‘We Won’t Forget’: Canada Marks 36th Anniversary of Tiananmen Square Massacre

A lone Chinese man blocks a line of tanks heading east on Beijing’s Avenue of Eternal Peace during the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 5, 1989. Jeff Widener/AP Photo

Canada’s embassy in China has issued a statement commemorating the June 4 anniversary of the massacre in Beijing’s largest public square, where more than 30 years ago the government violently suppressed a student-led pro-democracy movement.

“We won’t forget [June 4,] 1989,” wrote Canada’s embassy in China in a June 3 social media post. “We remember those who made their voices heard peacefully in [Tiananmen Square]. We stand with those who do so today.”

The massacre, which took place on June 4, 1989, followed weeks of student-led protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, where demonstrators called for democratic reforms after four decades under communist rule. On the night of June 3 and 4, the People’s Liberation Army stormed the square with tanks, violently crushing the protests. Casualty estimates range from the hundreds to the thousands. Accounts of the massacre are heavily censored by China’s state-run media.

Global Affairs Canada also marked the massacre’s 36th anniversary, calling it a “violent crackdown” that killed “many unarmed and peaceful citizens.”

“To honour the lives lost, Canada continues to call on China to uphold its human rights obligations under international law,” the agency said in a June 4 social media post.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre also issued a statement on the anniversary, saying the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) responded “mercilessly” to the students’ advocacy for political freedoms, “indiscriminately killing anyone in their path, using troops and tanks to murder their own people.”

“Even as the world watched the brutality broadcast live, the Communist government sought to repress the truth of their massacre,” Poilievre said in a June 4 statement.

“They have never shown remorse, and their oppressive tactics continue to be used today,” he added. “We must not let their denial of history win.”

The federal Conservative Party has been a vocal critic of China’s human rights abuses, as well as the Chinese regime’s use of transnational repression and foreign interference in Canada. As a result, a number of Conservative MPs have been targets of Beijing, including MP Michael Chong, a long-time critic of China’s human rights violations, who was targeted along with his family after he sponsored a 2021 motion recognizing Beijing’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang as genocide.

The U.S. government also marked the 36th anniversary of the massacre, saying that while the “CCP actively tries to censor the facts,” the world “will never forget.”

“Today we commemorate the bravery of the Chinese people who were killed as they tried to exercise their fundamental freedoms,” Marco Rubio, U.S. secretary of state, said in a June 3 statement.

“Their courage in the face of certain danger reminds us that the principles of freedom, democracy, and self-rule are not just American principles,” he added. “They are human principles the CCP cannot erase.”

To date, the Chinese communist regime has not disclosed the number or identity of those killed in the massacre.

New Generations Unaware

Cheuk Kwan, co-chair of the Toronto Association for Democracy in China, says Beijing’s efforts to censor information about the 1989 massacre have led to new generations in China growing up unaware of the incident.

“Even though the world watched in horror 36 years ago, the Chinese government is eager to suppress that information,” he told The Epoch Times, noting the regime’s use of censorship methods such as internet blockades and media control.

“A lot of people, a generation later, do not even know that this existed.”

He says this makes efforts to raise awareness of China’s oppression more difficult, because “we have to do double duty to not only commemorate [these events], but also to pass the message to the next generation–to make sure they do not forget.”

The Toronto Association for Democracy in China was founded in May 1989 to support the student protests in Tiananmen Square and continues to advocate for democratic reform in China today.

In recent years, the association has commemorated the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre alongside the 2019 Hong Kong protests, saying the suppression of pro-democracy advocates in both incidents amounts to a “generational issue” involving the “Chinese oppression both in Beijing and now in Hong Kong.”

Kwan said that while many in Western countries understand that freedom of expression “does not exist in China,” the lived reality in China and Hong Kong may still feel distant to them. He added that people in other countries can still support efforts to uphold the values of democracy and freedom.

“It is a duty for all the people who are freedom-loving people to defend this principle of freedom and democracy: the freedom of speech, the freedom of assembly, and of course, the freedom to voice your opinion without fear of retribution,” he said.

Eva Fu contributed to this report.