Never forget.

It has now been 17 years since the Tiananmen square massacre of June 4th 1989. Here's a story I did on the 10th anniversary. How many anniversaries must we pass before the Chinese government has the guts to acknowledge what happened?  As my friend Xiao Qiang points out the Internet is keeping the memory alive with videos such as the above, posted on YouTube.  Frank at GlobalVoices has a great post about the online commemorations taking place in Chinese cyberspace, including this del.icio.us page and this Flickr page.
 

Imagine if one of your loved ones died violently 17 years ago. Imagine what it would be like if the government didn't acknowledge he or she had died - and thus erased that person's existence. Imagine not being allowed to mourn in public. Imagine plainclothes policemen standing guard outside your home to prevent foreign journalists from talking to you. Imagine being sent out of town on an all expenses paid "vacation," courtesy of the Public Security Bureau every year around this time.

That's the life of Ding Zilin and probably thousands of other people. We don't know exactly how many because there is still no certain death toll - but human rights groups believe the number is in the thousands based on the  number of bodies in hospitals and morgues after the event. Professor Ding, whose 17-year old son, Jiang Jielian was shot near Tiananmen square, is now the head of the Tiananmen Mothers Group: a group of brave people who are gathering information and evidence about the victims and how they died. One day they hope to be able to hold their government to account for what was done. They want the Chinese government to acknowledge the facts of what happened. Visit the Human Rights in China page for information about her organization's latest call for justice. Click here to read more testimony from Tiananmen victims' mothers, and click here to sign a petition to support them.

Comments

[mahathir_fan]

I saw a documentary online that changed my mind about whether Tiananmen Masaccre actually happened.
I encourage those who believe the mainstream media to watch it. It is available on PBS free of charge.

The timing footage i quote above were taken from part 3 of the free online versio at:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/view/

Critic of the Tank Man video:

I only concentrated on part 3 which is the massacre section.

=========================
At 1:38 Part3,

The bald man said, "A lot of people went down, 30-40 people went down...."

The film footage at 1:48 and the surrounding footage did not show any dead bodies lying on the ground. Only bicycles.
=========================

At 2:25, the bald man said, "Suddenly there appears an ambulance....and they rushed in amongst all the people on the ground, and the soldiers open fire again and mow them down."

The footage begining at 2:36 showed the ambulance crashing into a traffic light followed by a loud bang.

This is an auto accident. It is unlikely that the driver was shot because if you look at the crowd reaction, the crowd were not running away from the soldiers. They would have started running if there were gunshots.

This appear to be a wrong accusation.
==========================

Even though I wasn't at the Square, I used to think that given the massive media coverage of the event about number of deaths, some deaths must have occured. But after watching the documentary, I am now not so sure if they are all unprovoked. The eyewitness accounts all seem so distorted, exaggerated, and self-believed. Perhaps there were accidental deaths, or deaths provoked by protestors attacking the military. But deaths due to a peaceful protest? I now have my doubts. Even the video Rebecca put up showed the students attacking and burning the tanks. It showed no military personel firing at the students. However, you will find this in the PBS documentary, but you will also see that the protestors first threw stones at them. There were however random warning shots which may have hit some high rise buildings.

As part of the internet community, we can collect video evidence and present them one by one highlighting like what I did above to prove guilt or innocence. To credit or discredit eyewitness accounts. This should be the first step.

The biggest problem about coming clean about the incident is that the masses have already made up their mind about who is guilty. They watched the videos without any critical mindset.

It is very difficult to get the government to apologize. For example, America has yet to apologize for the Bonus March.

[bobby fletcher]

I'd like to offer couple more reference in addition to PBS Frontline's "The Tank Man", where it reported the fact Chinese government did investigate this, and release casualty figure of 240 some dead (incidentally in-line with our own NSA intel estimate.)

An article by Gregory Clark on pack journalism:

http://mparent7777.livejournal.com/7702519.html

"the so-called massacre was in fact a mini civil war as irate Beijing citizens sought to stop initially unarmed soldiers sent to remove students who had been demonstrating freely in the square for weeks. When the soldiers finally reached the square there was no massacre."

An article by Columbia Journal Review on passive journalism:

http://archives.cjr.org/year/98/5/tiananmen.asp

"as far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square.
...
Hundreds of people, most of them workers and passersby, did die that night, but in a different place and under different circumstances."

[Just for reference, throwing molotov cocktail at riot police is a crime in US.]

[Bing]

I am not sure if anyone actually died on the Tianmen Square, but I do believe hundreds (not thousands as often cited by western media) might have died on that fateful morning on June 4th.

But that's not my biggest problem with the whole thing. If we call it "Tianmen Massacre", what do we call today's Iraq? Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of iraqi civilians died in the ongoing US occupation, and they are still dying? Why aren't anybody calling it "massacre" or "genocide"?

[bobby fletcher]

(Sorr Rebecca, you are an exception...)

Heaven forbid anyone should see China's delimas and choices with a little bit of sympathy.

Bing, I often see emotionally satisfying replies to your question like "one wrong doesn't justify antoher (forgetting China's wrong doesn't justify US wrong either.)

Or "The USA is not China". But forget in what context did Manfred Nowak make that statement:

"What is more distressing to the Western World is that now, so to speak, the master betrays his own
principles."

It is RIDICULOUS that, because if we are really so adamant about these values, then the governments, the western world, and whoever else in favor of it, had better PRACTICE it!

There is no sense in defending some "theoretical" rights and values that in practice, cannot be executed because of some shady reasons.

Then in actuality, such rights and values do not exist.

[mahathir_fan]

Actually if you look at history, or at least history of Malaysia, you will see that many techniques that our present government use to control our popluation, such as media control, and censorship, declaring "state of emergency", requiring polic permits for large gatherings, etc. etc., detention without trials(Internal Security Act) were inherited precisely from our original Western colonizers, the British.

It is sometimes quite bewildering that now the British(Western world) would criticize our government for censorship, detention without trials, etc. etc. . yet when they controlled us at one point in time they were censoring us and detenting us without trials too. It almost felt like present day criticism is levied to divert away "guilt". So if you ever accuse them of unfair treatment over us during the colonial days, they can come to us and say your own government is treating the same way we treated you.

Perhaps this may explain why the Western world is especially "concern" about human rights violation. To illustrate that despite independence and self rule, human rights violation continue to exist and human rights violation in the past cannot be attributed racisms or nationality superiority because it continues to exist today despite self rule.

[Sad 27]

Hi,

Re the post above saying that one has doubt about whether anybody acually died in June 4th movement.

I was very young when it happened. I am 27 now. I am from Hong Kong.

BUT I WILL NEVER FORGET THE PICTURES OF DEAD PEOPLE I SAW ON THE NEWSPAPER THE NEXT DAY. A LOT OF THEM HAD THEIR GUTS SPILLED OUT AND SOME WERE OBVIOUSLY RAN OVER BY THE TANK, THEY BECAME A PILE OF ORGANS... I was watching TV and newspaper, crying...

I hope that one day, Chinese Government will recognise what she did and let the dead to be in peace in another world. After all, people and government must learn from history or history will repeat itself...