One of the exiled leaders of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 got the cold shoulder from the Chinese embassy in Washington on Friday when he tried to turn himself in to return home.
Wuer Kaixi, 44, who now lives in Taiwan, wants to see his frail and aging parents in Urumqi, northwest China, as well as ignite a dialogue on reform with China’s communist leadership — even if it means standing trial.
However, when he went to the bunker-like Chinese embassy in the US capital, the dissident activist found the smoked-glass doors locked, and no one responded when he rang the doorbell and dialed an off-hours telephone number.
Telephone calls into the embassy by an Agence France-Presse reporter at the scene also went unanswered.
“Well, I guess this is as close as I can get to Chinese soil,” said Wuer Kaixi, who last tried to surrender at the Chinese embassy in Tokyo, where Japanese police arrested him for trespassing and held him for two days.
“If I want to go home, what does it take? It’s office hours. I call then and ring the bell, but no one comes,” he said, adding that he would next take his case to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Yang Jianli, president of Washington-based group Initiatives for China who was on hand to support Wuer Kaixi at the embassy, said “the Chinese government is doing everything it can to erase the memory of Tiananmen Square.”
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, died when the Chinese government sent in tanks and soldiers to clear the square in Beijing on the night of June 3 and 4, 1989, and ended six weeks of unprecedented pro-democracy protests.
Wuer Kaixi, then a student at Beijing Normal University, was among several Tiananmen leaders and hunger strikers who escaped to the US in the weeks after the crackdown.
An official Chinese Communist Party verdict after the Tiananmen protests branded the movement a “counter-revolutionary rebellion,” although the wording has since been softened.
Asked as an exile of 23 years what advice he would give blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng (陳光誠), who escaped house arrest last month and plans to come to the US, Wuer Kaixi suggested patience.
Chen “is a hero,” Wuer Kaixi said. “Everybody in the world should embrace him.
“But he needs to take this good time [in the US] to take a good rest” before joining other exiles in “a group effort ... a team effort” to bring about change in China, he added.
Wuer Kaixi was among six Tian-anmen activists in exile who last month sent a letter to Beijing saying they had been deprived of their right to return to their homeland and denied Chinese travel documents abroad.
Wuer Kaixi is now a political commentator in Taiwan. His gesture on Friday drew only a handful of reporters and a single US Secret Service diplomatic security officer.
Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr has fired his national police chief, who gained attention for leading the separate arrests of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte on orders of the International Criminal Court and televangelist Apollo Carreon Quiboloy, who is on the FBI’s most-wanted list for alleged child sex trafficking. Philippine Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin did not cite a reason for the removal of General Nicolas Torre as head of the 232,000-member national police force, a position he was appointed to by Marcos in May and which he would have held until 2027. He was replaced by another senior police general, Jose
STILL AFLOAT: Satellite images show that a Chinese ship damaged in a collision earlier this month was under repair on Hainan, but Beijing has not commented on the incident Australia, Canada and the Philippines on Wednesday deployed three warships and aircraft for drills against simulated aerial threats off a disputed South China Sea shoal where Chinese forces have used risky maneuvers to try to drive away Manila’s aircraft and ships. The Philippine military said the naval drills east of Scarborough Shoal (Huangyan Island, 黃岩島) were concluded safely, and it did not mention any encounter with China’s coast guard, navy or suspected militia ships, which have been closely guarding the uninhabited fishing atoll off northwestern Philippines for years. Chinese officials did not immediately issue any comment on the naval drills, but they
POWER CONFLICT: The US president threatened to deploy National Guards in Baltimore. US media reports said he is also planning to station troops in Chicago US President Donald Trump on Sunday threatened to deploy National Guard troops to yet another Democratic stronghold, the Maryland city of Baltimore, as he seeks to expand his crackdown on crime and immigration. The Republican’s latest online rant about an “out of control, crime-ridden” city comes as Democratic state leaders — including Maryland Governor Wes Moore — line up to berate Trump on a high-profile political stage. Trump this month deployed the National Guard to the streets of Washington, in a widely criticized show of force the president said amounts to a federal takeover of US capital policing. The Guard began carrying
Ukrainian drone attacks overnight on several Russian power and energy facilities forced capacity reduction at the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant and set a fuel export terminal in Ust-Luga on fire, Russian officials said yesterday. A drone attack on the Kursk nuclear plant, not far from the border with Ukraine, damaged an auxiliary transformer and led to 50 percent reduction in the operating capacity at unit three of the plant, the plant’s press service said. There were no injuries and a fire sparked by the attack was promptly extinguished, the plant said. Radiation levels at the site and in the surrounding