However, the vast majority of the people in the cities who faced the loss of their state pensions, their jobs in the state run factories, and a radically different way of life took to the streets in protest when they got wind of what was going to happen. In Beijing they took to the streets and they protested for days and the protesters congregated in the massive public space we know as Tiananmen Square. A small minority of the protesters decided to use this anti capitalist protest as a platform to protest against the Communist party that controlled China and to agitate for democracy, but by and large the vast majority of the people who were protesting in Tiananmen Square over those few days in June of 1989 were protesting against the coming capitalist take over of their economy.
The corporate media in the west, especially the corporate controlled media in the United States decided to frame the whole protest as a pro-democracy protest. They conveniently ignored all the protesters who were railing against western corporations and capitalism, and instead they focused on the tiny minority who were shouting pro democracy slogans. When the tanks rolled in and the army began shooting, the western corporate media were able to condemn the repressive measures the Communist government used to quell the protests on one hand, while on the other they were able to fill their corporate coffers with profits made off the backs of those same protesters who were forced into working in western factories in the ensuing years. The people they lionized as heroic and brave twenty years ago are slaves to the corporations that own the media outlets today.
The Chinese people don't want western style democracy now and they didn't want it twenty years ago. They wanted to keep their secure jobs. They wanted to keep their rent controlled apartments. They wanted to keep their government pensions and their way of life. They didn't want this:
or this
and they didn't want to become wage slaves and to have to work 14 hours a day in factories like this Nike shoe plant in China.
The millions of warm bodies who follow orders willingly were long coveted by western multi national corporations, they viewed the Chinese population as a mass of people just waiting to be exploited for their gain. And twenty years ago, they finally got their wish.So while you enjoy all those goods that say 'Made in China,' you can thank those tanks that rolled into Tiananmen Square. They didn't take away democracy from the Chinese people, instead they brought in western multi national corporations so that a few people could become wildly wealthy while the rest of us lost ground. And if you really want to learn from the events in China twenty years ago, then you need to learn to stop shopping at big box retailers, stop supporting multi national corporations, and you need to start buying locally from locally owned businesses.
