Remembering the Tiananmen Massacre, Activists Wait for the Day of the CCP's Fall
People take part in a candlelight vigil to commemorate the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre at the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington on June 4, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times
WASHINGTON—Activists held a vigil on the evening of June 4, 2025, to honor the pro-democracy protesters killed in China’s Tiananmen Square 36 years ago and urge the world to hold the regime behind the killings accountable.
The event, in which Chinese authorities used tanks and guns to crush and kill thousands of unarmed civilians calling for political reform, is now known as the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, a topic that is heavily censored in China by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The vigil was an opportunity to remember those who died in the “horrific” event, said Eric Patterson, president and CEO of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which organized the vigil. But more than that, he said, it was a chance to note reasons for hope.
“We remember that in Romania, Hungary, Poland, and many other countries, the lies and lawlessness of communism no longer exist,” he said, noting that what happened to these communist regimes made him hope that “there will be a new day in China in the future,” The Epoch Times’ Eva Fu and Frank Fang reported on June 5, 2025.
Rushan Abbas, executive director of the Washington-based advocacy group Campaign for Uyghurs, said the 1989 incident showed what the Chinese regime is “capable of.”
“Today, depression flows through the black cells in Tibet, the streets of Hong Kong, and the concentration camps in Xinjiang,” Abbas said at the commemoration.
“China’s long black arm reaches even here, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, through transnational threats and repression that cross national borders.
“The CCP’s methods change, its targets shift, but its goals remain the same: obedience without truth, silence without peace, prosecution without accountability. While the CCP quietly works to replace freedom and democracy [with] this authoritarian rule, the world has been trained to treat its abuses as background noise.”
In response to Abbas’ advocacy of Beijing’s mistreatment of Uighurs, Chinese authorities detained his sister, Gulshan Abbas, in China in September 2018 and sentenced her to 20 years in prison in March 2019.
“Let us honor those who lost [their lives] with a vision for a better world, a world that takes responsibility for the tragedy in Tiananmen Square, and justice for Uighurs, Tibetans, Chinese dissidents, Hong Kongers, Falun Gong practitioners, and all those who have been deprived of their freedom,” Abbas said.
Outliving the CCP ( Chinese Communist Party )
Rowena He, a historian and author of “Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China,” was a college student in the southeastern Chinese city of Guangzhou at the time of the massacre. She said she returned to campus the next day wearing a black armband as a sign of mourning, and was told by her teacher that if she didn’t take it off, “no one” would protect her.
Hong Kong held large-scale commemorative events to mark its anniversary every year until 2019, when Beijing tightened control over the city and Hong Kong authorities banned such gatherings under a Beijing-imposed national security law. Several organizers of the commemorative events have served prison sentences.
Remembering what happened in 1989 is important not just for the victims and protesters, he told The Epoch Times.
“The truth has not been told and justice has not been served,” he said.
The regime covered up the Tiananmen Square incident, and it did so again during the COVID-19 pandemic, when doctors wanted to warn about the dangers of the virus, He said in his speech.
“[It] is a violation of the human rights of every human being on Earth,” he said. “So don’t tell me that human rights and Tiananmen [is] about them, about China. It’s about here. It’s about us. It’s about now.”
Piero Tozzi, staff director of the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China, said the massacre offers a lesson in what the world can do.
“The nature of the regime was revealed 36 years ago—it’s the same regime that’s in power today,” Tozzi told The Epoch Times. “But the difference is that they’re much stronger, economically, and militarily.”
In 2000, Congress passed legislation to grant China permanent most-favored-nation status, now known as permanent normal trade relations, paving the way for China’s accession to the World Trade Organization. The status opens up the U.S. market to Chinese goods with trade benefits, including reduced tariffs.
“There was an opportunity to really destroy the regime, but we saved them,” Tozzi said. “The monster has grown.”
“Today, this is an existential threat, not just to the United States but to the world.”
Frances Hui, who was granted U.S. asylum in September 2021, said she believed the CCP’s propaganda about “Chinese national pride” before learning about the massacre when she was 10.
Learning about it was an eye-opener, Hui told The Epoch Times.
“I realized, wow, like in China, actually many years ago, people were yearning for a democratic China, and just like us, like Hong Kongers, we were fighting for it, all along,” she said.
Hui is now an advocacy coordinator for the Freedom Committee Foundation in Hong Kong.
Hongkongers try to remember Tiananmen Square through vigils, and now that the vigils have been banned, others in the free world need to “carry on that responsibility, to continue to remember this day,” Hui said.
“Because as long as we remember, one day justice will come, even if it’s obviously a delayed justice,” she told The Epoch Times.
David Yu, chairman of the board of the June 4th Massacre Memorial Association, noted that while the Chinese regime may appear strong, it is currently facing many internal issues that are “irreconcilable.”
“They are being suppressed, and you don’t see it,” he told The Epoch Times. It is only a matter of time before these issues explode, he said, and “the day when they do explode is not far away.”
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