against the people: shooting them indiscriminately in Tiananmen Square, on the streets, on their doorsteps, crushing them beneath tanks. A bankrupt, desperate, geriatric government, an edifice of ideology and aspiration, flaking and toppling before our eyes. We have been confronted, this week-end, by one of the great punctuation marks of 20th-century history.

No-one in the largest nation in the world will ever forget the first week of June in Beijing. A surge of desire for greater freedoms – not democracy as we know it, but an opening of society, a spirit of glasnost – has posed ultimate questions to a group of old men and, ultimately, at whatever cost, they have moved to stamp it out.

There was a chance, only a handful of days ago, that a more liberal strain of thinking within the Chinese Communist Party could, by its success in the backroom struggle for power, have harnessed the yearning for glasnost. But the old men won.

Are the manifest death throes of the Communist monoliths manageable? Can they be predicted and relied on? Could Tiananmen Square come to Red Square and savagely end a period of burgeoning hope?

The point is a starkly simple one. We, sitting comfortably in the West, assume that a spark in the individual human condition – a spark called freedom – must, in the end, make a bonfire of the system that seeks to snuff it out. We assumed, from Nixon on, that China could gradually evolve, that the business culture, the Americans with cheque books, would inevitably bring some form of democracy in their wake. Tell that, this bloody, awful morning, to the marines.

How frail is the Soviet spark? The Soviet people – because glasnost came first – may have acquired a patina of sophistication that the students of Beijing lacked. The Soviet Union is seeking to devolve power, to provoke argument, to manage change. The pensioners of the Chinese establishment had, long since, run out of ideas.

They must not get away with it. In the eyes of the West, because of the spark. And in the eyes of those who watch from Moscow, too, because the nightmare of Deng is theirs as well. We all, at root, know the Chinese march towards liberty must be resumed.