In this blog, I have made it my mission to call attention to everything that is wrong with China, from the sublimely evil to the absurd. Some days their refusal to acknowledge the former creates examples of the latter. I like to think I've gotten good at it, after all this time. But today, China's own propaganda machine has beaten me at my own game. It seems I should just retire, because no matter how hard I try, I will never be able to make China look as bad as they just made themselves look today.
To begin with, let me ask a question.
When you hear the words "China, tank, students, June" and "fearlessness" in the same sentence, what Earth-shattering, world-changing event leaps to the forefront of your mind?
Unless you have been living under a rock (or behind China's censorship machine), you immediately think of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, where PLA tanks rolled over unarmed student protesters on June 4 as civilians begged on hands and knees for the "People's Government" to spare their lives.
Well, on this day, June 28, 2018, China Global Television Network, a Communist Party English-language propaganda outlet, ran an article about a school in Hebei Province (not far from Beijing) posting a tank outside of their main gate in the hopes that it will "motivate" students to show a "spirit of fearlessness, bravery, solidarity and the willingness to fight for success." If they had run the article less than a month earlier it would have been just in time for the 29th anniversary of the massacre.
Let that sink in for a minute.
Oh, and it gets better. The article goes to great lengths to specify that the tank "has been used in real battles." Given that the PLA's only real tank action in history was Tibet and the aforementioned crackdown, there's something unmistakably macabre in the level of pride the article takes in THAT statement. The barely noticeable mention that "national defense will be added to the curriculum" is also eyebrow raising, given that China's history books give a blatantly distorted view of China as a kind of "lone hero" standing alone against an "evil and oppressive world" full of what they habitually describe as "Western Anti-China forces."
And to motivate students to take part in the next generation of this same mentality, they have put a tank on display at a high school, that could very well be one of the ones that was at Tiananmen, and they are so proud of this that they bragged about it within a few weeks of the Tiananmen anniversary.
And again, ladies and gentlemen, this is not a Human Rights advocacy group in a Liberal Democracy in the West. This is China's own propaganda machine. Either their censorship apparatus is so strict that the writers (who are mostly young) did not know about the massacre enough to see the irony (possible), they're deliberately testing the water to see if the rest of the world has forgotten (possible), they're so arrogant that they think no one will call them out on it (VERY possible), or the Chinese really, really, really didn't think this one through very well (...eh, definitely possible).
The jokes write themselves, but I have to wonder if the survivors of the 1989 massacre would be able to laugh.
Work Cited
"Chinese high school stations tanks at entrance to ‘motivate’ students." China Global Television Network. 28 Jun. 2018. Web. 28 Jun. 2018.
https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d514f354d444e78457a6333566d54/share_p.html