By The Associated Press and Knight Ridder Newspapers
BEIJING — Three Chinese activists have been removed from their homes just ahead of tomorrow’s anniversary of the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing, a human-rights group said yesterday.
Activists Wang Guoqi, Zhang Chunzhu and Yang Jing were all moved into hotels outside Beijing in the past week, the Center for Human Rights and Decency said in a statement.
Two other prominent activists, Liu Xiaobo and Jiang Yanyong, could no longer be contacted by telephone and may also have been taken away by authorities, it said.
Jiang, a military surgeon, petitioned the government to admit it made mistakes in crushing the Tiananmen protests.
Activists say Chinese authorities have tightened their surveillance in recent weeks, stepping up round-the-clock monitoring, tapping phones and forcing departures from the capital city in an effort to prevent public memorials as the anniversary approaches.
Hundreds, if not thousands, died in the attack, which the government has branded a counterrevolutionary riot. It has never issued a death toll and has detained and harassed activists who try to assemble their own.
The rise to power of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao early last year marked a generational change in China’s leadership, and some critics hoped for a reappraisal of the student-led pro-democracy protests.
But expectations have withered. The Communist Party quashes any public debate about the massacre.
Reflecting the intense feelings over the killings, about 5,000 people marched in Hong Kong on Sunday to commemorate those who died.
Among those in China who’ve tried for years to get an official reappraisal of the 1989 protests are a small group of women whose children were killed when the demonstrations were crushed.
Police restricted the movements of three of these “Tiananmen mothers” this year, as they have in years past during the period around the anniversary.
“We simply want justice over the June 4th incident from the government. They killed people that day. They are guilty,” said Zhang Xianling, a 67-year-old retired aerospace engineer whose 19-year-old son was shot in the head during the protests.
Zhang and two other mothers, Ding Zilin and Yin Min, had expected to deliver a letter to authorities last Friday about former Premier Li Peng, who ordered the protests crushed. All three were confined to their homes.
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For a Suvey of news stories about the events of Tiananmen 1989, please click on comments.
June 4th 1989: The images and memories
Related Posts: Beijing, June 4th 1989: Blood, Death, Chaos and Not that One Photo.
Hong Kong Holds Candle Light Vigil For Tiananmen Victims.
Can’t Sleep. June 3rd.. So this is how it feels to Live in a Totalitarian Regime huh?
Yan Sham-Shackleton Online 
chicagotribune.com >> Nation/World
Tiananmen massacre lost to young
China’s 1989 slaughter of democracy activists is unknown or irrelevant to a prospering generation
By Michael A. Lev
Tribune foreign correspondent
Published May 30, 2004
BEIJING — For those who witnessed the Tiananmen massacre or have had the freedom to read the historical accounts, the horror is indelibly etched: How bodies lay in the streets on June 4, 1989, after the Chinese military ruthlessly crushed the student-led democracy movement.
But for today’s Chinese university students, a successor generation to those who protested and died near Tiananmen Square, there is nothing to remember and nothing to contemplate.
As its 15th anniversary approaches, nearly all references to what happened during one of the most dramatic episodes of modern China were long ago expunged by a government that fears the massacre’s legacy and prefers to suppress a troubling event instead of confronting it.
Chinese students do not study the events of 1989. Internet sites about the date are blocked by the authorities. There are no official remembrances on the anniversary. Few young people know the details, bother to discuss the subject or consider its relevance.
In China, except among those with personal involvement, it is almost as if June 4 never happened.
Peking students talk
At prestigious Peking University, a center of the protest movement, students offer blank stares, vague and sanitized descriptions or recite Communist Party propaganda when asked about June 4.
“I’m not very clear on it,” said Tan Tao Chao, 25, a biology student. “It was something about the government sending the military there, and some people were injured.”
Tan had no idea that 300 to 3,000 people were killed, gunned down by the People’s Liberation Army or crushed by tanks. Nor did he understand the purpose of the protests.
A 22-year-old computer science student who identified himself only by his family name, Lu, answered immediately.
“I believe what the government did was correct. There were some troublemakers,” Lu said, “and there were American forces who were acting against China.”
He also was in the dark about the death toll, which the government has never confirmed.
“It’s possible that people were injured or killed. There were students who held a hunger strike,” he said.
A 19-year-old general studies freshman said the topic of June 4 was taboo in high school, but some of her history classmates insisted that their professor explain what happened. The professor mentioned the incident in brief, but clearly the teacher skipped over the chilling details because the student could remember nothing specific about the end of the protest movement.
“You can’t say it’s completely irrelevant, but we don’t talk about it,” she said. “It’s something far away from us.”
Some students declined to give their names.
Chinese who were scarred by the massacre and who want to challenge publicly the government’s policy of covering up the details are themselves suppressed.
A group that calls itself Tiananmen Mothers, whose family members died around the square, is one of China’s most internationally recognized dissident movements. Its members want an official investigation into the slayings, but whenever they try to express their views, they are stifled or arrested.
Ding Zilin, a leader of the group, whose 17-year-old son was shot and killed as the crackdown began on the night of June 3, 1989, has endured years of police harassment.
In March, Ding and two others were arrested and held for several days after trying to import T-shirts printed with an English-language Tiananmen Mothers logo that were to be used for an informal 15th anniversary commemoration by the group.
Any memorial activity that the group undertakes likely will occur in secret. Last week, the group read protest statements to mark the anniversary at a private location in Beijing to avoid police interference, according to Human Rights in China.
There have been at least two other attempts this year to press the government into acknowledging June 4, but Chinese citizens have not heard about them because the news media are muzzled.
In the first case, Jiang Yanyong, a prominent doctor who exposed the cover-up of SARS in Beijing last year, called on the government in March to reverse its official view that the crackdown was justified to quell a “counterrevolutionary riot.” He argues that it was a “patriotic movement.”
In the second, 67 Chinese scholars and dissidents, about half of them still living in the country, wrote an open letter this month to the government, demanding an investigation, an apology and the institution of a free press.
One of the 67 signees, Beijing writer Liu Xiaobo, 48, who was a hunger striker at Tiananmen, said the government so far had not reacted to the letter, but he has been followed for months by government agents and assumes his telephone is tapped.
The potential legacy of the government’s suppression is dangerous, Liu said.
“China has a long history of the people being repressed by dictatorial governments,” he said. “If fewer and fewer people remember, it can happen again.”
Beijing’s `diminution’ tactic
Perry Link of Princeton University, one of the editors of The Tiananmen Papers, a compendium of secret Chinese government documents, wrote recently that the Communist Party has used the public-relations tactic of “diminution” to alter perceptions of what happened.
From “counterrevolutionary riot,” the government over time has downgraded the events at Tiananmen to the officially sanctioned description, a “fuss,” Link wrote in the journal China Rights Forum.
The ability of China’s government to keep the slate wiped clean is less than perfect. Each year in March the premier gives a nationally televised news conference. A Western reporter asked Wen Jiabao about the doctor’s petition, forcing the prime minister to defend the government’s position.
“What hung in the balance was the future of our party and our country,” Wen said. “We successfully stabilized the situation of reform and opening up and the path of building socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
Wen specifically used the term “political fuss” to describe June 4.
The Chinese government’s argument, in effect, is that if democracy had suddenly swept the country, China today might look more like Russia, a struggling democracy with a declining standard of living, instead of a country with a rising one.
Justifying the crackdown on the grounds that it protected stability and paved the way for the economic miracle of today is perhaps not a morally tenable argument for most Westerners, but it is the only argument heard in China.
The Tiananmen protests began spontaneously as a public show of mourning and respect for Hu Yaobang, a pro-reform leader who died of a heart attack on April 15, 1989. It grew into a movement that targeted corruption, expressed frustration with inflation and pushed for democracy.
At its peak, more than 1 million people were drawn onto the streets of Beijing. The government repeatedly asked the students to return to their campuses and eventually declared martial law in a futile attempt to regain control.
Then came the violence.
At 10 p.m. on June 3, columns of troops and dozens of armored personnel carriers and tanks moved toward Tiananmen Square and a crowd of thousands. Demonstrators attacked by throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails, but after 2 a.m. the tanks burst through barricades and soldiers opened fire with automatic weapons and rifle volleys, according to news accounts from that day.
People scattered. A woman screamed over a loudspeaker, “Chinese people do not kill Chinese people.” Many were felled. Witnesses said they saw piles of bodies.
“The following morning I went out to Jianguo Bridge, on the boulevard east of the square,” a British reporter, James Miles, recalled 15 years later. “The body of a man was lying in the middle of the road, his head crushed like a watermelon. I got out my tape recorder and was again surrounded by angry citizens. They poured out their stories of what had happened,” said Miles, who was a reporter for the BBC at the time. “A boy in the crowd imitated a soldier firing a machine gun–pa pa pa pa pa–but he wasn’t playing. They were all angry and tense. All along the boulevard I could see the smoking wreckage of buses.”
The Chinese government was divided over the meaning and the level of threat posed by the protests, according to most interpretations of events, confirmed by The Tiananmen Papers.
The papers show that the Communist Party chief at the time, Zhao Ziyang, believed the students were reasonable and patriotic, but he was overruled by hard-liners and lost his job. He is 84, said to be in poor health and is the subject of speculation that his death could spark another public reaction.
But if today’s students don’t know what happened in 1989–or at least recognize that they aren’t supposed to analyze it–that seems unlikely.
“It’s important to history, but it’s not relevant to our lives,” said a 24-year-old Peking University political science student. “Life in China keeps getting better and better.”
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chicagotribune.com >> Nation/World
Tiananmen massacre lost to young
China’s 1989 slaughter of democracy activists is unknown or irrelevant to a prospering generation
By Michael A. Lev
Tribune foreign correspondent
Published May 30, 2004
BEIJING — For those who witnessed the Tiananmen massacre or have had the freedom to read the historical accounts, the horror is indelibly etched: How bodies lay in the streets on June 4, 1989, after the Chinese military ruthlessly crushed the student-led democracy movement.
But for today’s Chinese university students, a successor generation to those who protested and died near Tiananmen Square, there is nothing to remember and nothing to contemplate.
As its 15th anniversary approaches, nearly all references to what happened during one of the most dramatic episodes of modern China were long ago expunged by a government that fears the massacre’s legacy and prefers to suppress a troubling event instead of confronting it.
Chinese students do not study the events of 1989. Internet sites about the date are blocked by the authorities. There are no official remembrances on the anniversary. Few young people know the details, bother to discuss the subject or consider its relevance.
In China, except among those with personal involvement, it is almost as if June 4 never happened.
Peking students talk
At prestigious Peking University, a center of the protest movement, students offer blank stares, vague and sanitized descriptions or recite Communist Party propaganda when asked about June 4.
“I’m not very clear on it,” said Tan Tao Chao, 25, a biology student. “It was something about the government sending the military there, and some people were injured.”
Tan had no idea that 300 to 3,000 people were killed, gunned down by the People’s Liberation Army or crushed by tanks. Nor did he understand the purpose of the protests.
A 22-year-old computer science student who identified himself only by his family name, Lu, answered immediately.
“I believe what the government did was correct. There were some troublemakers,” Lu said, “and there were American forces who were acting against China.”
He also was in the dark about the death toll, which the government has never confirmed.
“It’s possible that people were injured or killed. There were students who held a hunger strike,” he said.
A 19-year-old general studies freshman said the topic of June 4 was taboo in high school, but some of her history classmates insisted that their professor explain what happened. The professor mentioned the incident in brief, but clearly the teacher skipped over the chilling details because the student could remember nothing specific about the end of the protest movement.
“You can’t say it’s completely irrelevant, but we don’t talk about it,” she said. “It’s something far away from us.”
Some students declined to give their names.
Chinese who were scarred by the massacre and who want to challenge publicly the government’s policy of covering up the details are themselves suppressed.
A group that calls itself Tiananmen Mothers, whose family members died around the square, is one of China’s most internationally recognized dissident movements. Its members want an official investigation into the slayings, but whenever they try to express their views, they are stifled or arrested.
Ding Zilin, a leader of the group, whose 17-year-old son was shot and killed as the crackdown began on the night of June 3, 1989, has endured years of police harassment.
In March, Ding and two others were arrested and held for several days after trying to import T-shirts printed with an English-language Tiananmen Mothers logo that were to be used for an informal 15th anniversary commemoration by the group.
Any memorial activity that the group undertakes likely will occur in secret. Last week, the group read protest statements to mark the anniversary at a private location in Beijing to avoid police interference, according to Human Rights in China.
There have been at least two other attempts this year to press the government into acknowledging June 4, but Chinese citizens have not heard about them because the news media are muzzled.
In the first case, Jiang Yanyong, a prominent doctor who exposed the cover-up of SARS in Beijing last year, called on the government in March to reverse its official view that the crackdown was justified to quell a “counterrevolutionary riot.” He argues that it was a “patriotic movement.”
In the second, 67 Chinese scholars and dissidents, about half of them still living in the country, wrote an open letter this month to the government, demanding an investigation, an apology and the institution of a free press.
One of the 67 signees, Beijing writer Liu Xiaobo, 48, who was a hunger striker at Tiananmen, said the government so far had not reacted to the letter, but he has been followed for months by government agents and assumes his telephone is tapped.
The potential legacy of the government’s suppression is dangerous, Liu said.
“China has a long history of the people being repressed by dictatorial governments,” he said. “If fewer and fewer people remember, it can happen again.”
Beijing’s `diminution’ tactic
Perry Link of Princeton University, one of the editors of The Tiananmen Papers, a compendium of secret Chinese government documents, wrote recently that the Communist Party has used the public-relations tactic of “diminution” to alter perceptions of what happened.
From “counterrevolutionary riot,” the government over time has downgraded the events at Tiananmen to the officially sanctioned description, a “fuss,” Link wrote in the journal China Rights Forum.
The ability of China’s government to keep the slate wiped clean is less than perfect. Each year in March the premier gives a nationally televised news conference. A Western reporter asked Wen Jiabao about the doctor’s petition, forcing the prime minister to defend the government’s position.
“What hung in the balance was the future of our party and our country,” Wen said. “We successfully stabilized the situation of reform and opening up and the path of building socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
Wen specifically used the term “political fuss” to describe June 4.
The Chinese government’s argument, in effect, is that if democracy had suddenly swept the country, China today might look more like Russia, a struggling democracy with a declining standard of living, instead of a country with a rising one.
Justifying the crackdown on the grounds that it protected stability and paved the way for the economic miracle of today is perhaps not a morally tenable argument for most Westerners, but it is the only argument heard in China.
The Tiananmen protests began spontaneously as a public show of mourning and respect for Hu Yaobang, a pro-reform leader who died of a heart attack on April 15, 1989. It grew into a movement that targeted corruption, expressed frustration with inflation and pushed for democracy.
At its peak, more than 1 million people were drawn onto the streets of Beijing. The government repeatedly asked the students to return to their campuses and eventually declared martial law in a futile attempt to regain control.
Then came the violence.
At 10 p.m. on June 3, columns of troops and dozens of armored personnel carriers and tanks moved toward Tiananmen Square and a crowd of thousands. Demonstrators attacked by throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails, but after 2 a.m. the tanks burst through barricades and soldiers opened fire with automatic weapons and rifle volleys, according to news accounts from that day.
People scattered. A woman screamed over a loudspeaker, “Chinese people do not kill Chinese people.” Many were felled. Witnesses said they saw piles of bodies.
“The following morning I went out to Jianguo Bridge, on the boulevard east of the square,” a British reporter, James Miles, recalled 15 years later. “The body of a man was lying in the middle of the road, his head crushed like a watermelon. I got out my tape recorder and was again surrounded by angry citizens. They poured out their stories of what had happened,” said Miles, who was a reporter for the BBC at the time. “A boy in the crowd imitated a soldier firing a machine gun–pa pa pa pa pa–but he wasn’t playing. They were all angry and tense. All along the boulevard I could see the smoking wreckage of buses.”
The Chinese government was divided over the meaning and the level of threat posed by the protests, according to most interpretations of events, confirmed by The Tiananmen Papers.
The papers show that the Communist Party chief at the time, Zhao Ziyang, believed the students were reasonable and patriotic, but he was overruled by hard-liners and lost his job. He is 84, said to be in poor health and is the subject of speculation that his death could spark another public reaction.
But if today’s students don’t know what happened in 1989–or at least recognize that they aren’t supposed to analyze it–that seems unlikely.
“It’s important to history, but it’s not relevant to our lives,” said a 24-year-old Peking University political science student. “Life in China keeps getting better and better.”
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Tiananmen Protesters Wish for New System
AUDRA ANG
Associated Press
BEIJING – Fifteen years after the bloodshed at Tiananmen Square, exiled student leaders of China’s 1989 pro-democracy protests are settled abroad as academics and entrepreneurs. But they nurture one wish above all – to come home to a new system.
“Living in exile, we have to keep our faith that there will be democracy some day,” said Wu’er Kaixi, who gained fame as a pajama-clad hunger-striker who harangued then-Premier Li Peng and now is a political commentator in Taiwan.
Though the protest leaders have built new lives and Chinese society has changed drastically since 1989, communist leaders are still intensely sensitive about the protests that drew thousands to vast Tiananmen Square in the center of Beijing to demand a more open system and an end to corruption.
The government is trying to prevent any commemoration of the 15th anniversary on Friday of the military attack on the demonstrators that killed hundreds and perhaps thousands. Activists and relatives of the dead have been detained or ordered out of the Chinese capital.
Now in their 30s, protest leaders who escaped after the crackdown are still labeled traitors and threatened with arrest. Others served prison terms and left China to start over.
Wang Dan, a principal strategist of the protests, spent seven years in prison. Now 35, he is working toward a doctorate at Harvard University with a thesis on Chinese politics and history and the democratic movement in Taiwan, the self-ruled island that had one-party rule in 1989 but is now a thriving ethnic Chinese democracy.
Chai Ling, a student leader known for her impassioned speeches, runs a software firm in the United States. Fellow demonstrator Li Lu heads an American investment company.
Since 1989, the government has carried out changes demanded by the protesters. It scrapped rules that dictated where Chinese could live or work and even whom they could marry. Economic growth has given millions new power over their lives, while Beijing is cracking down on rampant corruption that it once denied existed.
Beijing is experimenting with what it calls “village democracy,” with nonpartisan local elections that let tens of millions of Chinese pick officials for low-level posts. President Hu Jintao, who took power last year, has called for more “socialist democracy” – though that means making the Communist Party more attentive to public needs, not allowing real opposition parties.
Real power is still held by the closed, secretive ruling party, which prohibits independent political activity and has imprisoned or driven nearly all of China’s active dissidents into exile.
“The 1989 movement was instrumental for the country’s economic development today,” Wu’er, 36, said by phone from New York. “Fifteen years has marked tremendous progress economically, but still the biggest obstacle is political.”
The government defends the crackdown and continued one-party rule as a key to China’s economic success. It rejects pleas to reverse its verdict that the protests were a counterrevolutionary riot.
The protests were “political turmoil no matter what you call it,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said this week. He defended the crackdown as playing “a very good role in stabilizing the situation, which enabled China to develop its economy and make contributions to the peace and development of the world.”
Liu refused Thursday to say whether the student exiles would be able to return to China without being arrested.
“China is going to handle the cases in accordance with relevant laws,” he said.
Wu’er said he, Wang and other 1989 veterans plan to protest Thursday in front of the Chinese Embassy in Washington.
Wu’er was on the government’s list of 21 most-wanted pro-democracy campaigners. He was smuggled out through Hong Kong, first to France and then the United States before settling in Taiwan.
“It was never meant to be easy, challenging other people’s supreme power,” he said.
Zhang Boli, also on the wanted list, escaped in 1991.
“My personal wish is to go back to China,” Zhang, 40, said last week from Washington. “This, I believe, is also my right. … I believe all I have is still in China. It’s very sad.”
Wang Juntao, who was sentenced to 13 years in prison but released in 1993, is in the United States pursuing a doctorate in political science at Columbia University.
He said he is studying how a democratic government can be established in China.
“If we are ready for change, and if we want change, then we will finally get change,” he said from his home in New Jersey. “I believe that one day in the future, China will launch a new democracy with a peaceful vision.”
He added: “I still have hope. I still have my dreams. Otherwise, I would not have stayed in jail or paid that kind of cost.”
Another veteran dissident, Frank Lu, lives in exile in Hong Kong and runs a one-man news agency that collects information on Chinese activists and funnels it to news organizations.
Lu was detained at 17 for writing an essay on political reform. In 1989, he spent a year in jail for organizing student protests in central China in support of the Tiananmen demonstrators.
Lu, 39, longs to see his parents back in Hunan province.
Still, he said, “I have absolutely no regrets.”
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Learning the lessons of Tiananmen Square
WANG DAN
TOMORROW is the 15th anniversary of the massacre of student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. During the six years I spent in prison after the massacre, much of it in solitary confinement, I had ample time to reflect on whether we – the leaders of China’s 1989 democracy movement – made a mistake in encouraging the protests that culminated in the tragic events of 4 June.
Again and again, I have asked myself if there was another path that could have avoided the bloodshed. And whether, by bringing students and other ordinary citizens on to the streets to confront the Communist leadership, we frustrated the plans of reformist leaders – such as the former Communist Party general secretary, Zhao Ziyang – to engineer a peaceful transition to a democratic China. It’s a question I’ve also often been asked during my public appearances in the US, since I was forced into exile in April 1998.
Now, reflecting on the events of 15 years ago, it is clear to me as never before that the Tiananmen massacre was an unavoidable step in the long path to a free China, and that true political reform can never come from within the Communist Party.
Indeed, one of the real tragedies of 1989 was not that we jeopardised the efforts of so-called reformist leaders. Rather it is that they never had the vision or political will to lead China toward democracy.
The events of 4 June were a turning point for me and other members of what we call “The 1989 Generation”. Encouraged by the brief relaxation in the political environment in Beijing in the months before the killings, which had even made it possible for me to hold workshops on democracy, we harboured false hopes that change could come from within the Communist Party. It was this fantasy that emboldened us to take to the streets, calling on the government to fight corruption and take steps toward a free society. We petitioned the leadership in the hope of triggering a top-down reform.
Yet the response of “reformists” in the leadership was disappointing, to say the least. Had their hearts been with us, they would have surely seized this unique opportunity to support publicly our calls for democratisation.
Instead, they continued to hide behind closed doors. Only after he had already been outvoted in the Politburo standing committee did Mr Zhao finally come and visit us in Tiananmen Square. And when our modest demands were answered with gunshots on the night of 4 June, it shattered any remaining illusions.
The experience of the 15 years since then has confirmed what we failed to understand in 1989. Namely, that Communist leaders, be they conservatives or reformists, are all wedded to retaining the current political system, complete with its problems such as corruption and lack of accountability.
Look, for instance, at how even relatively enlightened officials such as Premier Wen Jiabao – who visited us in Tiananmen Square in 1989 – and President Hu Jintao have shied away from political reform since taking office. Instead, the issue remains a taboo subject in Beijing. And far from easing its iron grip on all forms of political dissent, the new leadership now seems intent on extending it to Hong Kong.
In the past, the Communist Party has reversed its official verdict on several other major political events in modern Chinese history. The Cultural Revolution, hailed by Mao Tse-tung as a great proletarian movement, has long since been repudiated. Another popular protest that also led to violent scenes in Tiananmen Square, the demonstration on 5 April, 1976, against the leftist leaders known as the “Gang of Four”, was also initially suppressed and labelled as counter-revolutionary. Within two years, that verdict had been reversed and it was recognised as a legitimate public protest.
Yet when it comes to 4 June, there has been no change even after 15 years. That’s because Messrs Wen and Hu realise that re-evaluating the official description of the 1989 movement as counter-revolutionary would shake the foundations of the Communists’ grip on power.
But avoiding the issue will not make it go away. On the contrary, the cries for justice are getting ever louder.
In recent months, the group of parents and relatives of those killed in 1989, known as the Tiananmen Mothers, have been gaining increasing domestic and international support in their fight to reverse the official verdict on the 1989 movement. They have been joined by Jiang Yanyong, the heroic doctor who blew the lid on China’s initial cover-up of the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome last year. In an open letter to the Chinese leadership, Dr Jiang recounted what he witnessed on the night of the killings and called on the government to revisit what he called the worst Communist crimes since the Cultural Revolution.
The continued failure of the Chinese leadership to address the issue only increases the risk of further violent eruptions in the future, especially at a time of growing social discontent. With unemployed workers struggling to survive without any form of welfare benefits, residents forced from their homes without proper compensation and farmers living in extreme poverty as they shoulder unfair tax burdens, China is a tinder box which could be set on fire by the slightest spark.
Worse still, until the leadership confronts the past and re-evaluates the official verdict on the 1989 movement, there is always the danger that it could resort to such violent methods again to suppress any future protests.
One positive development is that, since the early 1990s, shoots of civil society have begun to sprout within China. As more Chinese enter the private sector, the state is no longer able to control every aspect of daily life in the way it used to.
On the contrary, people are starting to recognise the importance of monitoring the state and making government more accountable. And as the internet and modern telecommunications have become part of everyday life, it’s become easier to break through the government’s control of news and information and to organise campaigns for basic rights, be they the right to private property or freedom of speech. This provides a stronger basis for continuing the fight for democracy in China.
Fifteen years after the massacre, the 1989 democracy movement remains as much a part of my emotional present as my past. The movement and its aftermath have consumed the idealism and passion of my youth, and the fight for a reversal of the official verdict has become a goal which I can never abandon.
The 1989 student movement played an invaluable role in pointing out the path to democracy in China. Without it, we would still be clinging to the myth that a small group of enlightened Communist officials could rescue China from totalitarian rule. Instead, we have learned from our mistakes that year, and realised that China’s democratisation must be a bottom-up process, driven by forces outside the Communist system.
And when that happens, as it inevitably will, I will be able proudly to say that we, the 1989 Generation, were part of the process that brought freedom to my home country.
Wang Dan is now a doctoral candidate in history at Harvard. This article also appears in the Wall Street Journal.
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New story emerges of an infamous massacre
By Robert Marquand | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
BEIJING – On the 15th anniversary of one of the most cataclysmic events in modern China, a wealth of eyewitness testimony and interviews suggest that one stubbornly popular picture of what happened in Tiananmen Square needs revision: There was no massacre of students on the Square.
Standard histories such as that by Yale’s Jonathan Spence, as well as the recent groundbreaking “Tiananmen Papers,” suggest that Chinese soldiers did not fire on students before they left the square in the early hours of June 4, 1989. But in popular references, most recently in the first paragraph of a major retrospective wire story this week stating that “thousands were killed in Tiananmen Square,” the myth persists. A massacre did take place in Beijing 15 years ago, eyewitnesses say – just not in Tiananmen.
What is famously known as the June 4 massacre actually began on the evening of June 3. The night was cool and windless, eyewitnesses remember. The student uprising that shocked China’s leadership with calls for democratic reform, and that captured the attention of the world, was nine weeks old by then.
One exhausted protest leader remembers retiring at 10:15 p.m. on June 3 in one of hundreds of makeshift tents in the square – unaware, in a pre-cellphone era, that Army columns were already rolling in on a westerly road.
Many journalists and observers had earlier strolled three blocks to the Beijing Hotel for a relaxed dinner. By June 3, in fact, the Tiananmen story seemed in a lull, and many reporters were pulled back to Tokyo or Hong Kong. Just weeks earlier, 2 million people were arriving each day to China’s most sacred public site. They were reacting to the imposition of martial law and the dismissal of reform leader Zhao Ziyang, who was sympathetic to the students, and who among other things appeared to favor the policy of glasnost that was changing the Soviet Union.
Yet by June 3 the numbers were down; the students were tired and squabbling.
Rumors and reality
Rumors came of an Army crackdown. But such rumors had swirled for weeks. Most students on the square at this point were not the original cast from the elite colleges of Beijing. These protesters had come from the provinces. Some arriving June 3 said they wanted to contribute to a “new China, less corrupt.”
Few observers were prepared for what happened next.
In two hours, between midnight and 2 p.m., the slightly riotous, unorganized festival of meetings and exhilarated free speech on the square became a grim confrontation with an Army that surrounded the students, and was using live rounds against citizens in neighborhoods all over the city.
That night still lives in infamy to many who remember it. Chinese leaders remain silent about the event 15 years later. No mistakes have been admitted nor has any government accounting been done. In today’s bustling commercial China, moreover, few speak of the brutal putdown. New generations here profess lack of interest in the question of who was and wasn’t a patriot, or what transpired, not that there are any rewards for such curiosity.
What actually did happen June 3 – 4 is still often confused with myth and misreporting.
Early wire reports, including a second-day account by a Tsinghua student, now widely regarded as disinformation, and several assertions to the media by student leaders who were not present, planted some of the misconceptions that persist today. A British reporter (who left the square at 1:30 p.m.) for example, wrote a widely read account based entirely on secondhand sources who claimed a massacre took place in the square.
In fact, the panic was so intense that most impartial observers left the square by midnight. In those days, says one European journalist who was there, “no one ever believed that the Army would actually shoot people.”
As few as 10 foreigners actually witnessed events on the square during the crucial early morning hours of June 4 , according to eyewitnesses interviewed by the Monitor, and an unpublished 52-page document compiled entirely in the weeks after by Robin Munro (then of Human Rights Watch) and Richard Nations (a Le Monde reporter) of 14 testimonials of journalists, diplomats, and students present on the square after midnight.
No eyewitnesses to a massacre
Despite orders that the People’s Liberation Army was to clear Tiananmen Square using whatever means necessary, there is no credible eyewitness testimony of a massacre of students there. No eyewitnesses at the Monument to the People’s Heroes, where students were centered, ever saw one. No “rivers of blood” flowed on the square. No rows of students were mowed down by a sudden rush of troops, as reported in European, Hong Kong, and US publications in the days, months, and years that followed.
The actual number of students and citizens killed on the square may be as low as a dozen, according to the documents and the eyewitnesses. The medical tent on the square, originally used to comfort student hunger strikers, reported at least 10 deaths. Rather, between the morning hours of 4:45 and 6:15, some 2,000 to 3,000 students filed off the square through a cordon of troops, protected by a line of their own ranks who linked arms.
There was, however, a massacre in Beijing – during the four days starting June 3. It took place at street intersections, in Hutong neighborhoods, in the alleyways around the square, and in the western part of the city, where resistance to the deployment of the Army was strongest. Moreover, the victims were not only students, but ordinary people who were outraged that the soldiers of a people’s army had been given warrant to shoot the people.
One emerging interpretation of the June 4 event is that the students avoided a massacre – partly, and symbolically, by using their power to vote.
By 4 a.m. on the square, one of the most dangerous moments had arrived. In testimony compiled by Mr. Munro, and including Mr. Nations, and Juan Restrepro of Spanish TV, among others – all of whom stayed with the students until they left the square – matters had by then reached a “lethal” tension point. Soldiers surrounded the students from three sides – at the Forbidden City, Great Hall of the People, and the History Museum. The square was lighted. Some 2,000 students huddled at the towering monument at center square. They sang the “Internationale,” with its verse, “the final battle is upon us, unite until the morrow.” Orange flames from burning tents leapt up.
Students wore headbands that said “ready to die.” Military loudspeakers competed with student loudspeakers. Students urged each other to, “Keep order, stay calm. We must not give them a pretext [to shoot.]” At one point about 4:15 the lights on the square went out and some 10,000 People’s Liberation Army troops ran out of the entrance of the Great Hall in what seemed an attempt to frighten students into scattering. But they remained poised.
What happened instead, according to Munro’s account, was a kind of surreal debate at a moment of decision. The head of the Peking students autonomous federation urged all students to stay and face the guns. “We will now pay the highest price possible, for the sake of securing democracy for China. Our blood will be the consecration,” are his words in Munro’s notes. Yet immediately leader Hou Dejian disagreed, saying on the loudspeaker: “We have already won a great victory. But now we have to go.”
The minutes ticked by and no actions were taken. Munro says, “My gut feeling was that everyone present knew perfectly well why they where there; it was a private conviction but one that all shared.”
Square standoff decided by vote
It appeared that they might stay. But in what seemed an afterthought, someone, it is not clear who, came on the speaker to suggest taking a vote. “It was … at the time a stroke of genius” that may have saved thousands of lives, Munro recalled.
Between 5 and 6 a.m. the students left the memorial and filed out to the southwest part of the square, walking behind the banners that marked which college they were from.
“There was absolutely no one killed at the Monument [of the People’s Heroes],” said Spanish cameraman Rodriques, who was filming the entire evening, and whose testimony contrasts with 15 years of unattributed rumor. “Everyone left and no one was killed.”
“Student leaders had pulled off the most difficult maneuver … an orderly retreat,” Richard Nations said in testimony given weeks later. “The real violence still lay ahead but at that moment the 1989 democratic movement was over, and the next phase began as the column walked off the theater of national politics at Tiananmen.”
Mr. Restrepro was on hand as the students departed past a Kentucky Fried Chicken shop: At daybreak “It was one of those extraordinary moments…. The students were carrying their banners…. Some had no shoes. I shall remember this for the rest of my life, the faces of those boys and girls…. At 5 a.m. the first flags coming out… and it took one hour… and as they [left] the people began insulting the soldiers and cheering … the students. Then some began to throw stones… and it was dangerous.”
Residents aid the students
One dynamic that eyewitnesses say played a central role was the relationship between students and ordinary Beijing people. By late May the common people were very impressed, if not a bit smitten with what they called “our” students. By the end of May, as the students tested their resolve through hunger strikes, workers and citizens were sending them water, offering help with sanitation, and medical supplies, and giving general tender loving care.
“The people loved the students because they could see the students loved China,” one school teacher who lived near the square remembers now. “That was the thing. We didn’t think of them as anticommunist. We could see they were patriots who were for democracy. But after June 4, we could no longer say this.”
On June 3 as the Army began approaching the square about midnight – calls went out all over Beijing. Sympathetic crowds numbering in the tens of thousands felt the Army was coming to shoot the students. There are hundreds of accounts of citizens, mothers and sons alike, chasing tanks in bicycles, setting fire to trucks, putting up road blocks. At the Jianguomenwai overpass a set of locals talked an entire truck-full of soldiers into climbing down. But the price paid by the citizens was high, as the troops – many of whom were brought into Beijing from all over China – began to retaliate.
“By June, the ordinary people identified with the students 100 percent,” Munro remembers. “Beijing people are outraged when the soldiers leave their barracks. They said the soldiers planned to kill ‘our’ students, as they put it.”
The bulk of departing students who left the square in a column took several turns and eventually crossed the Avenue of Eternal Peace just west of Tiananmen. At that point, one of the worst incidents involving students took place, as APCs fired on and ran over at least 11 students. AP reporter John Pomfret, traveling in the column, saw students remove seven bodies, and soldiers began to shoot tear gas into the student ranks, according to the Munro-collected testimony.
The Tiananmen Square protests were the apogee of a push toward openness in China and the adoption of more Western and international standards. The precipitating event was the death of beloved reformer Hu Yaobang on April 15. The genesis of the protest is thought to have begun in the party history department of Beijing University. According to the historian Spence, it was the children of high-ranking party members who saw a need for change – a perception corroborated here in Beijing by sources pointing out that no major operation like the Tiananmen protest could have been engineered by “someone on the street.”
The protest became a kind of referendum on China’s future, and its leadership. On May 15 Mikhail Gorbachev came to Beijing as a new type of Soviet leader preaching a new message of change. By that time, the square was so jammed that Mr. Gorbachev could not get through to the Great Hall of the People. But students immediately identified with him, as did Zhao Ziyang, then the party secretary. On May 19, days after Gorbachev left, Li Peng declared martial law and Zhao was out – itself angering the Beijing population. The Tiananmen Papers make clear that premier leader Deng Xiaoping felt that a glasnost style reform would cause damaging instability in China, and he advocated taking strong measures to put down the protest, despite the anticipated outrage in foreign lands. The die was cast: China outlined a path in which political reform would only come after economic reform.
A number of later discredited accounts of a “massacre” in the square came out in the days following June 4. Student leader Wuer Kaixi claimed “2,000 perished” and claimed to have seen two rows of students killed, though it is later shown he left the square about 4 a.m.
A Hong Kong student leader was quoted as saying “a thousand” were killed, but later admits under questioning that he has actually seen no killings.
Roderick MacFarquhar, a history professor at Harvard University, says the estimates of the final death toll range from 800 to 1,000. But, one eyewitness in Beijing who later wrote a book on Chinese nationalism points out that the actual numbers or locations are not crucial 15 years later. “Whether the figure is 900 or 2,052, is not the issue,” he says.
“We don’t want to start bargaining with the lives of victims. What now matters is a serious confession that it happened, and then an accounting of what happened. That’s what we still don’t have.”
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June 2, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Tiananmen Victory
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
New York Times
On Friday, it will be 15 years since I stood at the northeast corner of Tiananmen Square and watched China go mad.
The Communist Party was answering the demands of millions of protesters who had made Tiananmen Square the focus of their seven-week democracy movement. The protesters included students, Communist Party members, peasants, diplomats, laborers — even thieves, who signed a pledge to halt their “work” during the demonstrations.
I was in my Beijing apartment when I heard that troops had opened fire and were trying to force their way to Tiananmen. So I raced to the scene on my bicycle, dodging tank traps that protesters had erected.
The night was filled with gunfire — and with Chinese standing their ground to block the troops. I parked my bike at Tiananmen, and the People’s Liberation Army soon arrived from the other direction. The troops fired volley after volley at the crowd on the Avenue of Eternal Peace; at first I thought these were blanks, but then the night echoed with screams and people began to crumple.
The Communist Party signed its own death warrant that night. As Lu Xun, the great leftist writer beloved by Mao, wrote after a massacre in 1926: “This is not the conclusion of an incident, but a new beginning. Lies written in ink can never disguise facts written in blood.”
So, 15 years after Tiananmen, we can see the Communist dynasty fraying. The aging leaders of 1989 who ordered the crackdown won the battle but lost the war: China today is no longer a Communist nation in any meaningful sense.
Political pluralism has not arrived yet, but economic, social and cultural pluralism has. The struggle for China’s soul is over, for China today is not the earnest socialist redoubt sought by hard-liners, but the modernizing market economy sought by Zhao Ziyang, the leader ousted in 1989. The reformers lost their jobs, but they captured China’s future.
In retrospect, the Communist hard-liners were right about one thing, though: they warned passionately that it would be impossible to grab only Western investment and keep out Western poisons like capitalism and dreams of “bourgeois freedom.” They knew that after the Chinese could watch Eddie Murphy, wear tight pink dresses and struggle over what to order at Starbucks, the revolution was finished. No middle class is content with more choices of coffees than of candidates on a ballot.
So Communism is fading, in part because of Western engagement with China — trade, investment, Avon ladies, M.B.A.’s, Michael Jordan and Vogue magazines have triumphed over Marx. That’s one reason we should bolster free trade and exchanges with China, rather than retreating to the protectionist barricades, as some are urging.
The same forces would also help transform Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Burma, if only we would unleash them. We are doing a favor to the dictators in those countries by isolating and sanctioning them. If we want to topple them, we need to unleash our most potent weapons of mass destruction, like potbellied business executives and bare-bellied Britney Spears.
So when will political change come to China? I don’t have a clue, but it could come any time. While it might come in the form of a military coup, or dissolution into civil war or chaos, the most likely outcome is a combination of demands from below (perhaps related to labor unrest) and concessions from the top, in roughly the same way that democracy infiltrated South Korea and Taiwan.
It’s often said that an impoverished, poorly educated, agrarian country like China cannot sustain democracy. Yet my most powerful memory of that night 15 years ago is of the peasants who had come to Beijing to work as rickshaw drivers.
During each lull in the firing, we could see the injured, caught in a no-man’s-land between us and the troops. We wanted to rescue them but didn’t have the guts. While most of us in the crowd cowered and sought cover, it was those uneducated rickshaw drivers who pedaled out directly toward the troops to pick up the bodies of the dead and wounded.
Some of the rickshaw drivers were shot, but the rest saved many, many lives that night, rushing the wounded to hospitals as tears streamed down their cheeks. It would be churlish to point out that such people are ill-prepared for democracy, when they risked their lives for it.
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Activist recalls deaths in Tiananmen Square
`I will always be sorry’ for lost lives
15th anniversary of Chinese protest
NICHOLAS KEUNG
STAFF REPORTER
At first glance, the new Wang Dan looks every inch an all-American boy in his striped GAP T-shirt, denim jacket, green cargo pants and square-toed black leather shoes.
Wearing a leather-stringed stylish silver pendant on his neck, the 35-year-old even joked that, “I’m a fashion-boy. No,” he adds, “A fashionable man.”
Wang’s ruddy baby face has little imprint of what he has endured the past 15 years, since he and other student leaders started the Democratic Movement in Beijing, which ended with the infamous June 4 Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
“I have had no regret ever over what we did, but I will always be sorry for those who sacrificed their lives for China’s democracy, because I was one of the organizers of the protest,” Wang told the Star in an exclusive interview Friday. Wang, who is in political exile in the United States, and three other Chinese activists — Wang Juntao, Han Dongfang and Albert Ho — are in Toronto to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the massacre. More than 2,000 protesters are believed to have been killed when China’s military cracked down on the demonstrators.
The four will attend a public forum between 1 and 4 p.m. today at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education on Bloor St. on “Democracy in China: Past, Present and Future.” Admission is free.
Wang, then a freshman at China’s prestigious Beijing University, was one of the 21 student leaders blacklisted by the Chinese government. He was arrested and sentenced twice, in 1989 and 1995, for conspiring to overthrow the Communist party. He was sentenced to a total of 15 years in prison, but China released him in 1998 after international political pressure.
Supporters flew Wang to New York, where he was accepted by Harvard, Yale, Berkeley and Michigan universities. He chose Harvard, where he finished his master in East Asian history in 2001 and is pursuing a doctoral degree in Chinese history.
It was a tough decision to leave China, knowing he would not be allowed to return to visit his father Wang Linyuan, mother Xianzeng and elder sister Jinqing.
“I love my country and that’s why I did what I did 15 years ago. We wanted a better country for our people,” said Wang, whose first name Dan means “red” in Chinese, symbolizing the Cultural Revolution in effect at the time of his birth.
Even though he is thousands of miles from home, Wang said his heart remains in China. He searches for news on the Internet about his homeland and stays in close touch with his friends and family.
“That is why my English has improved so little,” he said sheepishly, adding that language is still a huge barrier in his life. (The interview was conducted in a mix of English and Mandarin.) “I also have a patriotic stomach. I can’t eat anything but Chinese (food).”
Wang said he was very uncomfortable when he first arrived in the U.S. because of the attention triggered by his “celebrity status.”
“I just want a normal life where I can go shopping, watch movies and just hang out with friends,” said Wang, who has delivered a lot of public speeches in his first two years in America.
Despite warm greetings from strangers, Wang said he feels isolated from some of his fellow Chinese students at Harvard, who distance themselves from him for fear of repercussions when they return home, and concern for their families in China. It is one reason Wang chose “political terror/fear” for his doctoral thesis topic.
Today, Wang can vividly remember the seas of demonstrators on Chang On St. in Beijing.
“I was standing on this bridge and saw people everywhere, within 10 miles of Tiananmen Square, waving their flags and signs,” he recalled.
“It was the first time I saw people go to the streets and speak up for themselves. It wasn’t organized by the government but by the people themselves.”
Although attendance at June 4 commemorative events has dwindled, Wang said it doesn’t mean the public has forgotten. Most of the high-profile student leaders are now in exile overseas. Chai Ling is an entrepreneur in Boston and Wuer Kaixi is a political talk show host in Taiwan.
“Fifteen years have passed and it’s natural for people to move on with their lives. But you can’t say people are not concerned about the political reforms in China any more,” he said.
Being in the U.S. has been enlightening for Wang, whose views on democracy have evolved as he joined the picket lines of Harvard tutorial assistants over wages, and other democratic protests in the west.
“Democracy is not just about institutional reforms,” Wang said in his soft voice. “It is about having a civil society where people are equal and treated fairly.”
Despite his gratitude to the Americans’ generosity (he studies in the States with full scholarships from the university and all his living expenses were paid), Wang said he was disturbed by the U.S. government’s post-Sept. 11 national security agenda and the war on Iraq at the expense of civil liberty.
Calling the terrorist attack a “civilization clash,” he suggested the best way to gain peace with Muslims is to engage them into modern civilization by education and talks — not by force.
He also believes China is in a critical period, caught between a capital economy and authoritative rule. “There are two Chinas,” he said.
“We have a poor rural China and a rich urban China. We have a social crisis. The government can either make it or break it.”
Wang has changed since his days at Beijing University.
“I have lost some of my idealism. I didn’t have any shadow as a teenager to prohibit me from doing things. Now I realize my responsibility. I am alive, but many of my friends died for the (democratic) movement.
“I used to have goals and when I couldn’t accomplish them, I’d get angry and keep asking why I failed. Now I’ve learned I’m a normal person. It’s not just about winning or being defeated. As long as I do my best, that’s enough.”
For now, he wants to focus on his education and pursue his goal to become a “public intellect” who can help facilitate China’s path to democracy.
“It is a family tradition. My grandfather and my mother both studied and taught history. It is a family trait,” he explained. “I want to be an intellect, so I can inspire others.”
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Democracy far off in dissidents’ eyes
15th anniversary of Tiananmen Square nears
By Indira Lakshmanan, Globe Staff | May 19, 2004
CAMBRIDGE — Two weeks before the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, exiled Chinese dissident leaders declared yesterday that corruption and inequality have worsened since the crackdown, and that the communist leadership has made no progress toward democracy despite allowing greater personal liberties.
Speaking at a panel at Harvard University’s Asia Center, leaders of the crushed movement called on Beijing and on the Chinese public to reassess the official version of history that the student movement was a ”counterrevolutionary” conspiracy to overthrow the government. When tanks rolled down the Avenue of Everlasting Peace on the morning of June 4, 1989, hundreds of demonstrators were killed. The government has never accounted for the deaths.
But the dissidents acknowledged yesterday that there was little chance the current government would reverse its condemnation of the largest popular protest in China’s communist era, and said they were not optimistic that this generation of Chinese leaders would tolerate a peaceful transition to democracy.
At their peak, the Tiananmen protesters drew 1 million to the streets of the capital and millions more in about 80 cities nationwide. Yet today, most ordinary Chinese voice no support for the suppressed movement, and even many current university students say the June 4 demonstrators were wrongheaded. That may be in part because the government has over the years accommodated some of the very demands the hunger-striking students made — freedom to choose one’s own job, greater freedom of ideas, and at least a declared crackdown on corruption.
The exiled dissidents say the only hope for a long-term groundswell for political change is if Chinese workers and peasants who have been the victims of economic restructuring are mobilized to demand their rights.
But the dissidents said they did not expect democracy by any means within the next 15 years.
”The international community should be ready for a not-very-peaceful transition,” warned Wang Dan, the top leader of the student movement who was imprisoned twice for a total of 6 years before being exiled to the United States in 1998. ”I don’t believe a peaceful transition is possible, because the authorities don’t want change.”
Wang asserted that official corruption — one of the key complaints of the student demonstrators in 1989 — had worsened and is now ”the greatest obstacle in China to further development.”
”All activities and suggestions for anti-corruption that come from outside the establishment are regarded as a challenge to the party’s authority,” said Wang, 35, who has been a graduate student at Harvard since his release from prison and forced exile in 1998.
He acknowledged that economic reforms have improved the lives ”of a certain group of people,” but said that ”China’s economic development has sacrificed the rights of many working people.”
”The common people may have more space in their daily life. Is it freedom, is it liberty? It’s not democracy,” added Wang Juntao, whom the government termed one of the ”black hands behind” the Tiananmen demonstrations. He was imprisoned for 4 years before being exiled.
Wang Youcai, 38, who two months ago was freed and exiled after serving half of an 11-year prison sentence, said that despite having suffered ”both emotionally and physically” from being imprisoned twice in the past 15 years, ”I am determined not to be filled with hate.”
Only constructive acts, such as training peasants and workers about their legal rights under the Chinese constitution, can build a grass-roots democracy movement, he said.
Wang Juntao said the challenge for prodemocracy activists is to change the attitudes of the neo-conservative wing of Chinese elite who believe that the country is too populous and its citizenry too unsophisticated for democracy.
In an interview after the panel, Wang Dan said that over his bed he has hung a poster of the iconic photo of the lone Tiananmen protester standing in front of a Chinese tank so that he will not forget the sacrifice of those who died that day.
”Every night when I go to bed, I think of them,” he said. ”But we have to go forward. We try to struggle to achieve their dream; that is the way to commemorate them.”
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Why Tiananmen is not forgotten
From CNN Senior Asia Correspondent Mike Chinoy
(CNN) — What is it about Tiananmen Square?
Why, even after 15 years, do the images and the story retain such enduring power?
Such is that power the subject remains taboo in China, and yet even on this distant anniversary the event is still remembered.
It was partly the times.
The optimistic and innocent students who occupied the heart of Beijing in the spring of 1989 represented the first stirrings of the winds of change that was to sweep through the communist world later that year.
Regimes were toppled in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and East Germany, setting the stage for the end of the Soviet Union.
It was also partly the debunking of so many stereotypes about China, a nation so regimented by Mao Zedong’s communist revolution that such a desire for freedom and a better life came as a shock.
For Chinese so traumatized by Mao’s relentless political campaigns it was a revelation that such desires had not only not been extinguished, but burned as fiercely in China as anywhere else.
In many ways, Tiananmen represented a revolutionary challenge to China’s communist hardliners.
And the way it was witnessed around the world represented a revolution too.
When the Chinese authorities pulled CNN off the air as martial law was declared, it underscored the arrival of a new phenomenon: 24 hour a day global TV news.
It was the first time an epic event in what had been, for many, a distant, impenetrable nation, was beamed into living rooms and foreign ministries around the world — live, as it happened.
And, of course, it was the bloody, horrifying end with the People’s Liberation Army occupying Tiananmen Square, gunning down unarmed protestors and toppling the Goddess of Democracy.
Against the awesome apparatus of state repression, the demonstrators never had a chance.
And yet one man gamely stood his ground, in a gesture of defiance as moving as it was futile.
The man in front of the tank — his identity and fate still unknown.
But his picture will go down as one of the great images of the 20th century, an enduring tribute to the power of the human spirit to confront the power of the state.
And even though his cause failed, the communist regimes of Eastern Europe fell.
There was a sense that the Beijing movement helped to light a fuse that would, one day, come back to explode in China.
But in that, those of us who covered Tiananmen, and many others who watched, were wrong.
The Chinese Communist Party did not collapse. It weathered years as an international pariah. And, ironically, in the early 1990s, the man blamed for the Tiananmen crackdown, senior leader Deng Xiaoping, orchestrated a revival of market reforms.
Throughout the decade, China experienced one of the greatest economic booms of modern history.
Hundreds of millions were lifted out of poverty. The corner where the man stopped the tank became the site of what was at the time the largest McDonalds in the world.
Ghosts remain
The political repression continued. But for most ordinary Chinese, there was more hope, and greater personal liberty, than at almost any other time in Chinese history.
Yet the Communist Party’s decision to crack down in 1989 is so sensitive that even today –even though every leader involved from Deng Xiaoping to former Premier Li Peng is either dead or retired — the government bans all public discussion.
Mothers who lost their sons are harassed and prevented from mourning in public and their demands for the government to reexamine the tragedy are rebuffed.
For the Chinese Communist Party, “reversing the verdict” on Tiananmen would be like pulling a bandage off a still-unhealed wound.
Because in the end, for all the progress since then, Tiananmen showed that the party still rules by repression and by fear.
That’s why, while for ordinary Chinese Tiananmen is now largely forgotten, for the ruling elite — and for many of those who were there — the ghosts have not gone away.
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Time is GMT + 8 hours
Posted: 04 June 2004 2339 hrs
Police prowl square as muzzled survivors mark Tiananmen massacre quietly
BEIJING : Police swamped China’s Tiananmen Square, keeping dissent at bay on the 15th anniversary of a bloody pro-democracy crackdown as survivors and relatives privately mourned the hundreds who died.
With the event highly sensitive to the ruling Communist Party, few, if any, commemorations were taking place to mark the day when hundreds, perhaps thousands, of protestors were killed by Chinese troops.
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Police vans criss-crossed the vast square in central Beijing constantly Friday, while on majestic Chang’an Avenue — the main route used by tanks and soldiers in 1989 — uniformed People’s Armed Police and undercover teams were out in force.
All traces of the bullet holes and tank tracks that scarred the area have long since been erased.
One wheelchair-bound man dared to protest, wearing a headband with a slogan on it. He managed to unveil and hold up a slip of paper before security forces pounced and took him away, an AFP photographer witnessed.
A group of middle-aged men and women, meanwhile, were seen being processed in the courtyard of the Tiananmen Square police station where detainees are first taken, although why they were there was not clear.
Police refused to comment.
While few in the capital dare to commemorate the massacre publicly, tens of thousands gathered in Hong Kong to light candles in an annual event to remember those who died.
In Washington, many of the student leaders of the 1989 protests who now live in exile in America held their own memorial in front of the Chinese embassy.
Taiwan, which split from mainland China in 1949, used the occasion to attack China’s poor human rights record and urge its leaders to move towards democracy.
And in India, Tibetans in exile voiced solidarity with the Chinese pro-democracy movement, using the anniversary to urge greater freedom for Chinese-ruled Tibet.
The only candles being lit in Beijing were behind closed doors, and even then it was far from safe.
“They threatened to take me away if I lit a candle,” Hu Jia, a leading Tiananmen and AIDS activist, told AFP from his Beijing home where he is under house arrest.
In the lead-up to the anniversary, China’s secretive state security police placed known dissidents under house arrest and even forced some from their homes to hotels outside the Chinese capital.
Universities were monitored by a state security police taskforce to prevent commemorations taking place, academics said.
“The Chinese government is trying to wipe out the memory of Tiananmen Square, but the horror of what happened still resonates inside and outside China,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.
“We don’t even know exactly who died in the massacre. The Chinese authorities need to punish those responsible, compensate the victims and allow those who fled the country to return home.”
Qi Zhiyong, who lost a leg when he was run over by an armed personnel carrier on the night of June 4, said he would mark the event mourning for those who died.
“My heart feels very grieved. Democracy has eluded us for such a long time,” he told AFP.
Many people in Beijing are too scared to talk about those fateful events, while others are more concerned with jobs and money in a country where economic reforms have rapidly transformed lives.
Some though refuse to forget.
“The police came to warn me and told me not to leave my home and not to invite friends to the house,” Zhou Duo, a former economics professor at Peking University who took part in the 1989 demonstrations, told AFP.
“But this year, like every year on June 4, I will make a hunger strike during the day.”
The Chinese leadership has shown no signs of changing its position on the crackdown, defending its actions this week as necessary for economic growth and China’s emergence on the world stage.
State media, which is banned from using the phrase “liusi” or June 4, predictably made no mention of the anniversary.
Analysts said Beijing was unlikely to change tack any time soon.
“This is still a taboo subject,” China specialist Joseph Cheng from City University in Hong Kong said.
“This can be very controversial and this can create a lot of divisions within the leadership. That’s why the subject must be suppressed, must be hidden from the public.”
– AFP
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Time is GMT + 8 hours
Posted: 04 June 2004 2339 hrs
Police prowl square as muzzled survivors mark Tiananmen massacre quietly
BEIJING : Police swamped China’s Tiananmen Square, keeping dissent at bay on the 15th anniversary of a bloody pro-democracy crackdown as survivors and relatives privately mourned the hundreds who died.
With the event highly sensitive to the ruling Communist Party, few, if any, commemorations were taking place to mark the day when hundreds, perhaps thousands, of protestors were killed by Chinese troops.
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Police vans criss-crossed the vast square in central Beijing constantly Friday, while on majestic Chang’an Avenue — the main route used by tanks and soldiers in 1989 — uniformed People’s Armed Police and undercover teams were out in force.
All traces of the bullet holes and tank tracks that scarred the area have long since been erased.
One wheelchair-bound man dared to protest, wearing a headband with a slogan on it. He managed to unveil and hold up a slip of paper before security forces pounced and took him away, an AFP photographer witnessed.
A group of middle-aged men and women, meanwhile, were seen being processed in the courtyard of the Tiananmen Square police station where detainees are first taken, although why they were there was not clear.
Police refused to comment.
While few in the capital dare to commemorate the massacre publicly, tens of thousands gathered in Hong Kong to light candles in an annual event to remember those who died.
In Washington, many of the student leaders of the 1989 protests who now live in exile in America held their own memorial in front of the Chinese embassy.
Taiwan, which split from mainland China in 1949, used the occasion to attack China’s poor human rights record and urge its leaders to move towards democracy.
And in India, Tibetans in exile voiced solidarity with the Chinese pro-democracy movement, using the anniversary to urge greater freedom for Chinese-ruled Tibet.
The only candles being lit in Beijing were behind closed doors, and even then it was far from safe.
“They threatened to take me away if I lit a candle,” Hu Jia, a leading Tiananmen and AIDS activist, told AFP from his Beijing home where he is under house arrest.
In the lead-up to the anniversary, China’s secretive state security police placed known dissidents under house arrest and even forced some from their homes to hotels outside the Chinese capital.
Universities were monitored by a state security police taskforce to prevent commemorations taking place, academics said.
“The Chinese government is trying to wipe out the memory of Tiananmen Square, but the horror of what happened still resonates inside and outside China,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.
“We don’t even know exactly who died in the massacre. The Chinese authorities need to punish those responsible, compensate the victims and allow those who fled the country to return home.”
Qi Zhiyong, who lost a leg when he was run over by an armed personnel carrier on the night of June 4, said he would mark the event mourning for those who died.
“My heart feels very grieved. Democracy has eluded us for such a long time,” he told AFP.
Many people in Beijing are too scared to talk about those fateful events, while others are more concerned with jobs and money in a country where economic reforms have rapidly transformed lives.
Some though refuse to forget.
“The police came to warn me and told me not to leave my home and not to invite friends to the house,” Zhou Duo, a former economics professor at Peking University who took part in the 1989 demonstrations, told AFP.
“But this year, like every year on June 4, I will make a hunger strike during the day.”
The Chinese leadership has shown no signs of changing its position on the crackdown, defending its actions this week as necessary for economic growth and China’s emergence on the world stage.
State media, which is banned from using the phrase “liusi” or June 4, predictably made no mention of the anniversary.
Analysts said Beijing was unlikely to change tack any time soon.
“This is still a taboo subject,” China specialist Joseph Cheng from City University in Hong Kong said.
“This can be very controversial and this can create a lot of divisions within the leadership. That’s why the subject must be suppressed, must be hidden from the public.”
– AFP
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Protest quelled at square
AP
05jun04
BEIJING – Police kept China’s symbolic heart of Tiananmen Square free of demonstrators yesterday, detaining at least 16 people.
The middle-aged men and women were arrested as security forces tried to block public commemorations for people killed.
Since the June 4, 1989 military assault that killed hundreds, possibly thousands, communist leaders have made many changes demanded by the dissidents, scrapping rules dictating where Chinese could work and who they could marry.
But they still permit no independent political activity and have jailed or exiled most dissidents.
Authorities had detained activists and relatives of people killed in 1989 or ordered them out of Beijing.
Leaders defend the crackdown and one-party rule, and reject pleas to reverse the verdict that the protests were a counter-revolutionary riot.
The crackdown “enabled China to develop its economy and make contributions to the peace and development of the world,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said this week.
Protest veterans mounted vigils, marches and hunger strikes in Hong Kong, Washington and Taipei.
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Tiananmen: A picture which cost a life
Zhang Xian Ling’s son was shot dead in the Tiananmen Square protests 15 years ago.
Her niece Ze Xia translated her story and emailed it to BBC News Online.
My youngest son Wang Nan left home on the morning of 3 June with a camera.
He was very innocent, thinking he would take some pictures of the historic moment.
He walked towards Tiananmen Square from the west side of Beijing city.
It was later that night, into early morning on 4 June, when he saw soldiers open fire. He was shocked and took out his camera.
His action was seen by soldiers who opened fire at him. A bullet entered the left side of his forehead and came out the back of his head on Nanchang Street, near Tiananmen Square.
He was lying on the ground breathing hard. Blood poured out of his head.
Some local residents saw him and panicked. They tried to approach him but were stopped by People’s Liberation Army soldiers with guns in their hands.
An old lady kneeled down begging the soldiers: “He is only a young boy, a student,” she said. “Please don’t let him die!”
Someone started becoming angry and questioned why, but could only hear soldiers shouting: “If anyone dares to come forward, I will open fire to kill you first.”
They all begged the soldiers. An old lady even kneeled down begging them.
“He is only a young boy, a student,” she said. “Please don’t let him die!”
Hurried burial
Suddenly they heard a noise from an ambulance vehicle. They thought help had arrived.
But after doctors came out of the vehicle they found they were not allowed to carry out their duties, and left.
After negotiations, when a second vehicle came, soldiers reported it to the commander who in the end agreed to try to save him, but it was too late.
About 0300 in the early morning of 4 June he stopped breathing. After doctors issued the death certificate, which was left in his pocket, they were forced to leave.
A kind and careful man, a member of the United Casualty Team which was formed by some volunteers and medical staff to deal with this emergency, took his student card and house keys.
We asked for a funeral and cremation, but were refused
He found Wang Nan’s school, then got hold of us. We had been looking throughout the whole city for our son.
This man told us the sad news of our youngest son and what he witnessed.
Three dead bodies including Wang Nan’s were buried in a hurry in a lawn outside a school near Tiananmen Square.
It was a hot day and rained later. After the rain, loose soil sank down, and some parts of those buried bodies stuck out.
Local people started digging them out. Wang Nan’s body was one of them. Because he was in an old army uniform, the authorities were not sure whether he was a soldier or not.
They decided not to remove his body but the other two bodies were taken away for immediate cremation because they had no ID attached.
Ten days later my husband and I were called to identify the body after police contacted his school.
We asked for a funeral and cremation, but were refused.
Seeking justice
The reason given was that he was a rebel even though his school and local community centre issued certificates to say he was a good boy.
We approached some non-governmental organisations. With their involvement, the authority finally agreed to cremate his body and hold a funeral after a long negotiation.
The funeral was on 26 June 1989. Our family went to a funeral hall where his and other bodies were held before cremation.
It was packed with people, the majority of whom were family members or friends of students killed in or near Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989.
Almost 15 years have past since the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Tiananmen Square Mothers, the organisation of which I am a member, has been seeking justice since we lost our loved ones, including my son Wang Nan.
Send us your reaction to this story. Were you a witness to the events in Tiananmen Square 15 years ago? Send your experiences using the form below.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/3777257.stm
Published: 2004/06/04 17:01:52 GMT
© BBC
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