Juneby June
語言:
English /// 中文
Photo Credit: Brian Hioe
LAST YEAR, at a Palestine solidarity encampment on campus, I had a tense exchange with a Zionist student. He sneered, pointing at a map: “Where is Palestine? I only see Israel.”
In that moment, it hit me again—some identities, some memories, are not erased because of what they’ve done, but simply because they exist. This is the reality in Tibet, East Turkestan, Hong Kong, Inner Mongolia, and across China itself: even remembering the Tiananmen Massacre is a punishable offense. Existence itself is treated like a crime.
Year after year, as June arrives, candlelight once again flickers across the world. From Liberty Square in Taipei to memorial gatherings in New York’s Chinatown, from Hong Kong’s former Victoria Park vigils to the dispersed communities of Hongkongers abroad, countless people raise banners, read poetry, and stand in silence—to remember the Tiananmen Massacre, a slaughter that since 1989 has been relentlessly erased by official narratives but continues to reverberate through unhealed wounds.
But we must ask ourselves: What exactly are we commemorating? And for whom?
Commemoration is never just about the past—it’s a political choice about the present and the future. And these choices often split along two divergent narrative paths: one rooted in Cold War alignment with the U.S. and opposition to China, the other grounded in the politics of collective liberation and decolonization. The first reduces 1989 to a clash between democracy and dictatorship, framing it as a standoff between Chinese communist tyranny and the so-called free world. The second sees Tiananmen as part of a global chain of resistance against oppression—connected to decolonial struggles in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, to Third World sovereignty, and to the demands of the marginalized across the globe.
Tiananmen and Cold War Framings
FOR DECADES, the commemoration of the Tiananmen Massacre has been framed through the lens of the Cold War—treated as an unexpected flare of freedom from within the heart of Eastern authoritarianism. In this narrative, the Tiananmen protests are lumped together with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, celebrated as evidence of Chinese citizens yearning for Western-style democracy. A linear logic is constructed: freedom belongs to the West, tyranny to the East; to support democracy is to side with the U.S.; to oppose communism is inherently just.
But this binary narrative oversimplifies complex political realities. As U.S. politics lurch further to the right, the once-celebrated “spirit of Tiananmen” has become politically awkward. Support for queer rights or solidarity with Palestinians—stances once aligned with broader visions of justice—are now increasingly cast as threats in both American mainstream politics and among conservative Chinese diasporic communities. Within this context, Tiananmen becomes a commemoratable event only when it is tightly bound to a specific set of American values, sanitized of any connection to other oppressed peoples. The mere mention of solidarity with Palestine is often enough to collapse the space of remembrance entirely.
Moreover, the Cold War narrative often treats the struggles of Tibetans, Taiwanese, and Uyghurs as mere extensions of the “China problem”—evidence of CCP authoritarianism rather than autonomous movements for self-determination. This instrumental logic strips these communities of their political agency, reducing their decolonial demands to mere footnotes in a larger story about Chinese democratization. The contradiction is stark: their resistance is de-radicalized and reframed not as liberation, but as further proof of China’s moral failure.
The Cold War framework also imposes a subtle moral imperative on Taiwan. So long as democracy has not been achieved in China, Taiwan—along with Tibet and East Turkestan—is expected to carry the burden of “fighting for Chinese freedom.” Taiwanese people who do not fully align themselves with Chinese democratization are often labeled as selfish or shirking historical responsibility. Meanwhile, Tibetans and Uyghurs are routinely invoked—without consultation—as symbolic material for “China issues,” rather than recognized as independent political actors.
Finally, Tiananmen is frequently juxtaposed with the Gwangju Uprising in South Korea, in efforts to construct a shared East Asian memory of democratic awakening. Yet this comparison overlooks a key fact: the Gwangju Massacre was carried out by Chun Doo-hwan, one of the most notorious U.S.-backed military dictators in the region, whose power was sustained by American troops and the Hanahoe military clique. To equate the two events exposes the moral incoherence of a geopolitical narrative that equates being pro-American with being democratic, and anti-American with being authoritarian—a narrative that simply doesn’t hold up to historical scrutiny.
Under the dominance of Cold War narratives, the commemoration of the Tiananmen Massacre has long been shaped into a project of narrative control. It demands that those who remember do so according to a fixed script aligned with geopolitical interests, rather than remaining faithful to the ruptures in memory and the entangled oppressions of lived reality. Any deviation from that script leads to the exclusion of other memories, other traumas, and other forms of resistance. In this framework, justice becomes selectively distributed, and memory is formatted for convenient storage.
The way forward is to liberate Tiananmen from the Cold War frame and instead situate it within global struggles for decolonization and collective liberation—revealing its historical and affective links to other sites of resistance. Beijing in 1989 was never an island unto itself. The cracks that opened in the spring and summer of that year were not merely the domestic affairs of “China.”
Tiananmen in the Frame of Collective Liberation
IN MARCH 1989, weeks before the massacre in Beijing, a wave of protests erupted in Lhasa. Tibetans gathered near Jokhang Temple to demand autonomy and religious freedom—demands rooted in decades of suppression since 1959. The protests were met with bloody crackdowns by armed police and military forces. These events are often omitted from global recollections of 1989 because they do not fit neatly into the Han-centric narrative of “Chinese people seeking democracy.” Instead, they point to a different historical subjectivity and a different experience of state violence.
In May of the same year, large-scale protests also broke out in Ürümqi and other parts of East Turkestan. Uyghur youth demanded an end to Islamophobic publications, racial discrimination, resource exploitation, and cultural and linguistic suppression. These mobilizations remind us that the political upheaval of 1989 was not only a cry for democracy—it was a challenge to internal structures of imperial oppression, cutting across lines of language, religion, and ethnicity.
Even in Taiwan—geographically distant from Beijing—the earliest acts of Tiananmen commemoration in 1989 did not emerge from a grassroots sense of solidarity with China’s democratic movement, but were instead led by conservative politicians who saw themselves as bearers of the “true China.” Figures like Jaw Shau-Kong and other deep-blue Kuomintang elites released a tribute song titled The Wound of History, framing the Beijing student movement as part of a broader Chinese national tragedy. The subtext was clear: because both sides of the Strait share a language and culture, Tiananmen was a case of Chinese-on-Chinese violence, and only the Republic of China (Taiwan) could preserve the authentic spirit of the Chinese nation.
Since the 1990s, however, as Taiwan’s localization and democratization deepened, the commemorative meaning of Tiananmen gradually broke away from blood-and-soil nationalism. It began to take root within a broader political and ethical framework. Movements like the Wild Lily Student Movement, anti-nuclear protests, Indigenous rights campaigns, and the Sunflower Movement helped forge a distinctly Taiwanese sense of political identity. Along this parallel timeline, Tiananmen became a symbol of universal political violence, no longer just an instrument of Chinese nationalist discourse in exile.
In recent years, commemorative practices in Taiwan—and among diasporic Asian communities—have become more diverse and complex. Some activists invoke Tiananmen as a symbol against authoritarian revival, aiming their critique at Beijing’s military and political aggression toward Taiwan. Others have used the memory of Tiananmen as a mirror, reflecting Taiwan’s own unfinished project of transitional justice and connecting the 1989 massacre to struggles of Indigenous peoples, migrant workers, and queer communities. In this shifting narrative, Tiananmen remembrance is no longer a private mourning within the Chinese body politic—it becomes a broader indictment of imperialism and state violence in all its forms.
Commemoration is no longer just about honoring the dead—it has become a declaration of subjectivity. Across different geographies and political experiences, the symbolic meaning of 1989 is constantly being rewritten. And it is precisely through these intersections that the memory of Tiananmen can break free from the confines of nation-state narratives and enter a transborder space of remembrance—one where language, ethnicity, and borders do not divide, but where oppression and resistance become threads of connection.
Within the logic of imperial governance, memory is never a neutral legacy—it is a political resource that can be granted or erased. Whose trauma gets remembered, whose history is allowed to be named, depends on whether their existence is permitted within dominant structures of power. The gradual marginalization of Tiananmen remembrance is one example of this selective governance of memory. On a deeper level, entire identities themselves can be rendered “illegitimate,” declared never meant to exist. This is the logic of dehumanization.
The Shared Logic of Colonial Governance
IN TAIWAN, citizen Lee Ming-che was arrested in 2017 while visiting family in China and later charged with “subverting state power.” Throughout the trial, he was treated as a Chinese national, with his Taiwanese identity deliberately denied. The case was framed entirely within the narrative of “an internal Chinese dissident,” flattening Taiwan’s political distinctiveness into a non-entity. Beyond punishing political speech, this was an erasure of Taiwan’s political subjectivity. Lee’s existence was redefined as merely a dissenting part of China, his identity divorced from the nation he belonged to.
In Tibet, the space for Tibetan-language education is rapidly disappearing. Schools teaching in Tibetan have been shuttered, and both teachers and curricula are being forcibly Sinicized. As language carries cultural memory and collective identity, its erasure is tantamount to deleting history and foreclosing the future. Similarly, in East Turkestan, so-called “vocational education centers” operate as de facto internment camps—sites of mass detention, forced labor, and ideological indoctrination. To be Uyghur is, in itself, treated as a threat. It’s not about religion or individual actions—it’s about existence.
In Gaza, geographic confinement and population control create a system of punitive survival. To leave, to seek medical care, to attend school—Palestinians must pass through endless checkpoints. A regime of permits and collective punishment defines daily life. Here, national identity and spatial position become the basis for punishment—not because of what one does, but because of who one is. To be Palestinian is, by default, to be at risk.
This logic of colonial governance—where existence itself is treated as danger—is not unique to China or Israel. It is deeply embedded in imperial systems of control. In the United States, Black communities have long faced systemic violence and criminalization. The murder of George Floyd was not an isolated act of brutality; it revealed a deeper truth—that entire systems are built on denying the legitimacy of Black existence.
In China, queer communities and labor organizers face near-total erasure. LGBTQ+ spaces are shut down, related discourse is censored, and independent labor movements are branded as tools of “foreign infiltration.” All these efforts point toward an overarching strategy of enforced invisibility. The state’s narrative doesn’t just silence dissent—it manufactures a false reality in which there are no victims, no resistance, no margins—only “stability.”
In such a context, memory itself becomes taboo, identity becomes a crime, and existence becomes a liability. Under this regime of control, the oppressed across regions are not isolated cases—they are subjects of the same dehumanizing logic, the same system of isolation, erasure, and enforced silence. This is not merely the suppression of dissent; it is a structural denial of being.
When the very existence of the oppressed is defined as a threat, and when memory is systemically suppressed and erased, what is needed is not a more persuasive narrative of loyalty—but a transnational commitment to liberation. In such a historical structure, resistance cannot be mapped neatly along the lines of ethnicity, nationality, language, or religion. Instead, what emerges is a spiritual kinship forged through shared experiences and common structures of violence. This kinship is not rooted in abstract sympathy, but in concrete realities—when naming, speaking, and surviving are rights denied across borders.
The Tiananmen Massacre should not be understood solely as a national trauma, but rather as part of a broader logic of imperial violence and modern state control. This violence lives not only in Beijing, but also in the streets of Lhasa, the mosques of Kashgar, and the candlelit vigils of Liberty Square. It echoes in the bloodied images of Gwangju, the shattered ruins of Gaza, and the asphalt under American police cruisers. Memory is not a competition of tragedies—it is a chorus of indictments. The connections between these experiences form the ethical foundation of resistance to dehumanization.
Liberation Beyond Savior Narratives
IN A WORLD shaped by nationalism and Cold War narratives, liberation is often portrayed as a one-way mission: a group of saviors helping another group in need. This dynamic is especially evident in Tiananmen commemorations and dominant Chinese pro-democracy discourse, where Taiwan, Tibet, and East Turkestan are expected to “help the Chinese people win freedom,” while their own pain and political demands are relegated to secondary status. But an ethic of collective liberation refuses this center–periphery framework. It calls for dismantling the hierarchy between the helper and the helped, and instead recognizing the shared structures of political violence we all confront—and from there, building solidarity and shared responsibility.
From Beijing to Lhasa, from Taipei to Kashgar, from Gwangju to Gaza, from Minneapolis to Hong Kong—the language of oppression is eerily similar. So are the methods of governance, and so are the targets: memory, autonomy, connection, and existence itself. And it is precisely in the cracks of these systems that memory gazes back, finds resonance, and forms an unofficial, decentralized history. This kind of solidarity refuses to be defined by borders, blocs, or belief systems. It is not about exporting Chinese democracy, nor about importing American “universal values.” It arises from a shared understanding among the oppressed, from the convergence of affective memories across space and struggle—a community of imagination forged in common wounds.
It is a solidarity that does not commemorate for the sake of ceremony, and does not erase for the sake of reconciliation. It seeks instead to reconstitute the boundaries and language of existence in the face of erasure—and to imagine, together, a world where collective liberation belongs to all of us. A world that must include:
A free Formosa,
A free Tibet,
And a free Palestine.