TIANANMEN SQUARE 32 YEARS ON

Police arrested an organiser of Hong Kong’s annual candlelight vigil remembering the deadly Tiananmen Square crackdown and warned people not to attend the banned event Friday as authorities mute China’s last pro-democracy voices. In recent years some tens of thousands of people have gathered in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park to honor the victims who died when China’s military put down student-led pro-democracy protests on June 4, 1989, killing thousands.

The PRC’s ruling Communist Party has never allowed any public events marking the military’s attack on protesters and citizens, and security was increased in the Beijing square Friday morning, with police checking pedestrians’ IDs and tour buses shuttling Chinese tourists as on any other day.

The PRC Authorities have actively prevented all discussion of the events on the Chinese mainland, where the few remaining activists and victims’ advocates are put under increased police monitoring and taken away on involuntary “vacations” around the anniversary. Responding to a question about the crackdown, Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin on Thursday reiterated China’s stance that its response to the “political turmoil” of 1989 had been correct.

The PRC’s efforts to suppress public memory of the Tiananmen events have in recent years focused on Hong Kong, where the June 4 Museum was closed this week and police again Friday warned residents not to attend the vigil. A nighttime commemorative event in Victoria Park has been banned for a second year under coronavirus pandemic restrictions, although the city has had no local cases for over six weeks. 

This latest action comes amid sweeping moves to quell dissent in the city, including a new national security law, election changes and arrests of many activists who participated in pro-democracy protests that swept Hong Kong in 2019. Hong Kong police said Friday that they would be cordoning off parts of Victoria Park, including football fields and basketball pitches, to prevent any gatherings to commemorate the crackdown. 

Local media including the South China Morning Post newspaper reported this week that the police were planning to deploy about 7,000 officers on Friday to enforce the ban on unauthorised protests. Taking part in an illegal gathering has a maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment.

Chow Hang Tung, vice chair of the group, was arrested Friday morning, according to the alliance, which organised the vigil and ran the June 4 Museum dedicated to the memory of Tiananmen. After the ban was issued, Chow urged people to commemorate the event privately by lighting a candle wherever they are. Last year, thousands went to Victoria Park to light candles and sing songs. 

More than 20 activists including Chow were charged for their participation in an unauthorised assembly. Two other key members of the Hong Kong Alliance — Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho — are behind bars for taking part in unauthorised assemblies in 2019.

An appeal from Tiananmen Mothers, published on the Human Rights in China website, urged the party to release official records about the crackdown, provide compensation for those killed and injured, and hold those responsible to account. Tiananmen Mothers said 62 of its members have died since the group representing victims’ relatives was founded in the late 1990s. It said many young Chinese have “grown up in a false sense of prosperous jubilance and enforced glorification of the government (and) have no idea of or refuse to believe what happened on June 4, 1989, in the nation’s capital.”

The suppression of commemorations of the Tiananmen victims has been accompanied in recent years by harsh repression (if not genocide) against religious and ethnic minorities in Tibet, the northwestern region of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, along with the sharp curtailing of political rights in Hong Kong. Apologists  for the PRC abound, from the hard left activists, too  the hard right new liberal free marketeers - turning a blind eye to brutal repression (anywhere) is simply unacceptable in the twenty first century.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD

Research has revealed that the global production of solar panels is using forced labour from China's Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province. Xinjiang produces about 45% of the world's supply of the key component, polysilicon, the research by the UK's Sheffield Hallam University says. The report produced by Sheffield Hallam University states that the material is obtained under a massive system of coercion, a claim denied by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) ruling authorities.

The report urges top panel makers to source the component elsewhere. Solar panels are in huge demand because of climate change. Polysilicon is extracted from mined quartz, and the research says the world's four biggest manufacturers use materials tainted by a massive system of coercion.

"The [Chinese] government claims that these programmes are in accordance with PRC [the People's Republic of China] law and that workers are engaged voluntarily, in a concerted government-supported effort to alleviate poverty," the report says. "However, significant evidence - largely drawn from government and corporate sources - reveals that labour transfers are deployed in the Uyghur Region within an environment of unprecedented coercion, undergirded by the constant threat of re-education and internment."

The PRC has placed millions of indigenous Uyghur and Kazakh citizens from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR or Uyghur Region) into what the government calls “surplus labour” and “labour transfer” programmes. An official PRC government report published in November 2020 documents the “placement” of 2.6 million minoritised citizens in jobs in farms and factories within the Uyghur Region and across the country through these state-sponsored “surplus labour” and “labour transfer” initiatives. 

The PRC claims that these programmes are in accordance with PRC law and that workers are engaged voluntarily, in a concerted government-supported effort to alleviate poverty. However, significant evidence – largely drawn from government and corporate sources – reveals that labour transfers are deployed in the Uyghur Region within an environment of unprecedented coercion, undergirded by the constant threat of re-education and internment. Many indigenous workers are unable to refuse or walk away from these jobs, and thus the programmes are tantamount to forcible transfer of populations and enslavement.

The PRC is facing mounting criticism from around the world over its treatment of the mostly Muslim Uyghur population in the north-western Xinjiang autonomous region. Human rights groups believe the PRC has detained more than a million Uyghurs over the past few years in what the state defines as "re-education camps". There is evidence of Uyghurs being used as forced labour and of women being forcibly sterilised.

We are living in a very connected world, in the 1930’s most people could state or at least claim that they did not know what went on in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, despite the courageous activities of journalists and political activists at the time to reveal the truth. In our 21st century connected world no one has the excuse of ignorance any more. The People’s Republic of China is a brutal, repressive, totalitarian dictatorship that represses all the peoples living within its borders - largely regardless of ethnicity.

The PRC has a long a dark record of brutality that goes back to the days of Mao, save for getting more technologically sophisticated, and delivering g prosperity at price to an expanding Middle Class, little appears to have changed. The Communist Party still controls the state, one of the last literal Empire’s and it thoroughly enjoys its privileges at the expense of the human rights people’s of China.

The PRC has a long well documented history of oppression - targeting minorities including the Tibetans, the Uygyr, and others. The PRC has also targeted ethnic Chinese citizens who resist oppression, seek freedom of thought, freedom of religion, or who have expressed concerns about environmental issues, land ownership and the cost of economic development that is being paid by the ordinary people.

The current UK Conservative Westminster PM, is keen, if not over-keen, perhaps with an eye to easing a post BREXIT trade deal with the USA, to send UK warships to confront the PRC in the South China Sea. This projection of UK military power east of Suez (the second time since 2003) may sit easily with the PM’s vision of ‘Global Britain’ but rather than sitting comfortably with military and strategic reality, it may owe more to the politics of fantasy island.

Not that Human rights violations and repression have ever stood in the way of economic or business dealings and commercial interests, previous Conservative and Labour PM’s have been much more accommodating to the financial and commercial (and political) interests and trading opportunities with the PRC and other repressive states in our recent past. George Osbourne, then Chancellor, desperately sought access to finance from China and encouraged the PRC’s involvement the in developing nuclear energy projects within the UK. 

What we had over the years of visionless New Labour, Conservative-Lib DeM and Conservative years is governments at Westminster, which remained hand in glove with despotic oil and gas-producing regimes in the Middle East ( aside from the vassal like relationship between the UK and Saudi Arabia ) who have had has little real interest in developing renewable energy to achieve energy independence or supporting democracy and social justice in the Middle East.

Teresa May’s weak wobbly and unstable Westminster government, along with its predecessor and successor worked actively to pull the rug out from under the renewables sector by cutting the feed in tariff something that cost highly skilled jobs here in Wales. As long as the UK state and the Westminster elite remains content to quietly look the other way when public attention is drawn to the PRC’s and Saudi Arabia’s gross human rights violations, then things are going to continue much as they have.