The West lies about all its opponents; they followed the example of the Soviet assassins too. Should we memorialize those Soviet revisionists/anticommunists also? It’s far more confusing to the working classes to present them with two wrong options. Communists remained in the party there too – despite coup d’etats. Food for thought:

Of course, the Western media is presenting this [Tiananmen '89] as the last gasp of Communism and the ultimate result of having carried out a revolution, but it is not that at all. It’s the ultimate result of having betrayed the revolution ten years ago. I haven’t had the time to go back and search out those very cogent statements that Chairman Mao made about Deng, Liu, Shaochi, and other capitalist roaders. On many separate occasions he said that if these people come to power our party will change color and we will end up with a fascist regime, and then the Chinese people will rise up and will again conduct revolution and change this. The only surprising thing to me is how fast this happened. Ten years ago Deng was a very popular man. Ten years ago he was supposedly saving China from the debacle of the Cultural Revolution and putting China back on its feet by introducing a measure of freedom and discussion, a free market and other liberating innovations. And here, ten years later, there is absolute military dictatorship, everyone is being forced to agree that a counterrevolutionary insurrection broke out – that the army did exactly the right thing and that the organizers of this movement should be persecuted and punished.

One of the last things that happened to me in Beijing before I came home was that an old friend who is a party member came to me and said, “Yesterday we had our party meeting and we all had to biaotai (that is express an attitude) and we had to say the army had acted justly in suppressing a counterrevolutionary insurrection. I also said those words, and I was lying and I’ve been lying so often, so many times and I’m sick of it, but I have to live here, I have to support my family. I have to lie in this circumstance, but I’m only hoping that you will be able to go home and not lie about what happened here.”

The truth is, the students were not conducting an insurrection at all. They were not trying to overthrow the government. They were demanding Deng’s resignation because he is eighty-four years old, corrupt, and his policies are jeopardizing China’s future. And they are demanding the resignation of Li Peng primarily because he imposed martial law. Prior to the martial law decree they were asking for dialogue, a freer press, more democratic rights, public disclosure of high officials’ assets. This is not equivalent to demanding the overthrow of the government; nor is calling on certain leaders to resign insurrectionary. This happens frequently in other countries, most recently in Japan, twice. But Deng regarded it as a terrible affront, as turmoil, as chaos, and he punished them for it. Many people on the left in this country worry about the politics of the students: Aren’t they rightists? Aren’t they making bourgeois demands? Aren’t they attacking socialism? Well, there is a lot of political diversity among the students; many of them look to Western capitalism as a model. They have rediscovered Adam Smith and the market and they harbor serious illusions about both. But the students are not the right wing in Chinese politics. The right wing consists of Deng and his group. The students are part of a huge progressive coalition – people in the middle, people to the left of the middle, and even some to the right of the middle – that is attacking the real reactionaries. (Hinton 1990 189-90) (emphasis added)