Awaiting a Democratic Hong Kong
Today is Convergence… I write about it. And a news item appears on My Yahoo! News feed. Never seen an 89 related piece before.
2 hours, 8 minutes ago
By Benjamin Kang Lim
BEIJING (Reuters) – A Chinese academic branded a “black hand” mastermind of the 1989 Tiananmen protests has quietly returned to work at a private think-tank 15 years after many of its researchers were jailed, sources said on Tuesday.
Chen Ziming, 52, who was sentenced to 13 years in jail, resumed work at the Beijing Social Economic Research Institute in late January, a development analysts saw as evidence China’s new generation of rulers, led by Communist Party chief Hu Jintao, are more tolerant than their predecessors.
“He may conduct some research, but we still haven’t considered whether he will write reports because he is still deprived of his political rights,” He Jiadong, head of the think-tank, told Reuters.
“It’s an improvement. They’re are not interfering. They’re more enlightened,” said the 81-year-old, a former newspaper editor-in-chief.
The ascent in 2002 of a new generation of leaders headed by Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao — and the retirement of hard-liners who supported the crackdown such as the unpopular then premier Li Peng — had sparked faint hopes of a possible reassessment of the protests that were crushed by the Tiananmen Square massacre.
But analysts rule out a government reversal of the official verdict that the protests centered in Tiananmen Square were a “counter-revolutionary” crime, saying the new leadership remains obsessed with stability as it consolidates its power.
“That strikes me as very significant that someone who was tarred so deeply by the authorities is allowed to make a comeback in that way,” a Western diplomat said of his return to work.
“But this is something completely different to a reassessment,” the envoy said.
Hundreds of civilians were killed when the army ended the protests on June 4, 1989 and many more arrested and sentenced to long jail terms in the nationwide crackdown that followed.
Authorities have shown little sign they are loosening their grip, formally arresting on Tuesday a civil servant who posted essays critical of the government on the Internet.
Chen, reached by telephone, declined to comment because he is still deprived of his political rights and not allowed to talk to foreign reporters. A source close to Chen said police surveillance stopped last year.
JUST A LITTLE LEEWAY
“This is more along the lines of allowing academics a little more leeway to get on with uncontroversial research,” the diplomat said of Chen’s return to work.
“But if they stepped out of any perceived line and strayed into territory of research that was controversial, our nice, kind Hu and Wen would step back in and seek control of their activities,” he said.
The think-tank ceased operations in 1989 after many of its 60 researchers were jailed or fled into exile. It reopened in January and has six researchers, including Chen, who work from home because it cannot yet afford to rent an office. It has a Web site at http://www.bjsjs.net.
Another “black hand” of the protests, Wang Juntao, one of the founders of the think-tank, was sentenced to 13 years in prison and released to the United States on medical parole in 1994.
The arrested cyber-dissident, Du Daobin, 40, posted 28 articles on the Internet that “incited subversion of state power and overthrow of China’s socialist system,” the Xinhua news agency said on Tuesday.
Du’s case has drawn protests from scores of intellectuals who have written to Premier Wen urging his release. An online petition said Du had not called for the overthrow of the government and labeled his detention a misuse of the subversion law to stop free speech.
Xinhua, quoting a provincial police spokesman, said Du, detained since October, had accepted money from overseas organizations in return for helping them to post articles harmful to state security on domestic Web sites. (Additional reporting by Juliana Liu and Cher Gao)
Yan Sham-Shackleton Online 