The comparisons between the protests now happening in Iran and the June 4th 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre deserve a fuller recounting of what happened in China twenty years ago. The world was flush with democracy, hot off the heels of the Soviet Union's impending collapse. Chinese students and intellectuals were mourning the death of a democratically-inclined reformer Hu Yaobang. The mourning sparked off angry protests since prior to his death Yaobang had been disgraced and compelled to engage in a humiliating bout of "self-criticism" for his views.
The protests were huge, seeing over 1 million people in Tiananmen Square at one point, and happened over a long time period, starting in April and ending on June 4th. It was an enormous movement, and encompassed workers nation-wide as well as the middle classes thronging in Tiananmen Square. Everyone was convinced that the world was going to see the collapse of Chinese communism as well as Soviet communism that year. But they didn't. After prevaricating for a while and offering some cosmetic concessions and reforms, Jiang Zemin, the Chief of the Military, ordered the army to put down the revolt and "clear" Tiananmen Square by 6am on June 4th. They were done with 20 minutes to spare.
One of the most terrifying aspects of what the Chinese government did on June 4th, was and is the total censorship of any details pertaining to the protests. On June 4th 2007, the Chengdu Evening News printed a notice "Paying tribute to the strong-willed mothers of the June 4th victims". The government cracked down and three editors were sacked. What's most disturbing about this, though, is that the clerk who approved the notice only did so because he was totally unaware that anything significant had happened on June 4th, and assumed it was pertaining to some mining disaster.
I could go on to write a lof of stuff on how criminal any state control of information and congregation is, and how basic and essential freedom of information and the right to congregate are to human beings, but unsurprisingly, Star Trek: The Next Generation says it better: the renowned episode "The Best of Both Worlds", aired one year after the massacre in 1990, referenced "The USS Tiananmen Square" as one of the many Starfleet ships destroyed by the unstoppable Borg cube (read: unstoppable Chinese authoritarianism) at the famous Battle at Wolf 359. Awesome.
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