30 years on from China’s Tiananmen Massacre, it’s time for truth
Read profiles of the Tiananmen victims in HRIC’s “Unforgotten” project
Thirty years ago, on June 3-4, 1989, the
Chinese government unleashed massive military force against civilians in
Beijing, both participants and observers of an exuberant and
peaceful large-scale protest centred in Tiananmen Square which had also
spread to other cities. Initiated by students, the protest to call for
democratic reform and an end to government corruption had been joined by
teachers, intellectuals, journalists, workers, and other civilians over
its 50-day course.
The 2017 Tiananmen Massacre vigil in Victoria Park. Photo: Tom Grundy/HKFP.
In one bloody night and on the days that
followed, martial law troops, obeying orders from higher authorities,
fired with submachine guns and pistols, crushed with tanks, and stabbed
with bayonets—and brutally killed an untold number of unarmed civilians.
In the June Fourth crackdown, or Tiananmen Massacre, the Chinese
government’s use of the people’s army—the People’s Liberation Army—to
kill its own people, in peacetime, shattered hundreds or
thousands—perhaps even ten thousand or more—of Chinese families, and
shocked not just the entire country but also the whole world.
Yet for 30 years, the Chinese government
has not taken responsibility for its crimes against its people. Instead,
it has engaged in a sustained campaign to rub June Fourth out of
Chinese history, in efforts to force those who saw and suffered it to
forget, and the younger people to never learn about it. The government’s
attempt to erase June Fourth from history has gone hand-in-hand with
its adoption of the June Fourth crackdown as a model for dealing with
perceived threats to the power of the ruling Communist Party of China:
absolute intolerance of critical diverse views and complete disregard
for human dignity and basic rights. In that sense, the lawless violence
of June Fourth—and the government impunity—exists very much in the
present, and has been intensified under Xi Jinping.
This sense of impunity has been in full
display, over and over, for all the world to see: the imprisonment and
tragic death-in-custody of Liu Xiaobo, the reform advocate and Nobel
Peace laureate; the destruction of an entire rank of rights defense
lawyers and activists by imprisonment and physical and psychological
torture; the outright kidnapping of foreign nationals, even on foreign
soil; the silencing of intellectuals; the continued suppression of the
culture and religion of the Tibetan people; and the internment of more
than one million ethnic Muslims in Xinjiang in a campaign to erase their culture and religion.
Xi Jinping. File photo: Flickr/Creative Commons.
“The international community’s
self-interested acceptance of the Chinese leaders’ post-June Fourth
‘bargain’—economic reform, but no political reforms—and failure to hold
the Chinese leadership accountable for the murder of its own people,
have also sadly contributed to the ongoing trampling on rights in China
today, ” said Sharon Hom, Executive Director of Human Rights in China.
“In exchange for trade benefits and entry
into China’s vast labour and consumer markets, governments and foreign
companies conveniently believed that China’s increased integration into
the international community would help it democratize and play by
international rules. Instead, in amassing enormous economic and
political clout, China is changing those rules and aggressively
promoting its own models of human rights, development, and democracy
that are at odds with universal values,” said Hom.
International engagement with China, in
particular marginalizing human rights for the sake of trade interests,
has emboldened a party-state increasingly brazen about its subjugation
of the rule of law under the rule by the CCP, its aim of
technologically-enhanced comprehensive control over the speech and
conduct of every citizen, and its ongoing violations of internationally
enshrined fundamental rights.
Hong Kong’s annual Tiananmen Massacre vigil. File photo: Etan Liam, via Flickr.
Beyond its borders, the Chinese government
is also stepping up efforts not only to rewrite international human
rights principles and norms—born of the lessons the world learned from
the horrors of the Second World War—but also to militarize, flout trade
decisions made by international authorities that it does not like, and
appropriate technology in the service of surveillance and control over
cyberspace.
“The Chinese party-state has learned the
lesson of 1989: that it can get away with murder. So now it is
accelerating efforts to legalize repression and upgrade its surveillance
and social control capabilities to equip a powerful digital
authoritarianism,” said Hom.
Against this formidable background, one
group in China has fought against state-enforced amnesia surrounding
June Fourth and has shone a steady light of evidence against ongoing
government impunity, defying harassment, surveillance, and threats of
retaliation: the Tiananmen Mothers. For nearly three decades, these
family members of June Fourth victims along with survivors have
collectively identified and documented 202 individuals killed in the
June Fourth crackdown and accumulated evidence of the crimes committed
against them. They have accomplished this by force of their moral
outrage, mutual support, and tenacity in their pursuit of justice for
their loved ones. Comprising 127 living members and 55 deceased members,
the Tiananmen Mothers have never stopped pressing the Chinese
authorities to respond to their three basic demands regarding June
Fourth: truth, accountability, and compensation. In the steadfastness of
their quest and the unwavering insistence of, the Tiananmen Mothers are
a beacon and the conscience of Chinese civil society.
Members of the Tiananmen Mothers at the 30th anniversary
commemoration of June Fourth victims, March 2019. Photo: HRIC.
It is their work that has made possible
Human Rights in China’s “Unforgotten” project: a series of profiles of
June Fourth victims that draw on the documentation the group has
collected and compiled.
The profiles, consisting of text, photos,
and videos, tell the stories of the individuals, about not only how they
died, but also, wherever possible, how they lived, and how their
families have been affected by their deaths.
“The dead cannot come alive again, but
HRIC’s ‘Unforgotten’ project seeks to honour each life. We hope the
profiles will remind the world that they were living human beings—many
of them passionate and patriotic students yearning for a free and just
society—whose lives were brutally crushed by a government which would go
on to deny their deaths,” said Hom.
With “Unforgotten,” HRIC supports the
Tiananmen Mothers’ demand for truth, accountability, and compensation
for the June Fourth crackdown, and urges the international community to
join in their call. The 30th anniversary of June Fourth is not only an
occasion for remembrance. It is a time for truth and justice.
This article originally appeared on Human Rights in China.
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