Dreaming of Tiananmen

The immediate impact of the protests in China should not be overstated. Yet, this is the first sign of cracks in the post-Tiananmen consensus that built 21st-century China

Over the past week, a lot of people around the world will have been thinking about the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The ongoing protests in the People’s Republic of China, sparked essentially by its draconian “Covid Zero” policy, do not approach the scale or nature of the 1989 protests. Nor are they either large or widespread enough to force the Chinese Communist Party to change course about anything it sees as fundamental to its rule. Yet they are in many ways of a different quality from localised protests in the past. Some former leaders of the 1989 student protests,