Today is the 27th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. It will go unmarked in China, but not elsewhere, including Taiwan.
Yesterday, for the first time, lawmakers held a commemoration at the Legislative Yuan, albeit in a meeting room, not the main chamber. Democratic Progressive Party lawmakers and one from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) were joined by exiled Chinese dissident Wuer Kaixi and human rights activists to hold a minute’s silence for those killed and call on the government to address rights issues in its dealings with Beijing, including expressing “Taiwan’s serious concerns over redressing the June 4 incident at the appropriate time.”
The anniversary comes three days after Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) angrily lashed out at a Canadian journalist for questioning Beijing’s rights record, saying that her question showed prejudice and arrogance, and that she had “no right to speak” about the issue, only the Chinese do.
China has written the protection and promotion of human rights into its constitution, he said.
The trouble is that Beijing ruthlessly crushes those Chinese who do voice their concerns or promote human rights, such as a 79-year-old former philosophy professor, Ding Zilin (丁子霖), a founder of Tiananmen Mothers, whose 17-year-old son was killed in the square, and other members of the group; Charter 08 coauthor Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) and his wife, Liu Xia (劉霞); Wang Yu (王宇) and scores of other lawyers who were rounded up last year; blind activist Chen Guangcheng (陳光誠), who now lives in exile in the US and so very many more.
The same day that Wang Yi was berating the journalist, who asked a question that had been agreed upon by reporters representing several news organizations, the Tiananmen Mothers released a statement decrying “27 years of white terror and suffocation.”
The minister asked the journalist if she had ever been to China and if she knew that it had lifted 600 million people out of poverty to become the world’s second-largest economy.
It is too bad that Wang and his ilk do not ask the Chinese if, while appreciating that remarkable achievement, they would prefer to still have their friends and relatives who were killed in Tiananmen, or the estimated 40-plus million who died in the three-year Great Famine that began in 1959 because of Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) criminally inept Great Leap Forward policies and the untold number of children forcibly aborted as part of the one-child policy. The list can go on and on.
It is not just journalists and media organizations abroad who have been slammed for not toadying up to Beijing — or face immense financial pressures to do so — but academics as well.
Even more worrying, with the abduction of several men linked to a controversial Hong Kong publishing company, Beijing has shown an increasing willingness to flout rules governing extraterritoriality to bring critics within its borders.
Beijing is hoping that now elderly members of the Tiananmen Mothers will gradually die out with their efforts forgotten. The trouble with that approach is that there were so many people in Beijing who saw what happened the night of June 3 and into June 4, including the thousands of city residents who poured onto the streets to help defend the students from the military onslaught.
Those outside of China who remember watching the events unfold on their television sets will also remember a frequent refrain screamed at foreign journalists in Beijing that night: “Tell the world … Tell the truth.”
Until Beijing makes the Chinese constitution — and all its rights and protections — actually worth the paper it is printed on, the world will remember Tiananmen and question the Chinese Communist Party’s policies. Whether Wang Yi likes it or not.
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