Communists Pack Tiananmen Square, Site of Historic Massacre, on 100th Anniversary

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP or CPC) packed Tiananmen Square with celebrants Wednesday to hear a speech from President Xi Jinping on the 100th anniversary of the Party’s founding.

Of course, no mention was made of the atrocity perpetrated by the communists in that same location on June 4, 1989, when Chinese troops slaughtered thousands of student demonstrators.

China’s state-run Global Times said the square was filled with “cheers and applause” and “genuine joy” during Xi’s belligerent speech, a hardcore nationalist stemwinder that hailed the Communist Party as too powerful to be restrained by any alliance of free nations or international human rights organization.

“Xi said the founding of the CPC has profoundly changed the destiny of the Chinese people, and also changed the world. Since the CPC was born, it established its mission to seek happiness for the Chinese people and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” the Global Times gushed.

In a key passage of the speech, Xi rejected all oversight of China’s human rights abuses and insisted the Communist Party, which only counts about six percent of the population as active members, is absolutely synonymous with the Chinese state and people:

Any attempt to divide the Party from the Chinese people or to set the people against the Party is bound to fail, Xi said, noting “The more than 95 million Party members and the more than 1.4 billion Chinese people will never allow such a scenario to come to pass.” 

China welcomes helpful suggestions, but will not accept sanctimonious preaching. “We are eager to learn what lessons we can from the achievements of other cultures, and welcome helpful suggestions and constructive criticism,” said Xi.

“We will not, however, accept sanctimonious preaching from those who feel they have the right to lecture us,” he said. 

The Global Times described Tiananmen Square as filled with giddy spectators waving red Communist flags while military aircraft roared overhead, including the first public appearance of the Z-8L heavy transport helicopter, and the largest display of J-20 stealth fighters to date.

Xi’s speech saluted the “revolutionary martyrs” of the Communist Party but, of course, had no room for the dead of Tiananmen Square – a sea of silent and uncounted victims rather than cheers and applause. 

The Communist Party forbids commemoration of the 1989 massacre and has never released an accurate count of the dead. Beginning in 2020 and continuing this year, the Party used the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to crush the largest Tiananmen Square vigil on Chinese soil, the event held for the previous three decades in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park.