When their Communist tyrants began to allow a degree of economic freedom to the Chinese people, we thought – with uncharacteristic optimism and a little too much faith in the liberating power of free markets – that political freedom would soon follow. We were wrong. China is still a tyranny, and the people are still slaves. To be held in a forced collective is to be a slave. (See our post Tarnished laurels, December 7, 2010, on the imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo who called for democracy in China.)

As Hu Jintao, China’s slave-master-in-chief, enjoys a state visit to the US with all honors, we recall the evil he and his fellow tyrants did and continue to do.

Ken Blackwell helps us with this article at Townhall:

It was twenty-two years ago, in the spring of 1989, that thousands of Chinese students gathered in Beijing’s Tienanmen Square to demand democracy… They yearned to join young people in Poland, East Germany, and the then-united nation of Czechoslovakia. It was a time when it seemed the winds of hope and change might sweep away tyranny from the whole world.

It was not to be. While Gorbachev in the Kremlin refused to send in the tanks, refused to shoot down demonstrating students in Eastern Europe, Chinese Communist cadre Hu Jintao joined those in the Communist leadership in Beijing who had no such qualms. Hu would counsel deadly force rather than relax the iron grip of the Communist Party in China.

The world watched, astounded, as a single young Chinese man, wearing a white shirt and holding an innocent briefcase, stood down an entire column of tanks in Beijing. As the lead tank maneuvered to get around the man whose name we now know was Wang Wei-lin, the young man shifted ground and stood squarely in the tank’s path.

It was a dramatic moment. The world watched, awed, at the courage and the idealism of young China on vivid display. But the clash ended quietly and out of sight of Western TV cameras. China democracy advocates who later took refuge in the West testified that Wang Wei-lin was taken into a nearby hotel where, out of view, he was quietly strangled to death.

That driver of the lead tank, a young officer in the People’s Liberation Army, was also killed by state security forces, China democracy refugees tell us. After all, if he had followed his orders, he would have swiftly run over the brave young man in the white shirt. There would have been no dramatic standoff. Thousands of Chinese students would likewise be overrun by the regime’s tanks and shot down as they fled Tiananmen Square.

Their bodies were burned. China’s rulers soon washed down the bricks of their capital’s ceremonial center.

Today, Hu Jintao is president of the People’s Republic of China. …

Washington is welcoming Hu Jintao. We have to roll out a red carpet for the man and the regime that hold a trillion dollars in U.S. debt. The blood-red flag of the People’s Republic of China flies on lampposts along Washington ’s Pennsylvania Avenue. …

Among its other atrocities, the regime kills untold numbers of babies, most of them girls. Astoundingly, American tax-payers contribute money to assist the mass murder:

U.S. taxpayers must once again give millions to the UN Population Fund (UNFP). This UN group aids and abets China ’s government as it brutally enforces its one-child policy. Hundreds of millions of Chinese women have been forced to have abortions. … Female infanticide is routine in rural China …

Today the national anthem of China will be played in Washington, D.C. It’s opening words are:

Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves!

And see what happens to you.