Commentary Tiananmen Is broad and clean And you can’t tell Where the dead have been And you can’t tell What happened then And you can’t speak Of Tiananmen James Fenton, “Tiananmen” (1989) The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has largely silenced annual observations of the oppression that took place in 1989 in Tiananmen Square throughout the Chinese-speaking world. Nevertheless, what happened on that day continues to reverberate through modern China and within today’s CCP. Nowhere is this more evident than in China’s claim to victimhood. Beijing and the CCP see themselves as constantly under siege from sinister overseas forces—military, political, economic, and cultural. “Hurting the feelings of the Chinese people” is one of gravest sins a foreign government, institution, or individual can commit. And yet few are aware of how the “China-as-victim” motif is the direct—and cynical—result of Tiananmen. Almost every nation in the Asia-Pacific can claim, with some justification, of …