Twenty years ago yesterday, tanks, troops and guns snuffed out the biggest movement for mass democracy on mainland China that there has ever been. This has had tragic consequences for China. If any one image symbolised this intense but unsuccessful struggle, it is that of the still largely unidentified lone man who single handedly confronted the tanks of the People's Liberation Army in Tiananmen Square only a day or so after the massacre.

The Chinese Communist Party leadership under Deng Xiaopeng and Li Peng decided to take on the student and worker protesters, who were calling for greater democracy within the country, especially after they had embarrassed them during Mikhail Gorbachev's historic visit to Beijing (made in order to heal the long-running Sino-Soviet split) during May 1989. It was Gorbachev's presence in the country that had largely sparked off the protests as the nearly one million strong Chinese crowds who gathered on Tiananmen Square during that northern spring had seen how successful Gorbachev's 'glasnost' reforms had been in opening up their fellow socialist neigbhour to the north.

After a decade of often tumultuous market-driven economic reforms, income inequality was on the rise and this was particularly being felt by the Chinese working class. This was at the same time as Deng himself proclaimed that 'to be wealthy is glorious' as a large scale capitalist class divide began to re-emerge after the implementation of Deng's 'Three Modernisations' market driven reforms after 1978.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, a nascent democracy movement began to spawn, at first amongst the intelligensia and then these ideas began to pervade the wider populace as represented, for example, in the 'Democracy Wall' movement that took off in January 1979 in Beijing. In fact, China did begin to open up slightly during the post-Mao years but this was part of a continuing cycle of openness and repression that had gone on historically for thousands of years ever since the earlier emperors of China had obviated between opening up to receiving greater criticism about their rule and then becoming repressive again when this criticism threatened to get out of hand. Mao, following the Communist triumph in 1949, had continued this tradition as was the case with his 'Thousand Flowers' campaign in 1958 which was a ruse intended to identify dissenters who thought they were genuinely free to express themselves about the state of affairs in China only to find themselves imprisoned and/or killed later for their efforts.

Therefore, the democratic centralism inherent in the Marxist-Leninist conception of socialism served as a convenient means of protecting the interests and privileges of the Chinese leadership (and still does today). What the Communist Party under Deng did was to move towards the economic right while continuing to espouse the authoritarian mantra first enunciated by Lenin whereby a small coterie within the party act as the so-called 'vanguard' of the proletarian revolution rather than act as the genuine voice of the working class and peasantry. Therefore, decision making isn't in the hands of the workers or peasants but rather a small elite within the leadership.

In my view, the protests of 1989 were an attempt by elements of the elite Chinese leadership to suppress the genuine desire for democratic socialism and the opening up of the Communist Party. Indeed, the brave protesters who lost their lives in the Tiananmen Square massacre reportedly sang 'La Internationale', one of the main anthems of international socialism. as the bullets rang out. Even a small faction of party leaders, led by the General Secretary Zhao Ziyang (albeit a believer in the free market revolution) sided with the students and workers during their protests and argued that they be treated leniently in the aftermath. For this show of internal defiance, Zhao and his small band of followers were later ousted from their leadership roles by Deng and Li and ended up under virtual house arrest.

What these protests also represented was a call for greater fairness within China as the workers who came onto the streets along with the students wanted to see genuine progress in terms of working conditions, the ability to form independent trade unions and the preservation of the positive gains of the revolution in terms of free health, education and affordable housing. They wanted to see that any transition to democracy not only benefitted the rising middle class but the massive numbers of workers and peasants too.

The tragic crushing of the Tiananmen protests has therefore served as a blow for greater democracy and openness in the People's Republic of China. This has enabled the regime to easily continue implementing free market reforms that have seen the emergence of a virtual slave labour workforce there who are both low paid and have few, if any, employment rights (indeed free market thinkers like the late Milton Friedman held that the suppression of democracy and personal liberty was imperative if the free market was to have any hope of flourishing with the minimum of state intervention as was the case in Pinochet's Chile). Ultimately, this has benefitted both domestic and foreign capital who have invested heavily in China for this reason. This has resulted in New Zealand, for example, being the first country (under the previous Labour Government) to sign a bilateral free trade agreement with the PRC and other Western nations will most likely suit. Concluding free trade deals with the PRC will not only further weaken the hands of Chinese workers but, as we have already seen in our own communities, the export of jobs to low wage hell holes like China.

Furthermore, the social protections created after the Communist takeover in 1949 have been eroded according to a documentary I watched the other night as free health and education have all but been ended there with many people now having to pay to send their children to school and for hospital care.

Tiananmen represented the effective end of socialism in China and of any attempt to introduce democratic socialism into the country as a humane alternative to unfettered authoritarian-driven free market capitalism. For this, ordinary Chinese people, whether they be workers, peasants or intellectuals have paid dearly and through concluding free trade agreements with the current regime, all of us have started to pay too.