The pillar of smoke that rose from Tiananmen Square in January 2001 was not an act that could be cleanly explained, nor one that history has resolved. The self-immolation incident that unfolded at the symbolic heart of Beijing—rapidly broadcast, tightly controlled, and endlessly instrumentalized by the Chinese state—became a spectacle rather than a tragedy, its meaning dictated before its ashes had cooled. For decades, the Western world had engaged China under the comforting assumption that economic liberalization would inevitably produce political pluralism. Whatever the truth of that day, the flames consumed more than human lives; they incinerated the illusion that authoritarian power in China was temporary, reformable, or ultimately answerable to its citizens. What burned in the square was not simply flesh, but the last residue of faith that the promise of 1989 might one day be redeemed.
That illusion had started to fade before the smoke cleared. The democratic hopes of 1989 were not just suppressed. They were buried by a political system built to keep them from returning. The Chinese state did not stumble into absolutism. It created it. After Tiananmen, the party crafted a system where dissent was not just punished but made impossible. Citizenship became a conditional privilege rather than a right.
It was in October 2022 that the trajectory toward total control reached its most explicit articulation during the 20th Party Congress. In that hall of choreographed applause, Xi Jinping dismantled the fragile norms that had governed elite politics since the post-Mao era. The informal checks and balances associated with Deng Xiaoping’s legacy—collective leadership, term limits, and managed succession—were discarded in favour of a centralized system revolving around a single personality. Reforms that once hinted at gradual opening were reversed, and the party reasserted its supremacy not only over the gun and the pen, but over history, law, and conscience itself.
Acts of extreme protest must be understood against this backdrop of foreclosed possibility. When legal redress is absent, speech is criminalized, and reform is structurally prohibited, despair seeks expression in the body itself. The self-immolation in Tiananmen was not a political programme but a terminal signal—a visceral response to a system in which the door to change has been bolted shut from the outside.
That despair is compounded by a suffocating economic reality. The implicit social contract of the past three decades—political obedience in exchange for rising prosperity—has fractured. Youth unemployment surged above twenty per cent before the statistic itself was withdrawn from public view, creating a lost generation of graduates confronting underemployment and stagnation. The optimism that defined the early years of the millennium has curdled into resignation, captured in the bleak vernacular of “lying flat” and “letting it rot.” When a society offers neither advancement nor voice, the pivot from quiet disengagement to fatalistic protest is neither sudden nor irrational.
Beijing attempts to mask this reality with the Orwellian formulation of “whole-process people’s democracy,” a phrase that circulates through state media and diplomatic statements while bearing no resemblance to lived experience. There have been no competitive national elections since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. The machinery of the state exists not to mediate public will but to perpetuate its own dominance. The “process” is one of extraction—of labour, loyalty, and silence—while surveillance and coercion are returned in kind. The man who burned in Tiananmen did not die in a democracy with Chinese characteristics. He died in a panopticon with medieval instincts.
This growing authoritarianism affects places beyond China. The heat is felt most across the Taiwan Strait. For Taiwan’s 23 million people, the Beijing episode was not just a distant event. It was a warning. A regime that tightly controls its own people will not hesitate with a neighbor it claims. Economic stress and social anger at home raise the risk of an outside crisis. Nationalism is the last tool of autocrats, and Taiwan is its strongest symbol.
The logic of deterrence must therefore be recalibrated. The belief that China could be integrated into a rules-based order through trade and engagement has burned away alongside earlier illusions. History suggests that expansionist authoritarian systems respond not to accommodation but to resistance. Taiwan stands as the democratic firewall of the Indo-Pacific—a living refutation of the claim that Chinese culture is incompatible with liberty. Its existence is intolerable to the Chinese Communist Party precisely because it offers a glimpse of what China itself might have been had 1989 ended differently.
Defending Taiwan, then, is not an act of charity but of strategic necessity. Ambiguity must give way to preparation, and preparation to credible deterrence. The accelerated provision of asymmetric capabilities—anti-ship missiles, sea mines, and layered air defence—represents the only meaningful ballot that can be cast against authoritarian expansion. If the smoke over Tiananmen in 2001 revealed anything enduring, it is that the era of hopeful engagement has closed. The age of containment has returned. The dreams of 1989 lie buried in Beijing, but they must be defended—decisively and without illusion—in Taipei.
Ashu Mann
Ashu Mann is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Land Warfare Studies. He was awarded the Vice Chief of the Army Staff Commendation card on Army Day 2025. He is pursuing a PhD in Defense and Strategic Studies at Amity University, Noida. His research focuses include the India-China territorial dispute, great power rivalry, and Chinese foreign policy.
- Ashu Mann#molongui-disabled-link
- Ashu Mann#molongui-disabled-link
- Ashu Mann#molongui-disabled-link
