A US congressman has blasted the international community for failing to seriously challenge China’s “massive human rights violations.”
“That includes the weak and feckless response of the United States,” said Republican Christopher Smith of New Jersey, speaking on the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. “The hard-liners in Beijing have unleashed unprecedented cruelty on labor leaders, political prisoners, religious believers and have committed massive crimes against women and children through forced abortion.”
“The ugly spirit of the massacre continues today unabated throughout China with brutality and efficiency only the Nazis would love,” he said.
Addressing a conference on Capitol Hill that was called to honor Yu Zhijian (??, Yu Dongyue (?? and Lu Decheng (魯德成) — known as the “three heroes of Tiananmen” — Smith called for a major change in attitude by the West.
“With some notable exceptions, including last year’s savage crackdown on Tibetans, the Chinese leadership has taken their murder and torture behind closed doors, where the cries, screams and tears of thousands of dissidents are heard by no one except the torturers themselves,” Smith said.
Smith also lashed out at US President Barack Obama, who was in Egypt, for failing to personally acknowledge the anniversary.
“While I respect President Obama’s outreach to Muslims in Cairo today, that event surely could have been scheduled for any other day but the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre,” Smith said.
“This solemn remembrance of the victims of mass murder at Tiananmen Square and the crushing of their bodies and hopes by tanks and bayonets should have been the White House’s major event today,” he said.
A senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Smith has introduced a bill — The Global Online Freedom Act — that would prevent US high-tech Internet companies from turning over to the Chinese police information that identified individual Internet users who express political and religious ideas that the communists are trying to suppress.
It also requires companies to disclose how the Chinese version of their search engines censors the Internet.
“Two of the most essential pillars that prop up totalitarian regimes are the secret police and propaganda,” he said. “Yet for the sake of market share and profits, leading US companies like Google, Yahoo, Cisco and Microsoft have compromised both the integrity of their product and their duties as responsible corporate citizens.”
“They have aided and abetted the Chinese regime to prop up both of these pillars in a myriad of ways, including surveillance and invasion of privacy. Google.cn, China’s search engine, is guaranteed to take you to the virtual land of deceit, disinformation and the big lie,” he said. “The Chinese government utilizes the technology of US IT companies to control information in China.”
About two weeks before the 1989 massacre, Lu, a bus driver, Yu Zhijian, a primary school teacher, and Yu Dongyue, an arts editor, traveled from Hunan to Beijing, where they threw eggs filled with brightly colored paint at the huge portrait of Mao Zedong (毛澤東) hanging in Tiananmen Square. They were arrested and sentenced to 16 years to 20 years in prison.
Following their release, they escaped from China and are now living in the US and Canada.
As a direct result of torture, Yu Dongyue is mentally impaired and cannot speak fluently.
Speaking through tears, Lu told the congressional conference: “Superficially, they destroyed us. My childhood friend sits in front of you now like a living fossil. This system destroys you as a human being, it attacks your psychology.”
“But we survived and we came out of prison,” he said. “This is not our victory. It is the victory of justice and it is the victory of your support.”
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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