A state-sponsored collective amnesia has blanketed the Chinese people.

In this world of falsehoods, duplicitous behaviour and double dealing the one thing we must all strive for above all others is truth. My wife grew up in a world heavy with the former and very little of the latter – the Soviet Union. The worst of it was that those negatives were state-sponsored, with a challenger facing the prospect of a bullet in the back of the head, the Gulag or in the later years after Stalin’s death being assigned to the madhouse, there to be medicated with mind-bending drugs which effectively turned them into a zombie.

The thinking was that if you couldn’t see the benefits of Communism you must, indeed, be mad. In true Kafkaesque, they even named the regime’s leading newspaper ‘Pravda’, which in Russian means truth. Yet for all the suffocating and malign effects of government policy, people did know much of the truth. Today’s N. Korea is an out-on-its-own, bizarre exception. Nothing in all human experience quite compares with what they do there. However, in order to get a decent job and stay out of trouble with the Soviet version, the bulk of the people chose to play the system and not challenge it. Only in the anonymity of the kitchen did they dare to speak their true thoughts.

Thankfully that system has been consigned to the dustbin of history and my wife’s once occupied people, the Lithuanians, can breathe the sweet air of Liberty – guaranteed, I’m proud to say, by our own RAF (among others) jets which daily sweep their skies. We in Europe congratulated ourselves that our own steadfastness – mightily reinforced, I have to say, by Uncle Sam – has seen off the dead hand of tyranny in our own continent. Only the single, anomalous state of Belarus remains to remind us of the awfulness of the system which prevailed for so long.

But far away, across the other side of the world, an eastern version staggers on. Full of absurd contradictions, it has loosened the economic purse-strings to such an extent that to pretend it reflects the thoughts of Marx and Engels is to put us back once more into the realms of Kafka. However, in terms of the suppression of liberties it is still very much in the mould of the old masters. I refer, of course, to Communist China.

This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the student uprising in Tiananmen Square in which, after much prevarication, the regime shot and crushed beneath tank tracks hundreds, perhaps over a thousand young people. All mention of that terrible atrocity has throughout this quarter century been forbidden in the Chinese media. A state-sponsored collective amnesia has blanketed the Chinese people. It is a non-event to be airbrushed from memory – except that it hasn’t, at least in a normally tranquil and prosperous part of the Middle Kingdom, which is what China liked to call itself when it considered it was the centre of the world. That corner of mainland China – where 100,000 people took to the streets in remembrance of the students – is Hong Kong. To the fury of the regime, the people there took no notice of Beijing’s ban on gatherings.

Who does the regime blame for that blatant act of defiance? Why, of course, we the British. Nearly two centuries ago we took over a little fishing village in a remote backwater and turned it into one of the great mega cities of the world. We gave it good governance and introduced the rule of law. It became a magnet for Chinese to flock to for a better life as well as jobs and prosperity. We taught them not to accept unfairness and now they turn these attitudes against their new masters in Beijing.

It may have been possible a quarter century ago before the age of social media, instant news and mobiles with millions of cameras to commit atrocities and get away with it, but not now. You may gun down a thousand people but can you gun down a hundred thousand? It is my belief that we have introduced a virus into the body politic of China, which in the fullness of time will sweep out of Hong Kong and infect the whole of China. If that is the case then we shall have done something of which we can be really proud.