Tiananmen Square — 19 years ago

Since it’s already June 4 in Beijing, it’s well worth reflecting on the Tiananmen Square anniversary, with the Olympics less than two months away.

Arguably, the dichotomy of modern, Deng and post-Deng China, started on this date. The peasant/urbanite and still-poor/middle class dichotomy. The capitalism/repression dichotomy, despite the claims of both fiscal conservatives and Democratic Leadership Council neoliberals aside, that American financial “involvement” will not change from outside.

In his new book, “The Empire of Lies,” a refutation to both fiscal conservatives and neoliberals, French intellectual Guy Sorman notes that soon after Tiananmen, he didn’t expect outrage over it to last. The almighty dollar, france and deutschemark of those days, the latter two now replaced by the euro, overwhelmed human rights issues.

After all, that’s why the Olympics are in Beijing this year after all, isn’t it? A chance for major sporting goods companies and other businesses to expand their Chinese markets? The currency of return is not just paying for marketing and advertising rights, but some political whitewash for the Communist Party.

Sorman’s book (I’ll have a review later this week) notes other hypocrisies, such as Chinese immediate admission to the WTO, despite being more repressive in many ways than Russia.

He also, contrary to neoliberals such as Atlantic’s James Fallows, doesn’t expect American engagement in particular, nor a tidal force of capitalism in general, to work some sort of inexorable magic on China, either politically to drive it toward democracy, or socially to address the rich/poor and urban/peasant gaps that continue to grow.