Family members of the civilians killed by Chinese troops at Tiananmen Square in June 1989 sent their annual letter to dictator Xi Jinping on Friday, vowing to remember the dead despite the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to erase the massacre from history.
“We will never forget the lives that were lost to those brutal bullets or crushed by tanks on June 4, 35 years ago,” the letter said.
The writers mourned “those who disappeared, whose relatives couldn’t even find their bodies to wipe away the blood and bid them a final farewell.”
“It is too cruel that this happened along a 10-kilometer stretch of Chang’an Boulevard in Beijing in peacetime,” they said.
In this June 4, 1989, file photo, a rickshaw driver pedals wounded people, with the help of bystanders, to a nearby hospital in Beijing after they were injured during clashes with Chinese soldiers in Tiananmen Square. (Liu Heung Shing, File/AP).
The letter denounced China’s efforts to justify or obscure the massacre as “intolerable.” It said the regime’s position on the massacre “reverses right and wrong, and ignores the facts.”
The letter was organized by Tiananmen Mothers, a group of family members that formed two months after the 1989 massacre. Its founder was a retired university professor named Ding Zilin whose teenage son was among the victims of the brutal Communist crackdown.
Tiananmen Mothers is small, counting fewer than 150 members, but extremely determined. They meet to commemorate the massacre every year, even though the Communist tyranny has forbidden such observances. They also send a letter to China’s dictator every year, demanding honor and recognition for the dead.
The Chinese government never responds to these annual letters. Zheng Xuguang, a veteran of the 1989 protests who survived and emigrated to the United States, says China will never acknowledge a movement it denounces as a “counter-revolutionary rebellion” and claims to have obliterated with minimal loss of life, despite all evidence to the contrary.
“How can they admit that they were wrong to kill people?” Zheng told Radio Free Asia (RFA) on Friday.
“Xi Jinping and the Communist Party are co-dependent; if Xi were to reappraise the official verdict of June 4… the Communist Party would fall from power,” he explained. “I don’t think he’s going to do that, because there’s no room in his ideology for these ideas.”
Other Chinese activists mournfully observed that the Chinese Communist Party has been very successful at using brainwashing techniques and intimidation to rewrite history and marginalize pro-democracy movements.
Some pointed to the massive pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong in 2019 and the “white paper” protests against Xi’s coronavirus lockdowns, both of which seemed like genuine threats to the regime’s power at their peak, before they were ruthlessly shut down. At least the white paper demonstrators had the consolation of Xi giving up on his lockdowns.
Pro-democracy football fans gather to form a human chain as they sing songs and shout slogans at Victoria Park on September 18, 2019, in Hong Kong, China. (Anthony Kwan/Getty)
Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned on Monday that China is once again “silencing discussion and commemoration of the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre.”
A statement from HRW spotlighted several examples of the regime cracking down on Tiananmen Square observances:
In May, the Hong Kong Court of First Instance convicted organizers of Hong Kong’s annual Tiananmen Vigi, the first arrests under the Hong Kong Basic Law. In April, a student leader was sentenced for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” after he held up a sign calling for redress at a local police station in China. Tiananmen Mothers – an activist group whose relatives were killed or injured during the events of 1989 – continue to face constant police surveillance. According to HRW, other activists “are similarly placed under tightened police surveillance or taken away from their homes.”
“The Chinese government must respect the human rights of those who challenge the official account of the Tiananmen Massacre, investigate those involved in planning or ordering the use of lethal force, and formally apologize to members of the Tiananmen Mothers,” HRW said, a list of demands that is very unlikely to be granted.
Both HRW and the Tiananmen Mothers urged world leaders and ordinary citizens to write to the Chinese government and demand proper respect for the victims.
On Saturday, Hong Kong’s weekly Christian Times left its front page mostly blank to call attention to Beijing’s attempts to erase the history of Tiananmen Square.
The Christian Times noted that Hong Kong was the only place in China where commemorating the massacre was legal and those vigils used to be enormous until the regime used the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to shut them down forever. The Communist regime now makes a point of filling Hong Kong’s Victoria Park with pro-regime festivals every June 4, seeking to erase the memory of the great candlelight vigils that were once held there.
“In recent years, Hong Kong’s society has changed drastically and become more restrictive. Even a prayer based on historical memories may arouse ‘concern,’” the Christian Times wrote.
Beyond the reach of the Chinese Communist Party, remembrance of the massacre continues. Tiananmen Square scholar Rowena He, who was a student protester in 1989, spent the weekend giving lectures in the United States, UK, and Canada.
“We cannot light the candles in Hong Kong anymore. So we would light it everywhere, globally,” He said on Monday.
He recalled how students like herself were immediately required to begin reciting the Chinese government’s false narrative about putting down a “riot” in Tiananmen Square, repeating the propaganda like a mantra until the last echoes of the truth faded from their minds.
“I never killed anyone. But I lived with that survivor’s guilt all those years,” she said.
