 29 years ago, a young brave, I think it was an architecture student, Chinese student, stood in front of a tank and in a sense pleaded with the Chinese army not to crush the student rebellion that was happening in China. Chinese students, about a million students, went out into the streets primarily around Tiananmen Square demanding more political freedom. They were becoming wealthier economically. Things were looking up from an economic perspective. They had a sudden amount of freedoms but they wanted more and they wanted more fast. They went out willing to wait and they went under the streets in a peaceful protest and the protest lasted for weeks and the Chinese government under Deng Cha Peng was not willing to grant them those freedoms. Deng would say that our Chinese are not ready and indeed Deng would argue, argued that Chinese might never be ready that always they will need a communist party to rule over them. I said some positive things over the years about Deng Cha Peng because in the name of pragmatism, he liberalized the Chinese economy and I think tens, hundreds of millions of Chinese are thankful for that fact. But we can't forget that before he liberalized the economy, he was one of Mao's thugs who was responsible for the murder of millions of people and that after Mao's death and in spite of loosening the reins of the economy, he continued to be a brutal dictator. Not a totalitarian but an authoritarian nevertheless. The difference is totalitarians, it's total, total control over everything you do, total control and speech, total control in the economy, total control on your behavior. Authoritarians pick and choose where they're going to control. They don't have total control. China today is authoritarian, not totalitarian. On June 4th, 1989, 29 years ago, Deng Cha Peng in anticipation of a visit from Gorbachev to China wanted to clean up the mess and get it over with. He wanted Gorbachev to be able to come to Beijing without being hampered by demonstrations all over the city. He wanted to show the world that he was in control and more importantly, I think, most importantly, he wanted to show the Chinese people he was in control. And they took, the Chinese took the most brutal brigade that they could find. The brigade peasants, a brigade still committed to Mao's ideas, a brigade that they knew would do whatever the Communist Party told them to do. And they put them in Tiananmen Square and they put them on the roofs and they put them in the tanks and in the armored vehicles and they put them in the soldiers with the guns storming, storming the square. And the square is massive. Those of you who haven't been in Tiananmen Square, you don't really get a sense of how massive that square was, filled with hundreds of thousands of students. And 29 years ago, those soldiers opened fire and those tanks ran over students. They slaughtered them. According to official Chinese government numbers, 300 people were killed. According to Chinese Red Cross, the number was closer to 3,000. According to independent estimates, including coming out of the British Embassy at the time, the number exceeds 10,000 people, 10,000 people, 10,000 people protesting for their own freedom, 10,000 young people wanting a better life for themselves, wanting a future for themselves, 10,000 people standing up to a communist regime that seemed to be superficially, at least, freeing their world up. And in the naivete, they thought, oh, we'll just push them a little bit and they'll speed it up and make our lives better. Give us the rights that are ours as human beings. Now, most of those students probably had not read Locke or the founding fathers of America, but some of them had. Many of them, I would argue, had. Many of them had even read some of the great economists, and some had even read Einrend. But all of them united by the fact that they wanted to be free at whatever level they understood that concept. They wanted their own freedom, and the Chinese government took their lives for that. They shot them dead, 10,000 of them, in the streets. They slaughtered them. They drove over them, and then they brought big fire hoses, and they washed away the blood. So when Gorbachev came to Tiananmen Square a few days later, the place was sparkling clean. They took all the bodies. They literally used tractors to load the bodies up into trucks, and they dropped those bodies into mass graves. I think they burnt them. So many people don't even know if they loved ones died that day, because many people just disappeared and were never to be seen again. That man who stood in front of the tank, nobody really knows what happened to him. He could have been killed. He could have escaped. Ruma has it. He lives in Taiwan today that he managed to get out. I hope that rumor is correct. I hope that courageous man who was pleading for his life, who was pleading for freedom, who was pleading with his own army, the army that is there to protect him, that according to a proper understanding of the role of government, the army that is there to protect him from criminals, that is protect him from foreign invaders, to protect him from people who would slaughter him like the Japanese, for example, did in World War II. That army turned against him and against his friends and against his people and slaughtered them. 10,000 people 29 years ago today in Tiananmen Square, many of them, their families will never see the bodies, many of them, their families will never quite know because some just disappeared, some left and have stayed inside, stayed hiding, if you will, a fear of what the Chinese government would do to them to this day. And the thing is that the Chinese don't even know the new generation doesn't even know Tiananmen Square happened. Ben says he's married to a Chinese and she didn't even know Tiananmen Square happened because they don't teach it. They know nothing about it. You can whisper about it in Beijing. You can talk about it in silence. But it's one of those no-knows when you go to China that you're not supposed to talk about. So those of us who are still free, those of us who still have the ability to speak freely, I think it's incumbent on us to remember the 10,000 who died that day. It's incumbent to call out the Chinese government for what they did. We can do it from the safety of distance. We can do it from the safety of living in a country that is still barely holding on by its fingernails, still free.