The official Chinese verdict on the Tiananmen Incident is definitive and clear: History has validated the decision to crack down on the protesters and there can and should be no revisiting of those fateful days.
Yet the Beijing government's actions on the anniversary of that date signal considerably less confidence about its actions two decades ago. Every year as the anniversary approaches, dissidents real and imagined are isolated. The media is censored. Security forces are deployed en masse to prevent any protest. These are not the actions of a confident government. The ghosts of Tiananmen do not rest.
It is still unknown how many people died on June 4, 1989, when the People's Liberation Army cleared Tiananmen Square, the massive public space in the heart of Beijing, to end weeks of protests by students and prodemocracy activists. The official death toll has never been released, but the government has asserted that the number is small and that the number of soldiers who died far outnumbered the civilian casualties.