China defends government action at Tiananmen Square in 1989

China has defended government action during the Tiananmen Square incident on its 30th anniversary in a rare move, accusing the West of stirring up public opinion against Beijing over the matter.

China has successfully become “the world’s second largest economy, with rapid improvement of people’s living standards” since the government’s decision to deploy troops to Tiananmen Square to disperse the protesters there on June 4, 1989, the state-run newspaper Global Times said in an editorial published in its English-language edition on Monday.

The editorial, titled “June 4 immunized China against turmoil,” defended the government’s decision 30 years ago, arguing that the deployment was aimed at “helping the country leave the shadow behind, avoid disputes, and help all Chinese people face the future.”

“Merely afflicting China once, the incident has not become a long-term nightmare for the country. Neither has the incident’s anniversary ever been placed in the teeth of the storm. It has become a faded historical event, rather than an actual entanglement,” the Global Times said.

According to the editorial, the dissidents fled abroad after 1989, and Western politicians and media outlets stirred up public opinion and attacked China every year onthe anniversary of the incident.

“Having become politically mature, we now understand the significance of the country’s continuous development through evolutions instead of revolutions,” the newspaper said. “As a vaccination for the Chinese society, the Tiananmen incident will greatly increase China’s immunity against any major political turmoil in the future.”

Foreign Ministry spokesman has also defended the government’s actions as “completely correct.”

“I can tell you that the Chinese government has already had a clear conclusion about the political turmoil that occurred in the late 1980s. The tremendous achievements in the development of the new China in the past 70 years have fully proven that the development path we have chosen is completely correct,” Geng Shuang said at a regular Foreign Ministry briefing on Sunday when he was asked two questions related to the incident.

Defense Minister Wei Fenghe also made similar remarks on Sunday, describing the government’s handling of the unrest as “a correct decision,” referring to China’s stability since the incident.

“Throughout the 30 years, China under the Communist Party has undergone many changes. Do you think the government was wrong with the handling of June 4? There was a conclusion to that incident. The government was decisive in stopping the turbulence,” he said in response to a question at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.

The June Fourth Incident refers to student-led protests in Beijing in mid-1989, which turned violent when the government sent in the military to deal with the turbulence. The military confronted the demonstrators who were trying to block the troops' advance towards Tiananmen Square. Estimates of the death toll vary from several hundred to a few thousand.

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