Acton Line

June 4 marked the 34th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, in which the Chinese Communist Party put down a pro-democracy protest movement that had bubbled up in Tiananmen Square and throughout mainland China. For many, it served as a stark reminder the brutality of the country that, under the autocratic leadership of Mao Zedong killed between 40 and 80 million of its own people, could still be just as brutal. Tiananmen happened just three years before Benedict Rogers moved to China to begin teaching English. For Rogers, this marked the beginning of a professional career focused on issues in and around China and Hong Kong that saw him work as a journalist in Hong Kong for the first five years after the handover to traveling to China’s borders with Myanmar/Burma and North Korea to document the plight of refugees escaping from Beijing-backed satellite dictatorships and then campaigning for human rights in China, especially for Uyghurs, Christians and Falun Gong practitioners, human rights defenders, jo