Tiananmen Square

The Party is so powerful and China so wealthy that it is highly unlikely that any prominent Chinese leader will apologise for 1989, certainly not to a Chinese audience. Discussion of the 1989 massacre is taboo within China today aided by the matter being officially erased from written records there and absent from the Internet available to mainland Chinese.

A lesson to be learnt is that a country with a large military force and a vast amount of money can get its way. No court, in the end, brings leaders of a powerful country to account. The applicability of this lesson to the US is glaring, but unfashionable, as it is a type of democracy.

We Australians can only hope that goodness will flow from the Middle Kingdom and that it continues to buy our mineral resources. Added to our economic dependence is the military reality that without our American protector all the conventional weapons so recently planned will not stop China if it seeks to secure our resources by force. Hence the Labor Party’s perpetual “expert” chant - that China is peaceful at heart - must fervently be believed.

What to do? I think, just remember with more than tears those who died at Tiananmen 20 years ago.