o commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre last year, I posted a photograph online of a night scene showing the mass hunger strike that took place there. It was taken by a friend of mine in May 1989 from the roof of Beijing’s Museum of Chinese History. He allowed me to share it as long as his identity was concealed, knowing that in China, this visual testament to a still taboo event could land him in jail. A year on from the 30th anniversary, as the Chinese Communist party’s tyranny endangers lives and freedoms across the world, the photograph and the suppressed truth it embodies are even more significant. For 31 years, the CCP has buried the truth about Tiananmen. In 1989 it branded the nationwide peaceful pro-democracy movement a “counter-revolutionary riot”, and on 4 June, sent tanks to clear the square, then crush and gun down unarmed citizens in the surrounding streets. It said the massacre was essential for China’s future order and prosperity. It claimed only 241 people died, when unofficial estimates are many times higher. Then it outlawed any further mention of the event. The message to the Chinese people was: the mass movement never took place; those peaceful protesters were thugs. Only the party can restore order and make you rich. Keep quiet, forget the past. Forget democracy and freedom. For the sake of stability and economic growth, the state can murder civilians. But the underlying truth was simpler: dictators will always put their political survival above human life. They will not rest until they have perverted every truth and obliterated all possibility of dissent. This photograph survives though, and stubbornly resists. It confirms that this moment in history did take place; it had a past and a future. Looking at it now, I am returned immediately to one of those tents: a young hunger striker lying asleep on a blanket beside me, clutching a pale blue notebook in her hand; students who’d just arrived from a provincial city sitting crammed in a neighbouring shelter, gobbling steamed dumplings donated by a Beijing stallholder; outside, cries for freedom and democracy and the sirens of volunteer ambulances rushing hunger strikers to hospital for treatment. This moment, caught in freeze frame, contains life, hope, colour, movement. But it also contains death. Unknown to all of us who were in the square at the time, in the Great Hall of the People that loomed silently behind us, soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army were hiding with bayonets, waiting for the order to strike. Today, Tiananmen Square is a place of oblivion, a memory hole scrutinised by police cameras, suspended from history. China is an economic giant, but the lies and murder have never stopped. The party has continued to use “subversion of state power” clauses in the law to deny citizens their constitutional right to freedom of speech and of demonstration. Dissidents have been silenced, killed or, like me, forced into exile. In Xinjiang province, for the sake of “public security”, an estimated 1.5 million Muslim Uighurs are being arbitrarily detained in secretive re-education camps, whose high boundary walls recall the Soviet gulags and Dachau. When the coronavirus broke out in Wuhan, Chinese authorities tried again to cover up the truth. The whistleblowing doctor, Li Wenliang, was accused of “subverting the social order” for warning his friends about the dangers of the new disease. Evidence was destroyed, the true death toll under-reported, and citizen journalists covering the outbreak were disappeared. If the Chinese government had been as open and transparent as it professed, how many of the current 388,000 deaths worldwide could have been avoided? It is striking that it is populist leaders who share Xi Jinping’s disregard for the truth that have handled the pandemic the worst. Until now, the only place under Chinese rule where Tiananmen’s victims could be mourned and its ideals celebrated was Hong Kong. But the CCP are now intent on stubbing out this last pocket of freedom. Following the approval of the new national security law, which bans “subversion, terrorism and treason”, the mass vigil in Victoria Park, the most vivid symbol of the territory’s autonomy, has this year been banned for the first time. After my first novel was banned in China, Hong Kong became my refuge for 10 years. Today I am more concerned than I have ever been that the CCP will enact another Tiananmen on Hong Kong’s streets. Whether it happens dramatically with armoured tanks, or more covertly, over years, as it has in Tibet and Xinjiang, Hong Kong’s unique spirit and character will be assailed as the CCP attempts to draw it deeper into its net. All around the world, people are finding it hard to breathe as the virus that originally emerged in Wuhan spreads through the air, and the boots of demagogues everywhere stamp down on human necks. In China and Hong Kong, the only source of hope will be the stubborn refusal to forget, and the fierce clinging to the humane ideals of the peacerful protesters who filled Tiananmen Square in 1989. • Ma Jian was born in Qingdao, China. His novels include China Dream, The Dark Road and Beijing Coma. All his books are banned in China