Political Change: be careful what you wish for…..

Many go to the ballot box not to vote for something/somebody but to seek change by voting against something/somebody.

Throughout history men and women have wanted the dictator, the monarch or the Emperor overthrown. But frequently those same men and women can be uninformed, to put it kindly.

Dismissing Gadaffi, Saddam or Assad does not always result in improvement.

An example of what might have been turned into a catastrophe was the misnamed Tiananmen Massacre. Beijing’s iconic spiritual centre.

Months of protests, stand off with the liberal arm of the government, the mob kills a few soldiers and police.

The conservative faction of the government brings in the tanks and the troops who over run the barricades on the arterial routes leading to Tiananmen. Thousands are killed.

However, as spontaneous as the nation wide uprisings were, the tense stand off had to be put away.

Many commentators at the centre of the action reported that the protesters were only united in their wish to overthrow the existing regime. beyond that single factor, there was no unity and no clear leadership or organisational structure. Had the protest movement been successful the result would have been chaos. China would not exist in the form it has subsequently taken and the world would have been poorer for that.

What does discredit the Chinese government, to this day, is their failure to recognise the size of the tragedy.

And what does discredit the western propaganda is the fact that many reputable sources say there was not one single death in the Square itself. I refer to prominent dissidents Liu Zhao Bo and Ho De Jian who were permitted, on the last day of the uprising, to lead their followers peacefully from Tiananmen. This was corroborated by Philip Cunningham, BBC’s man on the ground during the uprising. Some say, with a fair amount of credibility, that there were no protester deaths inside the square, they were permitted peaceful surrender.

Had the uprising been successful the result would have been disaster and chaos. 400 million Chinese would not have been subsequently lifted out of poverty, an event unprecedented in world history.

The Chinese authorities are far from perfect and I attack them from many angles. But no one outside China has any experience of running a state of 1.4 billion citizens.

And it may well come to pass that the citizens of UK and USA come to rue the time they made change for change’s sake.