The Chinese Communist Party on Thursday will mark the 37th anniversary of its use of military force in the massacre of thousands of unarmed pro-democracy protesters in Beijing.
Commemorating the event is a new report by the Air Force China Aerospace Studies Institute that reveals the Chinese Communist Party’s new disinformation narrative seeks to “flip the script” on what happened during the military attack on civilians on June 4, 1989.
No longer seeking to erase all memory of the killings, the new propaganda effort attempts to portray the political mass murders as heroic work by People’s Liberation Army troops.
“Instead of suppressing memory through censorship, [the CCP] has now undertaken an effort to reimagine the events altogether,” the report said.
Beginning in 2022, the CCP started promoting propaganda images that seek to show PLA troops as “the real heroes of Tiananmen,” the report said.
“The protesters are not only labeled ‘counter-revolutionaries,’ but now they are also ‘terrorists.’ It was the PLA soldiers who ‘sacrificed’ to save the country from these enemies of the nation,” the report said.
The new propaganda campaign reflects greater confidence by the CCP that decades of censorship and disinformation about the events in 1989 produced a blank slate in public consciousness that can now be filled with the new narrative.
The new CCP narrative calls for never forgetting what the report said is a false version of events. The report includes a copy of a propaganda poster showing a saluting PLA soldier atop a tank under the phrase, “We salute the sacrifices of the People’s Liberation Soldiers during the counter-revolutionary rebellion of 1989.”
The image includes white doves flying with olive sprigs over the tank, signaling the soldier had worked to restore peace.
In a separate social media post, the CCP published the image of a monument to the “heroes of the revolution” marking the spot where pro-democracy protesters first gathered. The posting states: “Never forget the sacrifices of the PLA heroes who defended the country against terrorism during the June 4th Incident.”
The report concluded: “Despite the nearly four decades of intervening censorship and recent attempts to rewrite the narrative, the brutal response of the Chinese Communist Party against its own population’s efforts to have a greater say in their own governance will continue to inform international perspectives of the Party, the nature of the regime, and its willingness to commit atrocities to remain in power.”
Between April and June 1989, tens of thousands of students, workers and other Chinese, prompted by the death of a reformist communist leader, took over Beijing’s main Tiananmen Square to demand free speech and oppose CCP rule. At one point, the protesters erected a statue similar to the Statue of Liberty, which they called “the goddess of democracy.”
On May 20, 1989, then-Chinese Premier Li Peng declared martial law, and PLA forces began mobilizing in preparation to forcibly clear the square.
Martial law, however, galvanized the protesters, who turned out in even larger numbers, prompting CCP leaders to view the protests as a mounting threat to party rule.
On June 4, PLA armored personnel carriers moved into the square, crushing unarmed protesters beneath the treads. Troops then fired automatic weapons into crowds of unarmed civilians.
Official Chinese government estimates put the death toll at 200 killed and 7,000 wounded.
However, declassified cables from Britain and other foreign governments estimated the loss of life to be as many as 10,000 people killed, with many thousands wounded.
After the massacre, the CCP launched a decades-long propaganda and information warfare narrative to spin the events at Tiananmen.
The information operations were partially successful through a long-term campaign of suppression and censorship that sought to gradually erase the attack from popular memory.
Chinese media remains barred from mentioning June 4, which is also banned from school curricula, blocked from inclusion in textbooks and purged from all public commemoration.
The global suppression campaign has been largely successful and now extends to all Chinese artificial intelligence chatbots, which are rigorously trained to avoid all mention of Tiananmen.
“Anecdotal experiences of foreigners living in China often include stories about otherwise well-educated and informed Chinese people never having seen iconic Tiananmen-related images like ‘tank man’ or the ‘Goddess of Democracy’ and having very little knowledge about the 1989 protest movement other than ‘something bad happened,’” the report said.
The tank man was a lone Chinese dissident who risked his life and stood in front of a line of tanks headed for Tiananmen Square in a bid to halt the operation. He was never identified by name.
Candlelight vigils are expected to be held around the world by those seeking to remember the bloody events of 1989 in Beijing.
