On June 4, Professor Carl Minzner joined the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission for a congressional hearing hosted by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs titled “Tiananmen at 30: Examining the Evolution of Repression in China.”
The intention of the hearing was to “review the events in China in 1989, the aspirations of the ‘Tiananmen generation,’ and the censorship and lack of accountability by the Chinese government.”
“Then came 1989. Chinese leaders were put to the test. Do you allow the forces that you yourself unleashed begin to fundamentally reshape your political system or do you revert to Leninist one-party controls. Beijing chose the latter. On the streets—repression—and so too within the party. Reformers were cashiered, ideological controls reasserted, and the principle that one-party rule should never ever be called into question was reaffirmed loud and clear in internal political study sessions. The Chinese reform era did not end in 1989. In the 1990’s and early 2000’s economic reform and social change continued to produce a host of private actors, commercial media and internet actors airing citizen grievances that Beijing struggled to control…”
Speakers included:
Nancy Pelosi: Speaker of the United States House of Representatives
Wu’er Kaixi: Tiananmen student leader, political commentator, and Founder, Friends of Liu Xiaobo
Fengsuo Zhou: Tiananmen student leader and Co-Founder and President, Humanitarian China
Mi Ling Tsui: Communications Director, Human Rights in China
Carl Minzner: Professor of Law at Fordham Law School and author of End of an Era: How China’s Authoritarian Revival is Undermining its Rise (2018)
Shanthi Kalathil: Director International Forum for Democratic Studies, National Endowment for Democracy