“Police warn families of Tiananmen crackdown dead not to visit graves on 37th anniversary,” reads the Newsday headline.
How rude of those families!
How dare they show such utter disregard for the right of the Chinese Communist Party to “grind you up and crush your bones”! Or to have your “heads bashed bloody,” as dictator Xi Jinping has put it.
Especially after everything Xi and the Chinese authorities have done to ease all this tension by facilitating a therapeutic four-decade campaign “to erase what happened from public memory.”
For thirty years, they allowed Tiananmen mothers to visit the gravesites; but come on, stop monopolizing the cemetery. I mean, there are millions of Uyghurs waiting to mourn, for heaven’s sake. And don’t forget the Falun Gong religious genocide. Coercive harvesting of the organs of political prisoners sure does quickly fill a cemetery. Be a team player for the CCP….
No one really knows how many died on June 4, 1989. The Chinese students and workers killed by soldiers who shot into crowds and rolled over them with tanks have never been accounted for by the Chinese government.
That government has only lied about the massacre, continuing to cover up the horrors. Now it is even trying to prevent grieving family members from visiting the graves of their loved ones.
Having extinguished freedom in Hong Kong, inserted their hands into virtually everything we consume, and built up the world’s second largest military, what will be next for the butchers of Beijing? Small-scale but insistent displays of Chinese aggression—water cannons, ships sunk, a couple soldiers injured, even killed—have not halted. Asia is under threat and Americans are not invulnerable.
We have a serious problem.
Which I’ll keep talking about in Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
This article originally appeared June 5, 2026 at ThisIsCommonSense.org
Also see:
Nicholas Marshall: Video: “The Gate of Heavenly Peace” (1995)
“By now many people—no one knows how many—had been killed or wounded. So far most of the casualties were bystanders, and people blocking the advance of the troops….
“ ‘In the first few days after my son was killed, many friends, colleagues and students came to express their sympathy. They all said that soon the official verdict would be overturned. But as investigations and arrests began, fewer and fewer people came to see me. When people ran into me, they were silent. It was as though nothing had ever happened.’ ”
