It is 20 years since Ding Zilin (丁子霖) stood by her gate and waited for her son.
“What came were students with tattered clothes and disheveled hair, shouting ‘they are killing people, they are shooting at people,’” she said.
“The more we watched, the more terrified and desperate we felt ... At about five in the morning we saw a car with a flat wooden board on it and a child’s body on the board. When I saw the body of that child I felt my son’s fate was the same and he would not come back again,” she said.
Her son, Jiang Jielian (蔣捷連), 17, was one of hundreds who died that day, shot dead by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on the streets of Beijing. Some believe the death toll in the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square democracy protests stretches into the thousands. But no one knows for sure, and Ding’s attempts to list the dead have resulted in two decades of harassment.
Security officials have repeatedly prevented her from marking her son’s death.
“You killed my son and you’re stopping me [from] going to commemorate him? You didn’t do enough?” was her incredulous comment about them to the Guardian earlier this year.
On Wednesday, police again arrived to blockade her home amid a broad security clampdown. Other dissidents have been detained or invited on “holidays” by security officials this week. Plainclothes and uniformed officers have flooded Tiananmen Square. Popular online services including Twitter and Flickr and bulletin boards have been blocked. BBC broadcasts on the anniversary are blacked out and pages of imported newspapers are cut out or glued together.
Last night an exiled student leader trying to return to China was refused entry to the territory of Macau, where he has not seen his parents for two decades. An arrest warrant for Wuer Kaixi (吾爾開希) has been in force since 1989, when he was second on China’s “most wanted” list. Like the peaceful activities of Ding — a 73-year-old retired philosopher and grieving mother — Wuer Kaixi’s presence is unacceptable to a state determined to suppress memory of the Tiananmen protests.
FORGETTING
Bao Tong (鮑彤), a chief aide to the reformist former general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Zhao Ziyang (趙紫陽), who was purged for his sympathy toward the students, said: “A lot of people have forgotten; foreign people forgot; many Chinese young people forgot, too. But as long as China is still under one-party leadership ... you can’t avoid talking about June 4, because it was a turning point. It’s the key turning point, when it could have gone in the right direction, but went in the wrong direction instead.”
His remarks emphasize the double amnesia surrounding the summer of 1989. The demonstrations’ bloody ending has largely erased memories of the carnival of protest that preceded it: an astonishing uprising that lasted six weeks and drew in millions of people from around the country, threatening an end to communist rule. Anything seemed possible.
Ten years of reform had created an appetite for freedom, but also new economic pressures such as rampant inflation, leaving many anxious and insecure. The CCP’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), tacked between reform and party orthodoxy as he tried to hold the leadership together.
Then, in April 1989, came the death of purged reformist leader Hu Yaobang (胡耀邦). It sparked student protests with modest demands: greater freedom of speech, economic freedoms, curbs on corruption.
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