What I Learned from Tank Man and the Heroes of Tiananmen

It was 17 years ago today, June 4, that armed forces of the People's Republic of China rolled into Tiananmen Square and opened fire upon thousands of student protestors, who had audaciously constructed a paper-mache replica of the Statue of Liberty in the center of square.

It was the formative political moment of my life - I was 19 years old, living in Massachusetts, taking summer classes. I remember the pride I felt as an American when the committed young college students - most of whom were my age then - put up Lady Liberty as their symbol of democratic unity, and to honor our Ideals (the ones enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution).

I remember more vividly the horror I felt seeing those tanks roll into the nighttime square on video, the crackle of gunfire everywhere, the shaky images of student running while holding lifeless bodies, the grotesquerie of dead kids on the ground, reminiscent of a large scale Kent State (which I had learned about as a kid from my mother, who was once a hippie anti-Vietnam protestor).

Most clearly from that June 4 summer I remember, with his shopping bags full of courage, facing down a menacing column of Chinese tanks. Refusing Death's intimidation, unaware his resolve was to be broadcast around the world - a symbol of Democracy as inextinguishable as the Statue of Liberty's torch.

According to Wikipedia the attack by the Government upon these students and intellectuals left "between 400 and 800 civilians dead, and between 7,000 and 10,000 injured. An initial report from local hospitals put the number at around 2,000 dead."

I remember the shock I felt watching a government oppress its own citizenry like that, and the gratitude I felt to be and American where, even though George H.W. Bush was president, our leadership would never intimidate or attack its own people to preserve its own power.

Then, after early condemnations of the attack from the Bush I administration, I recall that Brent Scowcroft was sent to secretly deal with Deng and open diplomatic channels for the normalization of trade relations between the U.S. and China. I remember hearing the argument that we could affect democracy in China through trade and business contact.

But I was shocked we would want to do business with dictators whose actions went against their peoples' best interest. If we the United States, the planet's richest and freest country, could not afford to boycott killers and repressors of Democracy, what country in the world could?

Next, as the Chinese Democracy Movement, or "June 4 Movement," was squelched, with its leaders and participants either executed, put into prisons or deported, and their supporters purged from government and the media, I remember Bill Clinton campaigning against Bush I and his business-as-usual policy towards the Chinese Communist Leadership.

I supported Bill Clinton as a volunteer, worked at Madison Square Garden during the 1992 Democratic National Convention, and then voted for the man. I even attended his Inauguration and stood with the crowds in the freezing cold.

It must have been just weeks after taking office that Clinton reversed himself, in a total betrayal of his campaign rhetoric, and announced he supported Most Favored Nation (MFN) status for the People's Republic of China. Right then and there, I knew Clinton had sold me out, since China was my most important issue.

Clinton offered the same reasoning: our business ties to China would enable more Democracy in China. We'd influence them to be more like us.

But those dead Chinese kids in the Square were my age!

Next, I remember a decade of U.S. manufacturing jobs going to China. Jobs that here offered high salary, vacations, health care, a pension, went to China and became subsistence wage jobs carried out in sweatshops and conditions that would make the most callus Gilded Age Robber Barron blush.

U.S. companies lead by the Gap and Nike and today by Wal-Mart were only too happy to exploit the advantages of Chinese Police State. (I would only learn later that Hillary Clinton had been on the Wal-Mart Board of Directors for an extended time during that evil company's most spectacular growth period).

Meantime, our manufacturing base was depleted while our political fortunes -- and our Democratic heritage -- went into steep decline as the tech-obsessed, sex-scandal ridden Clinton Years ended and, in 2001 We the People were saddled with George W. Bush.

Next came September 11, 2001.

Under Bush, we've abandoned whole sections of the U.S. Constitution, like those regarding checks and balances, due process and the rule of law, and ignored the Rights given to the People under the First and Fourth Amendments. We've invaded countries without an honest cause; established a worldwide archipelago of secret prisons; tortured and kidnapped so-called "Enemy Combatants;" declared U.S. citizens "Enemy Combatants;" wiretapped the American citizenry; and have accepted the niceties of the "Free Speech Zone" and an elitist government that conducts the People's business in secret. Oh yeah, and we quietly accepted fixed elections in 2000 and 2004.

In China, our Internet corporations actively work with the authorities to censor and suppress dissident thought. They will do the same here, I bet. In China, they have a press that is indistinguishable from state propaganda. Here, in the United States, the mainstream press reads more and more like it was scrubbed by Karl Rove.

It seems to me that through trade and through acceptance of our political differences, we've become more like China that China has become like the U.S.

We're more like the repressive police state that killed it's own people on June 4, 1989, than China is like the democracy we were on that same date. It's not hard at all to imagine this Government or its successor killing American democracy protestors in some great city square.

Who knows what Bush and Bloomberg and the NYPD would have done if thousands of protestors at the 2004 GOP convention had defied them and gathered upon Central Park's Great Lawn?

What's worse: we have a lack of Tank Men in the United States.

There was Cindy Sheehan down in Crawford. There's Russ Feingold in the Senate (the only one to vote against the Patriot Act in 2001). There was that "Go F**k yourself, Mr. Cheney!" guy on the Gulf Coast. There was Steven Colbert at the White House Correspondent's dinner.

But we need more. We need many, many more Tank Men. How dow we find them? From where do they come? New Orleans? Iraq's killing fields? From among the 9/11 families? I don't know.

Let's all mourn for those killed and maimed this day Seventeen Years ago. Let's mourn for the dead and fight for the living in China, in the United States, and everywhere. Friends, we have common cause.

And let's pray for more Tank Men.