A group of Chinese students living in Western countries have issued a rare public appeal for their government to end its secrecy over the Tiananmen Square massacre and hold those responsible to account.
The open letter from 11 students enrolled at universities in the US, UK and Australia is politically risky at a time of tightening government controls on activists and rights groups, from small charities and feminists to human rights lawyers who take on politically controversial cases.
It prompted an angry attack from a hardline nationalist paper, the Global Times, which accused the authors of serving “overseas hostile forces” and trying to “tear society apart.”
The lead signatory to the letter, Gu Yi, said the group felt they had a moral duty to share the information they had stumbled upon after leaving their home country, about the extent of the Tiananmen protests in Beijing and the bloody government crackdown on June 4, 1989.
“I feel strongly as a Chinese citizen with full access to information outside China that I have a responsibility to tell my fellow citizens about this. We have been living in fear for a lot of years and what we are trying to do is fight this fear so we can live in freedom,” said Gu, a chemistry student at the University of Georgia.
The lengthy discussion of what happened in May and June 1989 was mostly addressed to fellow students at home in China, trapped behind what the letter called the “ever higher Internet firewall,” but pointedly criticized the government.
“Some say the Communist Party of China has taken lessens from 4 June and we should not pursue it anymore, and yet the repression lingers on: The truth is still being covered up; the victims are still being humiliated,” the letter said.
It goes on to subvert the so-called China dream, a favorite slogan of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) about economic progress.
“We have a dream in our hearts, that in the near future, on the basis of accurate history and the implementation of justice, everyone could live in a world free of fear. As a group of Chinese students overseas, this is our China dream,” the letter said.
The letter has already drawn more than 50 new signatures since it was posted online, Gu said, including one from a high-school student in China whom he described as very brave.
He had not told his own parents about the letter to prevent them from worrying.
Its publication marked an unusual protest by students not connected to activist circles in China, and a generation below the activists who went into exile after 1989.
The events of 1989 are one of the biggest taboos in contemporary China, with the day’s bloodshed usually referred to simply as an “incident” in official media and government reports, and censors banning even indirect references.
The Global Times said the events in Tiananmen Square have been largely excised from public debate by common agreement rather than a government cover-up. It said Chinese citizens who want to can easily bypass controls to access “sensitive information from overseas Web sites.”
“Chinese society has reached a consensus on not debating the 1989 incident,” the newspaper said. “When China is moving forward, some are trying to drag up history in an attempt to tear apart society. It’s a meaningless attempt.”
Despite the ferocity of the Global Times attack, Gu said he was grateful to the newspaper for drawing attention to a letter by 11 unknown students that might otherwise have languished in relative obscurity.
Originally posted online across a variety of state media, the Tuesday editorial drew attention to a petition that had previously gone unnoticed.
The Chinese version was later stripped from all Web sites, but not before circulating widely enough that stored versions could still be found.
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