U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “brutal crackdown” of the June 4, 1989, student protests in Tiananmen Square, in a social media post ahead of the anniversary.
“We remember the Chinese Communist Party’s brutal crackdown 36 years ago in Tiananmen Square and commemorate the courage of the innocent people killed and imprisoned that day. Freedom, democracy, and self-rule are human principles the CCP cannot erase,” he wrote on X.
Rubio also issued a State Department statement commemorating the students, with a rebuke to the CCP for its censorship and human rights abuses.
It noted that the pro-democracy demonstrations had begun in the spring of 1989 and “inspired a national movement.”
“Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people in the capital and throughout China took to the streets for weeks to exercise their freedoms of expression and peaceful assembly by advocating for democracy, human rights, and an end to rampant corruption,” the statement reads.
“The CCP responded with a brutal crackdown, sending the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to open fire in an attempt to extinguish the pro-democracy sentiments of unarmed civilians gathered on Beijing’s streets and in Tiananmen Square.”
The CCP met protesters with tanks and opened fire, and protester casualties numbered in the thousands, but Chinese authorities, in one of its best-known instances of censorship, told the Chinese people that the students had been the ones to attack the soldiers.
“The CCP actively tries to censor the facts, but the world will never forget,” Rubio stated.
Rubio commemorated the bravery of the demonstrators who were killed, “as well as those who continue to suffer persecution as they seek accountability and justice for the events of June 4, 1989.”
“Their courage in the face of certain danger reminds us that the principles of freedom, democracy, and self-rule are not just American principles. They are human principles the CCP cannot erase,” Rubio said.
Then-President George H.W. Bush condemned the CCP’s actions, and the State Department has continued to do so annually.
Human rights activists around the world commemorate the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, but in China, the CCP surveils and limits the movement of known human rights advocates ahead of major anniversaries like June 4 to prevent demonstrations.
The CCP has a long record of human rights abuses, but regularly warns other nations not to broach the topic. Chinese defectors revealed two decades ago that the CCP considers some groups to be “poisonous” to its power because they may present a different vision for China: the spiritual discipline Falun Gong, Tibetans, supporters of democracy in China, supporters of Taiwan’s independence, and most recently Uyghurs, an ethnic minority the CCP persecutes in Xinjiang. The CCP terms them the “five poisons.”
