China dominates international news.
Whether it is the trade war with the United States, questions about Huawei Technologies’ role in China’s surveillance state or the detention of up to a million people in the Muslim-dominated Xinjiang province.
Human rights activists around the planet will pause June 4 to remember the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. The military crackdown in Beijing may have killed 10,000 people, when peaceful protests demanding democracy were snuffed out.
“It was one of the most important and significant and gallant uprisings in the cause of democracy for the past half century,” said Terry Glavin of the National Post and Maclean’s, this week’s guest on theBreaker.news Podcast.
“It was a countrywide uprising and it was suppressed in the most-gruesome and bloody way.”
Despite the atrocity, China was welcomed into the World Trade Organization in 2001 and hosted the 2008 Olympics. It will also host the 2022 Winter Olympics. Engagement was supposed to open the door to the west in such a way that China would be more likely to adopt liberal democracy someday. The opposite happened. China became more authoritarian, especially under president-for-life Xi Jinping.
“We fail to draw distinctions between the princeling caste, the red aristocracy, the billionaire parasites that run China and the ordinary Chinese people,” Glavin said. “We don’t take any refugees from China, we used to. We accept the proposition that money is good, that you can look at Vancouver real estate and see the result there.”
Listen to more from Glavin. Plus commentaries and Pacific Rim and Pacific Northwest headlines.
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