Eli Lake, Columnist

Don’t Let China Export Its Internet

The 30th anniversary of Tiananmen is a reminder of how hard the government works to control all information.

June 4, 2019 at 10:00 AM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

Less eventful today than it was 30 years ago.
Photographer: NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP

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On the 30th anniversary of the Chinese government’s massacre of student protesters at Tiananmen Square, it’s appropriate to look at the extent to which Beijing has tried to spread two separate myths to two separate audiences. It wants its own people to believe it never happened, and it wants the rest of the world to believe that the students had it coming.

Abroad there is defiance. Over the weekend, Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe told an international conference in Singapore that the student gathering was a kind of riot, “political turmoil that the central government needed to quell.” Inside China, the government has tried its best to censor discussion of Tiananmen altogether. Late last year, the government began a crackdown on Twitter users who posted criticism of the government. A former leader of the 1989 protests was barred from traveling to Hong Kong to commemorate the anniversary.