The iconic photo of The Tank Man, Tiananmen Square, June 1989.(64memo.com)

Speech at Remembrance rally in Chinatown Sydney Australia 3rd June 2018.

We are here to remember how on June 4 1989 and on subsequent days the Chinese Communist Government sent the so-called Peoples’ Liberation Army (PLA) to kill protesters who had gathered in Tiananmen Square and other places in China to demonstrate peacefully in favour of democracy.

No-one knows exactly how many people were killed but reliable sources say it was over 3000.  (Editors note: It was actually more than 10,000 according to British Ambassador).

But here is the thing, the majority of people in China do not know the massacre even happened.

Written out of Chinese history

In communist china the communist party controls all means of communication. The Tiananmen Square Massacre has been written out of history in China. You can’t import a book or magazine into China that mentions the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Any Western book published in China that has mention of the massacre has the reference taken out.

Any mention of the Tiananmen Square Massacre is blocked from websites in China.

The majority of politicians in the west and businesses in the West that trade with China are secretly glad it happened, because since the massacre everyone in China does what they’re told.

People are afraid to complain about working conditions, People are afraid to complain about corruption. Therefore China remains a reliable source of cheap merchandise made with cheap labour made by workers who are afraid to complain about their working conditions or go on strike.

Politicians in the West and big business in the West overwhelmingly want a stable China  - they are not interested in freedom.

Just the tip of brutality and repression

But we must also remember that the massacre is still going on. The Tiananmen Square Massacre was just the tip of the iceberg of the brutality and repression that has gone on since the communist takeover in 1949.

Remember Mao said political power comes out of the barrel of a gun and that a revolution is not a banquet, well how true that was seen to be on that on that day, June 4 1989.

But political prisoners are right now being killed in gaols so their organs can be taken out and sold, or just killed to get rid of them. Tibetans and Uyghurs are being massacred every day – we don’t know how many because Tibet and East Turkestan are closed countries.

But the scariest thing is that the people who carried out this massacre, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), are right now engaged in taking over the world.  As Clive Hamilton’s book, The Silent Invasion, recently published, demonstrates, they are buying  up key strategic assets like ports and farms and power stations everywhere across the globe and buying political influence with the aim of building an empire, and of course stationing missiles and battleships and warplanes on their man-made islands in the South China Sea.

They have unlimited amounts of money because their whole economy is based on slave labour and rigid discipline. All these assets they are buying up will never be returned to the countries they are buying them from because if they attempt to get them back they will get the same treatment the students in Tiananmen Square got in 1989.

For all these reasons, if we needed any more reason to be here, the memory of the Tiananmen Square Massacre is something that affects us all.