Reporting Tiananmen: The Rest of the Story

Old Progressive Irish media continue to report on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square incident with a key qualification: the West would be wrong to assume that this was about a struggle for Western-style democracy. It is true, after all, that leading student protesters denied they were trying to verthrow the state. Some talked of Communist reform or a better form of socialism. And, of course, to the extyent that Tiananmen was rooted in internal Chinese politics, the outcome could never fit a precise Western paradigm.

But this analysis is like the same kind of thinking that reflected Irish Times and RTE praise for the “civic” NGOs in East Germany and Czechoslovakia in 1989. Once change got under way, these mystical third forces just slipped away.

China’s economy is, in some respects, very capitalist already. Now, we have the diaries of Zhou Enlai showing that he, a Communist Party leader, saw democratization as leading to something very close to Western liberal democracy. Other East Asian democracies – S Korea, Japan, ROC/Taiwan etc .. have their Asian characteristics, their Confucian traditionalism and all the rest. But they are still recognizably “bourgeois democracies,” to use the old left’s term of abuse. Though the path might be tortupous, this is also the likely outcome of any real opening in China (assuming it does not trigger a rightist authoritarian backlash).

But old Progressive Irish media outlets only reluctantly celebrate liberal democracy in Eastern Europe and deny its relevance to China and Cuba.

Irish policymakers should treat the challenge of regiume change and democratization in Communist states on the basis that the struggle for democracy is indivisible and should be constituted as a component of Ireland’s moral voice and national interest on the world stage. Academic and media obfuscation designed to sideline this issue should be challenged wherever they occur.