The leader of a 500-person rally held on Wednesday on Capitol Hill to commemorate the 19th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre praised President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) commitment to human rights in China, but warned that the old Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) establishment will hamstring Ma’s efforts to improve China’s rights policies.
Yang Jianli (楊建利), who called Ma an old friend, confirmed in an interview with the Taipei Times that Ma telephoned him on Tuesday to express his support for the rally and for the rights of Chinese.
But Yang said he had not seen Ma’s official statement on the Tiananmen anniversary, which many people in Taiwan and in Washington felt was weak and which failed to condemn China’s human rights violations in strong enough terms.
Yang, a Tiananmen survivor who recently spent five years in Chinese jails for investigating labor abuses, recalled that over the years Ma had regularly joined Chinese human rights demonstrations in Taiwan.
“Ma has been a personal friend of mine for many, many years,” Yang told the Taipei Times on the sidelines of the rally, which brought together members of several overseas Chinese rights groups, the Falun Gong and organizations of Tiananmen victims.
“I think the phone call is very symbolic. [Ma] said although the Taiwan government is trying very hard to make good relations and have a harmonious situation between the two sides across the Taiwan Strait, he still pursues the value of human rights for mainlanders [sic],” Yang said.
Yang said “I never had doubts” about Ma’s commitments to human rights. “Ma is different from most of the Kuomintang Party. Personally, we have had a lot of conversations [when Ma attended Tiananmen memorials]. I know he has a very strong commitment to the cause of human rights,” he said.
Yang had less favorable comments about other KMT officials.
“The older officials in the Kuomintang in the past years established very good relations with China. I don’t think these officials are idealists, they are pragmatic. They want the relationship to make money,” he said.
“Ma Ying-jeou got elected with the help of these party officials. So these officials’ policies have some constraints on his policies. Definitely, the Taiwanese people will have some disagreement with the Kuomintang party officials. So Ma Ying-jeou is in a dilemma between the two. He has to appeal to both,” Yang said.
Yang arrived in Washington on Wednesday at the head of a month-long 800km walk from Boston to publicize the Tiananmen protest.
The three-hour demonstration in the shadow of the US Capitol building featured several members of Congress, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a long-time critic of China’s human rights abuses.
Pelosi lashed out at China’s continued rights violations and demanded that the scores of Tiananmen protesters still held in Chinese jails be released immediately.
Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee who last month received Taiwan’s Order of Brilliant Star with Grand Cordon award from former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), said that rights abuses have increased in China in advance of the upcoming Olympic Games.
“We here today cannot let the bright gleam of Olympic gold blind us to the dark shadows cast by the heavy chains which today hold China in bondage,” she told the crowd, which came from several Chinese-American rights organizations.
Coincidentally, the day before the march, a congressionally funded non-profit organization, the National Endowment for Democracy, devoted to fostering democracy around the world, publicly announced on Tuesday that this year’s recipient of its annual Democracy Award will be four Chinese rights activists arrested over the past 15 years. It will also give a special award to the late congressman Tom Lantos, one of Taiwan’s leading champions in Congress. The award is a replica of the Goddess of Democracy statue constructed during the Tiananmen movement.
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