Remarks by Carl Gershman at the Capitol Hill commemoration of the Tiananmen Square Massacre

June 4, 2008

I want to begin by congratulating Yang Jianli and his colleagues in the GongMin ”Citizen” Walk for taking this initiative to dramatize the continuing struggle in China for human rights and democracy.

We are gathered here to commemorate the 19 th anniversary of the violent crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests. There are some who think that what happened in Tiananmen Square 19 years ago was a defeat for the democracy movement in China. I think this misjudges the meaning of what happened in Tiananmen Square and how its impact will be viewed in the long run. The struggle for democracy in communist Central Europe also suffered many defeats – East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1981. But as the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski explained to me in 1987, two years before all of these countries were liberated in the revolutions of 1989, each of these defeats obscured the fact that with the uprising and despite the crackdown, the democracy movement in every one of these countries had taken an important step forward, so that the next stage of the struggle, when it occurred, would proceed from a higher plateau. And so it will be in China.

In a talk at the NED earlier this year, Jianli said that almost everyone he spoke with in China before, during, and after his five years in prison – migrant and unemployed workers, inmates and guards in the prisons, dissidents and professors, entrepreneurs and even government officials – believed that democracy is inevitable in China, even if they might disagree on when it would come and the suffering and disorder that might accompany the transition. I believe they are right. Democracy is inevitable in China.

I believe this for the same reason that Alexis de Tocqueville, in the introduction to his famous book about “Democracy in America,” saw the steady, inexorable advance of democracy in the world as a universal reality, even “a providential fact.” Century after century, Tocqueville wrote, all the great events that occurred had contributed to the advance of democracy and equality, whether it was the Crusades that decimated the nobles, or the invention of firearms that equalized the vassal and the noble on the field of battle, or the art of printing that opened the same intellectual resources to the minds of all classes, or the discovery of the New World that opened a thousand new paths to fortune.

And so it is with China: the growth of the economy has produced pervasive corruption and environmental degradation, leading to an eruption of protests throughout the country and the erosion of the Communist Party’s legitimacy and authority; the breathtakingly rapid spread of Internet and cell phone use has given the people at the grassroots a powerful new means to mobilize against abusive and previously unaccountable officials, accelerating the erosion of the totalitarian system and the rise of a rights-based movement and culture; securing the Olympics has exposed the emptiness of the government’s promises about improving human rights and created new targets of protest and mobilization; and the horribly tragic earthquake in Sichuan Province has created new cleavages and grievances as schools for poor children crumbled into rubble, killings thousands of children, while nearby schools for elite children withstood the quake, as did government offices. The photograph of the Communist Party boss of Mianzhu, kneeling on the street before aggrieved and enraged mothers holding pictures of their lost children, begging them without success to abandon their march to the provincial capital, spread throughout China on the web, capturing in a single image the fury of the people and the weakness and vulnerability of the authorities.

The people of China are awakening. They are going to continue to demand that their rights be respected and that criminally corrupt officials be held accountable and brought to justice. The genie of democracy is now out of the bottle in China, and it cannot be put back by hosting prestige events like the Olympics or building new dams and factories. And what opened that bottle and released the genie was the eruption of popular protest that gathered force in Tiananmen Square almost two decades ago. That protest may have been crushed, but its impact is with us today, and it will continue to grow stronger until one day, the dream that inspired the Tiananmen protesters becomes a reality.