Remembering the ghosts of Tiananmen Square

Can we learn anything about a country from its proverbs? When the English say that "A man's home is his castle", are they telling us that the UK will never be an enthusiastic member of the EU because the British love their island independence more than anything else? And what about the Americans, those practical, pragmatic people who like action and dislike bureaucracy? Their "Too many chiefs and not enough Indians" tells us all we need to know about why General Motors reached the end of the road yesterday.

"A penny saved is a penny gained" say the Scots, who are famously careful with their money, while "Better be fighting than lonesome" tells us that the Irish would prefer anarchy to sitting alone thinking about the ideas of Nietzsche or Sartre.

Now, a Chinese proverb that goes back to imperial times: "Kill a chicken to frighten the monkeys". It means that the best way to make people understand terror is to let them experience it, which is exactly what the communist leadership did on 3 June 1989, when it ordered soldiers to massacre the supporters of what it called "bourgeois liberalism". In fact, these were simply young people demanding that China's new economic freedom should be matched by political freedom.

Between 15 April and 3 June 1989, up to a million people gathered at different times in Beijing's Tiananmen Square to sing, laugh, cry and dream. In mid-May, they created "the Goddess of Democracy" — a 10-metre tall figure, very like New York's Statue of Liberty, holding a torch and looking directly across the square at a huge image of Mao Zedong. This challenge was too much for the communist authorities so they decided to "Kill a chicken to frighten the monkeys".

How many hundreds or thousands died between 3 and 4 June in Tiananmen Square? We won't know until the Chinese dictatorship ends, but we have to accept that China is now more totalitarian than ever and its people are very frightened. They have learned the bitter truth that's often contained in proverbs.