Tiananmen taboo: how crackdown snuffed out any prospect of reform
Twenty-five years on, experts say the events of June 1989 snuffed out any prospect of political reform in an increasingly authoritarian China
The government's military crackdown on protesters in June 1989 - which killed hundreds, and perhaps more than 2,000 demonstrators - fuelled further corruption, inequality, and sowed the seeds of discontent and social instability for years, historians and analysts say.
Since Tiananmen, Beijing has tightened control on debate and increased its suppression of dissent because officials believe they need to maintain one-party rule at all cost, the experts say. Politically, the crackdown closed off the possibility of political liberation for the foreseeable future, they say.
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The crackdown "trapped the regime itself in an authoritarian model from which it is difficult to extricate itself and trapped the public in a state of political disenfranchisement and apathy," says Andrew Nathan, a political science professor at Columbia University. The subsequent generations of leaders have shown no signs that they wish to liberalise the nation's politics, he says.
When soldiers opened fire on the Beijing protesters on the night of June 3, 1989, it was "an important turning point" for China, says Perry Link, a sinologist at the University of California at Riverside. He says the extreme force of tanks and machine guns is seared into the memory of ordinary Chinese, that they must not step outside the authorities' boundaries.
