Even today, it is not clear how many Chinese were killed during what the authorities euphimistically refer to as the political turmoil between Spring and Summer of 1989...
Though China claims 241 died during the crisis, it is feared that many thousands were killed and wounded…We shall most likely never know, as the bodies were spirited away and secretly disposed of…
Today, twenty years on, what is known in the West as the Tiananmen Square Massacre has disappeared into oblivion, and any effort to commemorate the event is severely dealt with.
The Chinese media have ignored the historical event, and policemen have resorted to umbrellas to try and prevent foreign television crews from filming in Beijing…
Many major websites, such as Twitter and Flickr have been temporarily shut down in order to ensure that the taboo issue is not even mentioned. VeryCD, a Chinese version of YouTube suffered a similar fate;YouTube itself was shut down in march…
If the Chinese were treating June 4, 2009 as a non-event, others abroad simply could not do so.
Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State said: a China that has made enormous progress economically and is emerging to take its rightful place in global leadership should examine openly the darker events of its past.
The Chinese had other plans…
The government’s strategy was expounded in a memo, a copy of which the AFP managed to spot on the internet : village cadres must visit main persons of interest and place them under thought supervision and control. Such was the mission of Guishan township, located some 870 miles from Beijing.
Thought supervision?
That is an ability that the authorities lost long ago…In this internet age, they must rely on more mundane measures such as harassment, intimidation and imprisonment in their black jails, where they detain the meddlesome, and the more politically motivated of their citizens.
A student leader of the 1989 democracy movement who had to flee China shortly after the crackdown, tried to reenter his homeland Wednesday, and turn himself in, in order to finally go home. Wu’er Kaixi declared: when I turn myself in, I will use the platform of a Chinese courtroom to debate the Chinese government about this incident…My turning myself in should not be interpreted as my admission that my behavior 20 years ago is illegal and wrong. I want to reassert here the Chinese government bears complete and undeniable moral, political and legal responsibility for the tragedy that happened in China in 1989. I hope, 20 years later, the Chinese government can set a new position on the historical problem of the 'June 4 massacre,' admit its guilt and apologize to the Chinese people…
Though China claims 241 died during the crisis, it is feared that many thousands were killed and wounded…We shall most likely never know, as the bodies were spirited away and secretly disposed of…
Today, twenty years on, what is known in the West as the Tiananmen Square Massacre has disappeared into oblivion, and any effort to commemorate the event is severely dealt with.
The Chinese media have ignored the historical event, and policemen have resorted to umbrellas to try and prevent foreign television crews from filming in Beijing…
Many major websites, such as Twitter and Flickr have been temporarily shut down in order to ensure that the taboo issue is not even mentioned. VeryCD, a Chinese version of YouTube suffered a similar fate;YouTube itself was shut down in march…
If the Chinese were treating June 4, 2009 as a non-event, others abroad simply could not do so.
Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State said: a China that has made enormous progress economically and is emerging to take its rightful place in global leadership should examine openly the darker events of its past.
The Chinese had other plans…
The government’s strategy was expounded in a memo, a copy of which the AFP managed to spot on the internet : village cadres must visit main persons of interest and place them under thought supervision and control. Such was the mission of Guishan township, located some 870 miles from Beijing.
Thought supervision?
That is an ability that the authorities lost long ago…In this internet age, they must rely on more mundane measures such as harassment, intimidation and imprisonment in their black jails, where they detain the meddlesome, and the more politically motivated of their citizens.
A student leader of the 1989 democracy movement who had to flee China shortly after the crackdown, tried to reenter his homeland Wednesday, and turn himself in, in order to finally go home. Wu’er Kaixi declared: when I turn myself in, I will use the platform of a Chinese courtroom to debate the Chinese government about this incident…My turning myself in should not be interpreted as my admission that my behavior 20 years ago is illegal and wrong. I want to reassert here the Chinese government bears complete and undeniable moral, political and legal responsibility for the tragedy that happened in China in 1989. I hope, 20 years later, the Chinese government can set a new position on the historical problem of the 'June 4 massacre,' admit its guilt and apologize to the Chinese people…
The authorities do not want any of the veterans of the student movement to move freely about at this sensitive time.
He should be deported back to Taiwan shortly…
The most prominent of the student leaders Wang Dan, was jailed for seven years, then expelled to the US in 1998.
Though tragic and painful, he cannot but remember these events with fondness: for me, it was the proudest moment in China’s long history. For the first time in our lives, people dared to exercise the most basic human right: freedom of speech.
What was the June 4th movement all about?
Initially, it was caused by the death, April 15th , 1989, of a respected reformist official, Hu Yaobang, who had been forced to resign in January 1987 because of his liberal tendencies…
University students in Beijing were intent on mourning the official and demanded his rehabilitation. They demonstrated, in bigger and bigger numbers, in Tiananmen Square, where speeches were delivered and a list of grievances established.
By the time of the funeral, April 21st , some 100,000 were in the Square, and their demands became more precise: an end to official corruption, freedom of the press, and democracy!
Workers soon joined the movement, as a high inflation rate, 28%, threatened living standards. It also spread to other cities such as Shanghai.
The students demanded direct negotiations with the government, and many began a hunger strike, as a means to convince the public they were serious, and genuinely fighting for a better future for all Chinese. The movement’s popularity did, in fact, increase as a result…
Because Soviet President Gorbachev was to arrive in Beijing for an official visit on May 15th , many foreign journalists were in the Chinese capital to cover the event…
The Chinese authorities lost patience and declared martial law on May 20th, but did not move on the Square before the evening of June 3rd…
During the onslaught, many students were heard screaming, why are they killing us?
Twenty years on, China is a different country, and a much wealthier one…
Between 1990 and 2007, China’s GDP was multiplied by thirteen…It is now the world’s fourth largest economy, after the US, Japan and Germany
The struggle for political rights, for all intent and purposes, died in Tiananmen square…The government’s obsession since then has been to recover its legitimacy by promoting economic growth so as to improve the lives of as many Chinese as possible…Its performance has been a deft one. Qi Yuting, a retired laborer told the Washington Post: that time (June 1989) was cruel. But ever since, our life has been good. We only have progress. We promote harmony.
With all hopes of political reforms having been dashed, the only remaining viable option for many was improving one’s lot. Zhang Lifan, a historian, put it this way: people all turned to making money, seeking their individual benefits and interests.
Yet, Chinese society is more open, certainly less oppressive than twenty years ago.
Access to the internet has given the Chinese the opportunity to express themselves. Information is much more freely and widely available than ever before…The Chinese have thus used this instrument to effect social change. As Donald Morrison, a former editor of Time Magazine’s Asia edition, observed:
Indeed, foreigners who move to China are struck, as I am, by the wealth of personal freedom on display. Not just the latitude to shop, move to another city or attend wine tastings, but also to debate such poisonous subjects as Tibet, corruption and the shoddy construction of schools flattened during last year’s Sichuan earthquake…It’s not democracy, but it is a better, more responsive, more humane system than the one China had 20 years ago. To my Chinese friends, it is unthinkable that the country could regress to those benighted days.
It would seem that there is less discontent in China than twenty years ago, because the standard of living has improved, and the Chinese do have the means to goad the government to take some of their aspirations into account, as long as the grievances avoid the political.
Increasingly, the Chinese have resorted to the courts to bring about social change.
After the earthquake, many parents sued the government, considering that the poor quality of school buildings had led to the deaths of their children…
More than political transformation, they demand accountability.
Nevertheless, China is by no means a free society.
The last taboo, hence, is freedom and democracy…Censorship is rampant. Some 30,000 cyber cops scour web sites, for instance. The Chinese know where to draw the line: not surprisingly, the majority of Chinese citizens censor themselves, not because of apathy, but out of fear, concluded Yang Jianli, a student activist in 1989, who now lives in the US.
As long as the individual does not directly question the party’s authority or legitimacy, than he or she is allowed a certain autonomy…
As such, some 100,000 anti-government protests take place every year…
The writer Lijia Zhang summarized the situation this way: we’re still in a cage here. But for many…it has grown so large that we hardly feel its limits. In that sense the 1989 protests weren’t a total failure. Without our efforts, China’s rulers might have not expanded the cage at all.
It is far from certain however, that in this age of globalization, the authorities had much of a choice in the matter…
Should we conclude that the Chinese democracy movement is dead?
Not quite!
In December 2008, a number of Chinese activists posted their Charter 08 on line. Some 8000 Chinese have signed it, and many have borne the brunt of the authorities’ wrath since having done so.
It is obviously inspired by the Czech Charter 77 movement…
Sponsored by prominent Czech intellectuals, such as Vaclav Havel, the future president of the new and free Czech republic, it demanded that the Communist government respect fundamental human rights, after it had signed the Helsinki Accords in 1975. Predictably, the signatories were hounded and jailed by the oppressive regime.
The Charter 08 states emphatically: China has many laws but no rule of law; it has a constitution but no constitutional government.
The authors propound a number of fundamental universal values that they hope will soon form the basis of a new, democratic China, one that will have repudiated once and for all its authoritarian ways.
Hence, they advocate freedom, human rights, equality, republicanism, democracy and constitutional rule. their objective being establishing a free, democratic and constitutional country.
It took the Czechs twelve years to reach the goal…
May the Chinese reach it even sooner…
It seems more than fitting to conclude this piece on Tiananmen with a tribute to a man whose name we do not know. Nor do we know where he is, and even if he is still alive…
On June 5th, 1989, a young man wearing a white shirt and holding a shopping bag walked to the center of a large and deserted avenue and stopped the advance of a column of tanks.
The stunning picture is by Jeff Widener, of AP (here is where and how it was taken), and is featured at the top of this post.
He should be deported back to Taiwan shortly…
The most prominent of the student leaders Wang Dan, was jailed for seven years, then expelled to the US in 1998.
Though tragic and painful, he cannot but remember these events with fondness: for me, it was the proudest moment in China’s long history. For the first time in our lives, people dared to exercise the most basic human right: freedom of speech.
What was the June 4th movement all about?
Initially, it was caused by the death, April 15th , 1989, of a respected reformist official, Hu Yaobang, who had been forced to resign in January 1987 because of his liberal tendencies…
University students in Beijing were intent on mourning the official and demanded his rehabilitation. They demonstrated, in bigger and bigger numbers, in Tiananmen Square, where speeches were delivered and a list of grievances established.
By the time of the funeral, April 21st , some 100,000 were in the Square, and their demands became more precise: an end to official corruption, freedom of the press, and democracy!
Workers soon joined the movement, as a high inflation rate, 28%, threatened living standards. It also spread to other cities such as Shanghai.
The students demanded direct negotiations with the government, and many began a hunger strike, as a means to convince the public they were serious, and genuinely fighting for a better future for all Chinese. The movement’s popularity did, in fact, increase as a result…
Because Soviet President Gorbachev was to arrive in Beijing for an official visit on May 15th , many foreign journalists were in the Chinese capital to cover the event…
The Chinese authorities lost patience and declared martial law on May 20th, but did not move on the Square before the evening of June 3rd…
During the onslaught, many students were heard screaming, why are they killing us?
Twenty years on, China is a different country, and a much wealthier one…
Between 1990 and 2007, China’s GDP was multiplied by thirteen…It is now the world’s fourth largest economy, after the US, Japan and Germany
The struggle for political rights, for all intent and purposes, died in Tiananmen square…The government’s obsession since then has been to recover its legitimacy by promoting economic growth so as to improve the lives of as many Chinese as possible…Its performance has been a deft one. Qi Yuting, a retired laborer told the Washington Post: that time (June 1989) was cruel. But ever since, our life has been good. We only have progress. We promote harmony.
With all hopes of political reforms having been dashed, the only remaining viable option for many was improving one’s lot. Zhang Lifan, a historian, put it this way: people all turned to making money, seeking their individual benefits and interests.
Yet, Chinese society is more open, certainly less oppressive than twenty years ago.
Access to the internet has given the Chinese the opportunity to express themselves. Information is much more freely and widely available than ever before…The Chinese have thus used this instrument to effect social change. As Donald Morrison, a former editor of Time Magazine’s Asia edition, observed:
Indeed, foreigners who move to China are struck, as I am, by the wealth of personal freedom on display. Not just the latitude to shop, move to another city or attend wine tastings, but also to debate such poisonous subjects as Tibet, corruption and the shoddy construction of schools flattened during last year’s Sichuan earthquake…It’s not democracy, but it is a better, more responsive, more humane system than the one China had 20 years ago. To my Chinese friends, it is unthinkable that the country could regress to those benighted days.
It would seem that there is less discontent in China than twenty years ago, because the standard of living has improved, and the Chinese do have the means to goad the government to take some of their aspirations into account, as long as the grievances avoid the political.
Increasingly, the Chinese have resorted to the courts to bring about social change.
After the earthquake, many parents sued the government, considering that the poor quality of school buildings had led to the deaths of their children…
More than political transformation, they demand accountability.
Nevertheless, China is by no means a free society.
The last taboo, hence, is freedom and democracy…Censorship is rampant. Some 30,000 cyber cops scour web sites, for instance. The Chinese know where to draw the line: not surprisingly, the majority of Chinese citizens censor themselves, not because of apathy, but out of fear, concluded Yang Jianli, a student activist in 1989, who now lives in the US.
As long as the individual does not directly question the party’s authority or legitimacy, than he or she is allowed a certain autonomy…
As such, some 100,000 anti-government protests take place every year…
The writer Lijia Zhang summarized the situation this way: we’re still in a cage here. But for many…it has grown so large that we hardly feel its limits. In that sense the 1989 protests weren’t a total failure. Without our efforts, China’s rulers might have not expanded the cage at all.
It is far from certain however, that in this age of globalization, the authorities had much of a choice in the matter…
Should we conclude that the Chinese democracy movement is dead?
Not quite!
In December 2008, a number of Chinese activists posted their Charter 08 on line. Some 8000 Chinese have signed it, and many have borne the brunt of the authorities’ wrath since having done so.
It is obviously inspired by the Czech Charter 77 movement…
Sponsored by prominent Czech intellectuals, such as Vaclav Havel, the future president of the new and free Czech republic, it demanded that the Communist government respect fundamental human rights, after it had signed the Helsinki Accords in 1975. Predictably, the signatories were hounded and jailed by the oppressive regime.
The Charter 08 states emphatically: China has many laws but no rule of law; it has a constitution but no constitutional government.
The authors propound a number of fundamental universal values that they hope will soon form the basis of a new, democratic China, one that will have repudiated once and for all its authoritarian ways.
Hence, they advocate freedom, human rights, equality, republicanism, democracy and constitutional rule. their objective being establishing a free, democratic and constitutional country.
It took the Czechs twelve years to reach the goal…
May the Chinese reach it even sooner…
It seems more than fitting to conclude this piece on Tiananmen with a tribute to a man whose name we do not know. Nor do we know where he is, and even if he is still alive…
On June 5th, 1989, a young man wearing a white shirt and holding a shopping bag walked to the center of a large and deserted avenue and stopped the advance of a column of tanks.
The stunning picture is by Jeff Widener, of AP (here is where and how it was taken), and is featured at the top of this post.
The young man has been referred to since then, though the nickname by no means does him justice, as the Tank Man…
Shortly after the picture was taken, he was grabbed by several spectators of the extraordinary scene, and taken away, into the crowd..
Rumors abound as to his fate…In all likelihood, he was seized by the secret police and executed …We simply do not know…
Shortly after the picture was taken, he was grabbed by several spectators of the extraordinary scene, and taken away, into the crowd..
Rumors abound as to his fate…In all likelihood, he was seized by the secret police and executed …We simply do not know…
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