MCLC: seeking justice for Tiananmen

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Rowena He <rowenahe at gmail.com>
Subject: seeking justice for Tiananmen
********************************************************

Source: Washington Post (6/4/12):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/still-seeking-justice-for-the-tianan
men-massacre/2012/06/04/gJQAd1weDV_story.html

Still seeking justice for the Tiananmen massacre
By Rowena Xiaoqing 
Dr. Rowena Xiaoqing He, a lecturer at Harvard University, teaches a course
on Tiananmen in History and Memory.

Ya Weilin, 73, hanged himself
<http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jHTZn-72gOHs3dpQNpU2C3C3
w3eg?docId=18ef534f74af457ab0eba256dd65bb9c> in an empty parking lot in
Beijing on May 25. He was marking, as he had in one way or another for 23
years, the death of his son at the hands of the Chinese government and the
People¹s Liberation Army on the night of June 3, 1989. After 23 years of
waiting, 23 years of petitioning and questioning, 23 years of searching
for justice, Old Ya made his last dramatic statement without ever seeing
justice done for the Tiananmen massacre.

In video testimony <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjaoFS2NnTo> Ya and his
wife gave in 2004, he looked sad but determined. They had asked the
Chinese government for answers to the questions any parent would want to
know: ³Why did you use real guns and bullets on your people? Even if you
kill a chicken, or a lamb, you should apologize and compensate, right?
Such a big China, such a big Chinese Communist Party, you killed my son,
but you didn¹t even say sorry. Are we citizens not allowed to say a single
word?²

It has been 23 years since the Tiananmen massacre. None of the questions
raised by the heartbroken parents have been answered; nobody has been held
accountable. On the contrary, immediately after the military crackdown,
after the mass arrests and purges, the government launched an elaborate
campaign through the controlled media and official education to
reestablish its legitimacy. An official version of the events of 1989 was
constructed and a massive effort undertaken to ensure this fiction would
become the national memory. The soldiers who fired on the unarmed
civilians became ³Guardians of the Republic.² A Patriotic Campaign was
initiated, and the military crackdown was described as necessary for
stability and prosperity and as against a Western conspiracy to divide and
weaken China.

Today, Tiananmen remains a taboo topic, and any deviation from the
official version is a forbidden memory inside the country. The official
verdict < a ³counter-revolutionary riot² < is unchanged. The exiles are
turned back 
<http://www.hrw.org/news/2009/05/12/china-tiananmen-s-unhealed-wounds#_Toc2
29803714> when they try to return home to attend a parent¹s funeral, and
scholars working on the topic are denied visas to China.

Ya and his wife had been fighting a war of memory against forgetting with
the group Tiananmen Mothers <http://www.tiananmenmother.org/>, represented
by Professor Ding Zilin. Despite escalating government repression, Ding,
who lost her 17-year-old high-school son during the massacre, started a
³one-woman campaign² to collect the names of those killed. The list
includes victims <http://www.tiananmenmother.org/index_files/Page480.htm>
such as Xiao Bo, a Beijing University lecturer, who was killed on his 27th
birthday, leaving behind twin sons who were born just 70 days before he
died.

The victims list is not arranged alphabetically but by the date when
information about a victim came to light. For example, according to Ding¹s
account, the authorities told Xiao¹s wife to remain silent about her
husband¹s death < otherwise they would not allow her to stay in their
campus housing. This young mother felt that she could not afford to be
homeless with her babies, so she was invisible until Ding eventually
reached her in 1993 and added her husband as number 008 on the list.

Ding¹s work has truly been a mission impossible < the total of 16 names
she collected by 1993 has grown to 202 in 2012, but it is far from
complete. The true number is buried under 23 years of cover-up, deception,
suppression and repression.

Ya¹s son is number 131 on Ding¹s list. Before this young man became a
number, he had a name: Ya Aiguo. Ai means ³to love,² in Chinese, and guo
means ³country,² so the name Aiguo means ³Patriotism.² The student
protesters of 1989 called their movement a ³Patriotic Democracy Movement,²
which implied they had no intention of overthrowing the government < they
were simply following the long-standing Confucian tradition of helping the
rulers to improve. As Sinologist Perry Link says
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393310655?ie=UTF8&tag=slatmaga-20&linkCo
de=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0393310655>, youhuanyishi, or worrying
mentality, was pervasive among Chinese intellectuals in the ¹80s. ³Those
who work to improve society, whether they succeed or not, represent the
courageous ideal of the Chinese intellectual in its purest form.² Sadly,
Link himself has been banned from going to China because of his work on
Tiananmen.

Since the night Ya Aiguo and the others were killed, aiguo (patriotism)
has been given a new meaning. While students of the Tiananmen generation
were highly critical of their government and pushed for political reforms,
later generations, under the effects of the Patriotic Campaign, tend not
to distinguish between the regime and the nation and defended the Beijing
government as if they are defending China itself. In 2008, before the
Beijing Olympics, a letter signed by ³a group of overseas Chinese
students² described the Tiananmen Mothers as criminals who had raised
their children to become running dogs of the United States.

There is something profound and revealing about a rising China that is
afraid of these elderly ³running dogs² and their dead family members.
Surveillance cameras were installed in graveyards near the tomb of Yuan
Li, a graduate student killed in 1989. When Yuan¹s father died in 2011,
some Tiananmen Mothers were banned from attending this 94-year-old¹s
memorial.

The fear created by the massacre is best illustrated by a story told by
Professor Cui Weiping, Chinese translator of Vaclav Havel¹s work
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/vaclav-havels-legacy-to-humanity/20
11/12/19/gIQAheW94O_story.html>. After the elder son of one family was
killed, his sister had two boyfriends, each of whom broke up with her
after learning about her brother. The sister and the mother decided that
she would not mention her brother again to whomever she planned to date.
Now she is married with a daughter, and her husband still has no idea
about the death or even the existence of his brother-in-law.
Did Old Ya abandon his hope of ever seeing justice? Or did he think he had
nothing else in this world except his own life to protest and to remind us
of our obligation to remember the truth? We cannot know. But in either
case, we know that this story is not just about Ya, his wife and and their
son. It is also about us. It is not just about then but also about now. If
we can watch such tragedy with folded arms, it reflects who we are as
human beings and world citizens.

Maybe the Tiananmen Mothers could help remind us of some common sense: The
moment a government orders its army to fire on its own people, it loses
its legitimacy; when a regime tells its people that human lives and human
rights, human dignity and human decency can be ³sacrificed² for the sake
of higher goals such as national pride and economic development, it sends
the message that any principle can be compromised to ³get rich² and
³rising.² Such mentality has become the root of major social and political
problems in the post-Tiananmen China.

Ya Weilin reminds us that if something like the Tiananmen movement ever
occurs again, it will not be out of trust and passion like that of 1989;
it will explode from the mix of anger, frustration and grievance.