China Should Apologise Tiananmen Massacre

Symbolic Graphics

SALEEM SAMAD

Quietly the infamous day passed off without large vigil to mark the 31st Tiananmen Square massacre on 4 June.

Hong Kong is the only territory of mainland China where a candlelit vigil, mass commemorations are held for the event since 1990. The event attracted tens of thousands of participants and visitors from all over the world.

Hong Kong police have banned the annual vigil marking the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre for the first time in 30 years, citing coronavirus pandemic restrictions.

The candlelight vigil was in memory of tens of thousands pro-democracy movement were brutally suppressed on 4 June 1989 at ancient Qing dynasty Tiananmen Square built-in 1651, ending months of unarmed student-led demonstrations in China.

The governing Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has never acknowledged the massacre.

About 180,000 troops and armed police marched into Tiananmen Square and crushed a student protest calling for democratic reform following the death of a progressive leader in CCP, who had been deposed by Chairman Deng Xiaoping.

Well, no death toll has ever been officially released, but rights groups and Chinese in exile estimate hundreds, if not thousands were killed when China's elite People's Liberation Army was deployed to crack down on unarmed protesters in Beijing.

Surely there was global outcry and media made screaming headlines around the world, with iconic images such as the "Tank Man" bravely defying the troops on the square.

China's hardliners exploited that event to oust reformers who had been sympathetic to the demonstrators. The hawks have rewritten history and demonizing political opposition and dissidents.

Tiananmen Square has brought the hardliner bigwigs of CCP into drawing board to rethink the state policy and implemented methods of repression and strict state control, according to Zhang Lifan, who was a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1989.

Post Tiananmen, many of China's reformers (including the head of the Communist Party himself) were condemned to lifelong house arrest, while some dissidents fled to the West in collaboration with a network of exiled Chinese in Paris who advocates on how to bring democracy to China.

China's state authority censorship increased manifold with a particular emphasis on purging the protest from Chinese news and history books. Within a year of the massacre, the Chinese government "had closed 12 percent of all newspapers, 13 percent of social science periodicals and 76 percent of China's 534 publishing companies," according to Minxin Pei's From Reform to Revolution.

China's hawks were initially perturbed by the Tiananmen pro-democracy struggle and further frightened by the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. America's victory in the Cold War and the outright dissolution of the USSR shook Beijing hardliners.

The Tiananmen syndrome has impacted proactively upon open-door policy in trade, commerce, and investment. The economic policy has catapulted China to become an Asian giant and gradually came at par of Western countries.

Amid anti-American conspiracy theories, which portrayed the devious United States continually undermine the Chinese people. The purge of pro-American reformers in China left few reform advocates in positions of power, rest were toppled and send into exile.

The hawks also adopted "hyper nationalists" concepts and soon became official Party doctrine in the Patriotic Education Law in 1994, which China later tried to impose on Hong Kong.

Behind the curtain, the reformers in China keeping their heads low, silently watching the Hong Kong's pro-reform protests and of course giving up hopes of Chinese apology to the families and survivors for the massacre and another ten of thousands thrown into dark dungeons in punishment to dare challenge the CCP hawks. #

First published in The New Nation, 10 June 2020

Saleem Samad, is an independent journalist, media rights defender, recipient of Ashoka Fellowship and Hellman-Hammett Award. He could be reached at saleemsamad@hotmail.com; Twitter @saleemsamad

Asian countries flatten coronavirus curve

Photo: Reuters

Asian models that actually combated Covid-19
SALEEM SAMAD

Globally nations are convinced that washing hands with soap, wearing a mask, maintaining social distance, and staying home are prime health safety tips to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

The scenario in Taiwan, however, is similar but strikingly different from most countries in Asia, Africa, America, and Europe struggling to combat the Covid-19 crisis.

In a new coronavirus twist, South Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, and Hong Kong are examples of containment that have been hailed for using those lessons learned from combating the new coronavirus, officially Covid-19 and a relative of SARS.

By the time the virus began to spill over China’s frontiers in January, many health think-tanks believed that territories having proximity would take the major brunt for a large-scale outbreak.

Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong territories are closely interconnected with mainland China, unilaterally imposed travel restrictions on nationals returning from China, contravening the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) insistence that a travel ban was not necessary.

The precaution, nevertheless, came at a significant economic cost to these international hubs, which all rely on mainland China as their biggest trading partner and source of tourists too.

Amid these grim trends, South Korea has emerged as a sign of hope and a model to imitate as coronavirus cases have dropped sharply to a single digit. 

The South Korean president hoped that containment progress gave hope that the coronavirus outbreak is “surmountable” in other parts of the world.

Well, after after the deadly SARS epidemic in 2003, Taiwan established a Central Command Centre for Epidemics. The country had introduced national drills in educational institutions, government establishments, and factories for preparedness on bio-safety.

The Command Centre has quickly compiled a list of 124 “action items,” including border controls, school and work policies, public communication plans and resource assessments of hospitals, according to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The 210 countries typically struggling with the coronavirus pandemic have gambled on a containment strategy. It has socked hundreds of countries that have imposed strict shutdowns and stay-home policies to hear that Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Vietnam residents venture outside only by necessity while national emergency remains enforced.

Unlike wealthier Asian neigbours, Vietnam does not have the capabilities to conduct mass testing, but surprisingly the country has zero fatalities with no new cases in the last several days. The status of coronavirus cases was 268 and 202 recovered as of April 20.

Hong Kong, an autonomous state of China promptly imposed border control from early February and made quarantine in hospitals mandatory for those returning from mainland China.

Hong Kong’s population of 7.5 million had had just 1,026 confirmed cases of Covid-19 infection, recovery of 602 and four deaths as of April 20, according to a new study published in the health journal Lancet.

A study by Harvard University’s Centre for Communicable Disease Dynamics estimates Singapore detected almost three times more cases than the global average due to its strong disease surveillance and fastidious contact tracing.

In Singapore, amid the coronavirus outbreak, quarantine, and isolation protocols were strictly enforced. 

The government has deployed plainclothes police officers to track persons in quarantine and used government-issued mobile phones to keep tabs on them.

The challenges remain for Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore of a growing number of recovered Covid-19 patients relapsing especially in South Korea, raising fresh concerns among scientists and health authorities after the countries successfully flattened the curve. 

First published in The Dhaka Tribune on 20 April 2020

Saleem Samad is an independent journalist, media rights defender, recipient of Ashoka Fellow (USA) and Hellman-Hammett Award. Twitter @saleemsamad; he can be reached at saleemsamad@hotmail.com