I went to the Asia Society last evening for a fascinating conversation among three people who witnessed the massacre of students and other protesters 30 years ago today at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. They were Orville Schell, Nick Kristof and Zha Jianying. I’ve also read all the commentary in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
The gist of all this commentary is that China’s Communist Party leadership has erased all memory of what happened as part of a “national amnesia.” As Schell asked last night, can a nation be healthy and normal if it represses its own history?
While all very stimulating, i think the real point is that the impulse toward absolute control, witnessed that night in Tiananmen, is very much in charge of today’s China. President Xi Jinping, determined to avoid any possibility that any member of Chinese society could challenge his one-man rule, is imposing the world’s most digitally advanced dictatorship with voice and facial recognition technologies, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, a variety of social credit rating systems and other tools. He is seeking to wipe out any trace of Western thinking about civil society or human rights.
Moreover, the Chinese party-state is selling these systems to dictators and strongmen around the world. It also is using the huge wealth it has accumulated over the past 40 years, since normalization of U.S.-Chinese relations in 1979, to bolster strong-man rule in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It has lent Venezuela some $60 billion, for example. And its One Belt, One Road Initiative is luring in many developing nations while at the same time allowing Beijing to project military power through the control of ports. We documented much of this at the Overseas Press Club’s May 9 event. See here.
The same impulse toward authoritarian control is even being displayed inside the United States, as I document in my book, “The New Art of War: China’s Deep Strategy Inside the United States.” See here. The same type of Communist leaders who ordered the slaughter in Tiananmen Square are now employing incredibly sophisticated digital hacking and espionage techniques to steal technology in America, penetrate our governmental institutions, and co-opt key institutions such as Hollywood studios, universities and think tanks.
So I argue that the real lesson we should be taking away from this 30th anniversary is that the Communist Party is infinitely richer and far more technologically sophisticated today and is determined to impose its will globally. It seeks to build a new Chinese empire spanning the globe. The key question is whether we have the will to recognize it and to defend our own values and interests, here at home as well as around the world. That, to me, is the real takeaway as we mark this most somber of dates.
