Tienanmen Square was a Student-Mandarin attempt at Counter Revolution, by Andrew Taylor

Today commemorates the 20th anniversary of the bloody suppression of the Tienanmen Square protest. It has brought back memories of those days of student demonstrations
against the backdrop of the mainstream corporate media's ecstatic embrace of Mikhail Gorbachev's abandonment of solidarity with the Warsaw Pact countries, and his surrender of the USSR's long history of support for anti-imperialist struggles in the Third World.

I was a doctoral student at McGill and was close friends with an international student from the PRC who was also doing graduate studies. My friend had been a boy when the Students of 1960s China had been led into the anti-party terror known as The Cultural Revolution. Because his father was an engineer and party-member he was hounded, persecuted and then banished to the remote countryside by the Red Guard students. His family suffered a great deal for some years until the terror-scourge of the Cultural Revolution were utterly rejected.

My Chinese friend strongly opposed the growing revolt at Tienanmen Square and explained to me that the Chinese students were being manipulated to make a power-grab just as had been the case at the start of "The Cultural Revolution"

On May 13 twenty years ago, thousands of pro-democracy students had occupied Tienanmen Square in a hunger strike to press for a new order in China. At the same time, international media was swarming Beijing in anticipation of a state visit by Mikhail Gorbachev.

At the conclusion of Gorbachev’s visit, the government declared martial law, but it was half-hearted. Protesters blocked the army from entering Beijing and it made a retreat.

The nation was in crisis. The atmosphere of the day in Europe and the Big Business press was preoccupied with the downfall of socialist country after country in
the betrayed Warsaw Pact. It seemed that everywhere Mikhail Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Shevardnadze went in the Warsaw Pact, solidarity was betrayed, and secret understandings between the Kremlin and Washington were put into effect.

At Tienanmen Square the thousands of "pro-democracy" activists portended a similar fate. Would People's China also capitulate social ownership of the productive forces to counter-revolution. A difficult decision was made to crush the revolt and so preserve China's socialist character.

For the capitalist west this was a bitter pill since it ensured that a great section of world markets and territory would not be available for domination and exploitation.It meant the growing Chinese economic and political centre was to remain as a challenge to the dominion of big capital.

It does not matter what Mrs. Clinton is sermonizing about today regarding "human rights" as the leader of world imperialism is visiting the America-plundered Middle East.

Let History judge sovereign China's slender choices.