Twenty years ago the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square and turned a boisterous but peaceful protest into a blood bath. The Chinese Red Cross put the number butchered between 2000 and 3000, while other sources put the death toll as high as 7000 with thousands more injured, scythed down by the gunfire from armed soldiers and tanks.

Time does not heal the wounds, nor should it – but time does allow for reflection. I freely admit that my understanding of the nuances of Chinese politics is miniscule, even though I’ve lived in Hong Kong for a long time. Even so, I can see that the Mainland will never acknowledge the actual scale of this atrocity. And censorship has ensured that 20 years on, Mainland students and the younger generation know little if anything about what happened on 4 June 1989.

Yet despite its censorship policies, I am hopeful that China has changed enough in the last twenty years that this couldn’t happen again. So long as governments squeeze our rights and freedoms, protests will and should materialize around the world. The television news is sadly full of images of police clubbing and smashing their riot shields and batons into innocent protestors. And that’s not just our part of the world; it’s also the imagery from western Europe, supposed home of freedom of speech and bastion of human rights. Years from now, how many will still remember? Will they understand? How can we ensure that those thousands did not die in vain? That their deaths, tragic and unnecessary, nevertheless meant something… That we have learned and we do remember!

The only way to ensure that 4 June is not forgotten as a footnote in history is by embracing it as the day when we fete all those who have embraced life and sought to live it peacefully, free of oppression and tyranny. The image of the man before the tank may be the most recognised image relating to the 4 June - and it’s a stunning photo on so many levels - but that is only because the mass media isn’t comfortable with showing dead bodies crushed beneath tanks tracks or heads blown apart by a bullet’s impact. Uncomfortable as these other images might be, they would at least impart the gravity of the event into the minds of the next generations, whose only perspective of the Fourth June Nineteen Eighty Nine will be from collective memory. We must not forget, but as we move forward we must not lightly give-up the hard won freedoms the anonymous dead of six-four and countless others died for. If we go quietly into the night, then we have betrayed their sacrifice and their deaths mean nothing. sd