MCLC: truth about Tiananmen

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: truth about Tiananmen
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Source: NY Review of Books (3/6/14):
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/mar/06/truth-about-tiananmen/

The Truth About Tiananmen
To the Editors:

Readers of The New York Review know that for nearly twenty-five years the
Chinese government has hidden from the Chinese people the truth about the
June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Massacre, in which at least hundreds of peaceful
Chinese demonstrators were killed by Chinese army troops in Beijing. Any
discussion of what happened at Tiananmen is off-limits in China. It is not
part of the Chinese Communist Party’s operational code to apologize for
its numerous monstrous errors. Of course, the massacre was not a mistake,
but a deliberate, cold-blooded decision on the part of paramount leader
Deng Xiaoping and his associates.

The forthcoming twenty-fifth anniversary of the massacre is an opportunity
for truth-telling. We are organizing an international effort under the
rubric of the Tiananmen Initiative Project to mark the anniversary.
Through public lectures, teach-ins, and demonstrations that will
undoubtedly become known inside China itself, we intend to remind Chinese
leaders that their crimes are neither forgotten nor forgiven. At the same
time, we wish to reaffirm the values of openness, democratization, and
social justice that the demonstrators in Beijing stood for and for which
they died. Our appeal is on our website:

http://June4commemoration.org/appeal.html

Anyone is welcome to sign it.

Perry Link, Professor, University of California at Riverside; Jonathan
Mirsky, Writer, London; Ding Zilin, Founder, Tiananmen Mothers, Wuxi,
China; Goran Malmquist, Swedish Royal Academy, Stockholm; Jean-Philippe
Béja, Professor, University of Paris; Teng Biao, Human Rights Lawyer,
Shenzhen; Kunga Tashi, Office of the Dalai Lama in North America, New
York; Wang Dan, Professor, Student Leader at Tiananmen, Taipei; Andrew J.
Nathan, Professor, Columbia University, New York; Jiang Peikun, Professor,
Wuxi (partial listing)