Twenty years since the Tiananmen Square massacre

The official toll of just 241 deaths, including soldiers, is not credible. The regime at first denied any civilians had been killed. The Chinese Red Cross reported 2,600 dead, but withdrew the figure under government pressure. Independent analysts estimate that up to 7,000 people died, although the actual toll may never be known.

Ignited by student protests for democratic reform in April, the mass movement rapidly spiralled out of official control as the working class raised its own social demands. At least 100 million people in 400 cities participated in protests and demonstrations of one form or another. Along with industrial workers and the urban poor, low-ranking officials, clerks, teachers and even police were involved, driven by their hatred for the social inequality and bureaucratic profiteering that followed Deng Xiaoping’s embrace of the capitalist market in 1978.

Over the past 20 years, various Western politicians and media pundits have continued to issue hypocritical statements denouncing the “communist” regime’s suppression of “democracy”—all based on the false identification of Stalinism with socialism.

The Maoist regime established in 1949 was never socialist or communist. Its anti-proletarian character was revealed yet again in 1989, when the CCP’s peasant-based army drowned the workers’ movement in blood. The massacre established the conditions for the Chinese working class to be integrated into the circuit of global capitalist production as super-exploited cheap labour.

Beijing’s own claims to have suppressed a “counter-revolutionary rebellion” are no less false. The shooting of poorly-armed Beijing workers, who used their bodies to resist 40,000 troops armed with AK-47 rifles, tanks and helicopter gunships, was a gigantic advertisement to the Western powers that the Stalinist police-military apparatus would guarantee their investments from any challenge by the working class.

The world’s major corporations responded to the massacre with a flood of capital that transformed China into the cheap labour “workshop of the world”. China’s economy is now six times larger than in 1989 and the country is the world’s second largest exporter after Germany.

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