Opinion | This June 4, perhaps the US should forget Tiananmen, if we are ever to move on from anger and recrimination

To this day, no one has nailed down precisely what happened between protesters and government troops in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Yet the rumour mill grinds away and disputed memories continue to poison China-US relations

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Published: 9:00am, 4 Jun 2019Updated: 9:00am, 4 Jun 2019

This is about the downside to overwrought moralising. For, inconvenient truths must be carefully considered on this day marking the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising and suppression. Much is at risk, given the ethical framework through which the United States views China, and vice versa.

The truths presented here are not so obvious. The American perspective tends towards rank propaganda, a reconstruction of the past, driven by the political interests of the present, even as Beijing tries to pretend this infamous event was minor – a mere myth that belongs with other phantoms of the new cold war opera.

One truth is that, even to this day, no one has nailed down precisely what happened at Tiananmen, such as how many people were actually killed by government troops – hundreds or, some say, thousands. No one knows how much troops were provoked, or the myriad motivations of the various interests involved in that tragic swirl of circumstances in the square.

Nor can anyone say for sure how insane was the rulers’ decision that the upheaval was an existential threat – or whether, to put it unkindly, the judgment of Deng Xiaoping and his inner circle was clouded by undiagnosed post-Cultural Revolution post-traumatic-stress disorder. Perhaps the mere sight of antagonistic young people wanting to run things pulsated through panicked old men like an electric shock.

And it is quite uncertain whether Western hands were all that clean in the mess; whether journalists took sides, some pitching in to help protesters strategise for maximum media play; or even whether the protesters’ commitment to Western democracy was as universally shared in the square as reported by the foreign media.

With each new annual degree of separation from the events of 1989, the potential for unreality looms larger than ever. But the lack of a clear picture of what did happen decades ago never seems to muffle the roar on this international day of political sermonising. Given the tension, recrimination and evaporating trust between China and the US, this incautious cacophony is especially disturbing, even pre-war-like, in its blindness to nuance.

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