Tiananmen: Never forget, unless you’re Bob Hawke

The ABC has contacted Mr Hawke on several occasions this past week requesting an interview for his reflections on the legacy of Tiananmen two decades on.

Mr Hawke has said nothing.

It’s a tremendous pity, because he would bring much to the debate. He could probably argue - as others have - that the China of 2009 is much different from the China of 1989, that people now have greater economic freedoms and are more affluent, even though the country remains a one-party state.

Instead, he’s opting out of the discussion, fearful that he’ll have to field impertienent questions about human rights, which would not sit well with his undoubtedly lucrative commercial work on behalf of Chinese companies and Australian companies doing business with China.

The Australian’s China correspondent Michael Sainsbury reported on April 1 that Mr Hawke, whose consulting group Robert JL Hawke and Associates has an office in Shanghai, was now visiting China “five or six times a year”  and lobbying for everything from the expansion of Chinese bank operations in Australia, to the Chinese government-owned shipping company COSCO.

Most Australians are mature enough to recognise that doing business with China is pivotal to our own economic future; to this end, Hawke’s work in China is in our national interest, whatever the private commercial benefits to him might be.

But it’s galling to see the man who once sobbed for China’s dead, and extended a fraternal arm to 20,000 frightened young people, making himself complicit through his silence in China’s attempt to airbrush the events of June 4, 1989, from the collective memory.

China has this week disabled its twitter feed and scrambled websites to shut down any domestic discussion of the Tiananmen atrocity.There has been no discussion of Tiananmen in the Chinese media.

It’s a shame that as great an Australian as Bob Hawke has played his own role in securing that silence.

When he spoke to The Australian, back in March, all Mr Hawke was quoted as saying on human rights was that present-day China was markedly different from when he made his first visit in 1978.

“It is an immesaurably much more different society, much more liberal, people have more freedom…obviously there are things that need to be improved but I think it is inevitable that the regime’s move to freer society will continue in the years ahead.”
But by not speaking this past week, Mr Hawke has helped China as it tries to ensure that the Tiananmen Square massacre is not treated as an anniversary at all.