China's authoritarian regime has long lied to its entire population about what happened in the early morning of June 4, 1989. Those who know it’s a lie don’t dare speak out. And those who don’t know, especially the young, are limited in their access to the truth.

Beginning in late April 1989, peaceful student demonstrators filled Beijing's iconic Tiananmen Square. They demanded democracy, freedom of speech and of the press, and an end to government corruption. Their gathering, which predated the fall of the Berlin Wall by more than two years, drew more than a million people together of all ages and from all professional backgrounds. Their gathering inspired hundreds of smaller demonstrations throughout China.

For weeks, there were sharp divisions within China’s Communist regime about how to handle these protests. But in the end, they did what communists do, suppressing dissent and silencing criticism with rivers of human blood.

In late May, the throngs of protesters prevented the People’s Liberation Army (communists are masters of irony) from advancing into Tiananmen Square and ending the protests. A standoff ensued, but it didn’t last. On the evening of June 3, the army received its orders to crush the protests “by any means.” The army began using live ordnance and even dumdum bullets, mowing down those who stood in their path to Tiananmen. They killed between 300 and 3,000 unarmed demonstrators and injured thousands more. To this day, the exact body count is unknown because the government suppressed all discussion of this in the aftermath.

According to the government’s initial accounts, the vast majority of those wounded were military and police. In any other context, this obvious lie would provide an amusing commentary on the efficacy of Chinese soldiers. It can’t be easy to lose a fight in which you have all the guns and tanks on your side.

The government failed to keep the images of this massacre and its aftermath out of the international press. But then, as now, it had a much tighter grip on the information available to those living within China. Over 1,000 arrests followed the killings. In the decades that followed, the Chinese state kept tightening its grip on information and its surveillance activities while continuing to abandon backward socialist ideas that had been retarding economic growth. Western leaders, eager to reach more than a billion new participants in global markets, made only feeble attempts to challenge China’s appalling human rights record. The result, unfortunately, is a regime as powerful and ruthless as ever, but backed by a much stronger economy than ever before.

China's regime today uses similar repressive tactics to quell domestic dissent. Last fall, it targeted people for illegally using American social media platforms, arresting Twitter users in China and coercing them into deleting controversial tweets and even their entire accounts. This week, Twitter abruptly shut down or locked out the accounts of hundreds of dissidents: a move that the company has since claimed was an accident that just happened to take place days before today's commemoration of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Meanwhile, any attempt to discuss those events or any other controversial subject online in China will result in censorship and possible arrest.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has arrested and purged many of his political rivals in the Chinese Communist Party, leaving his own power almost unchecked. He has even abolished term limits on his own job. He has created a network of concentration camps in the northwest Xinjiang province, where hundreds of thousands of Uighur Muslims and other religious minorities are being held and “re-educated," among other things, pressured to abandon their religion and submit to the Chinese state.

But even scarier, today’s China has major expansionist plans. It hopes to bring its brand of tyranny to a neighborhood near you. Its Belt and Road Initiative is designed to trap developing nations in crippling debt and to seize control of their assets. China is also exercising soft power on American college campuses, exporting censorship and propaganda through Confucius Institutes and monitoring Chinese students abroad.

As everyone finally acknowledged starting in November 2016, Russia poses an immediate threat to U.S. interests. But Russia’s population is dying, and its economy is shrinking. China, in contrast, will be America’s indispensable friend or foe in the coming century. Today, and on every June 4, remember what China’s leaders are capable of and what they're willing to cover up.