A group of families demanding justice for the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre said that Beijing must bear responsibility for “historical crimes” in the same way it has called on Japan to do so for its wartime past.
The Tiananmen Mothers group has long urged the Chinese government to open a dialogue and reassess China’s 1989 pro-democracy movement, violently suppressed on June 4 that year by Beijing, which labeled it “counterrevolutionary.”
In an open letter released on Monday through New York-based Human Rights in China, the group referred to Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強) having said that Japan has failed to reflect on its past.
China-Japan relations have long been poisoned by what China sees as Japan’s failure to atone for its occupation of parts of China before and during World War II.
Li in March said that “the leaders of a state not only inherit their predecessors’ successes, but should also bear historical responsibility for their predecessors’ crimes.”
SERIES OF CRIMES
“By the same logic, shouldn’t today’s Chinese leaders bear responsibility for the series of crimes — [human-caused] famine and slaughter — perpetrated in their own country by China’s leaders at the time: Mao Zedong (毛澤東) and Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平)?” the group said.
It asked when China would commemorate the deaths of people during a famine from 1958 to 1961, the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 and the Tiananmen Square Massacre, saying leaders “cannot impose a forced amnesia.”
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Hua Chunying (華春瑩) said China had long ago reached a “clear conclusion about the political turmoil of the 1980s.”
“The more than 30 years of the great achievements brought about by China’s reform and opening up have proven that the path of development that China has chosen is completely right,” Hua told a daily news conference.
One of the more prominent members of the Tiananmen Mothers group, Zhang Xianling (張先玲), said they were also inspired by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) remarks last month to Japanese officials that “the crime of aggression committed by Japanese militarism cannot be concealed.”
MURDER
“So we think that the crime of murder is also not easy to cover up,” Zhang, 77, told reporters by telephone. “Your killing of people in China was even more brutal than what happened during the war.”
After initially tolerating the student-led demonstrations in the spring of 1989, the Chinese Communist Party sent troops to crush the protests late on the night of June 3, killing hundreds by the morning of June 4.
The topic remains taboo in China and the Chinese Communist Party has rejected all calls to overturn its assessment of events.
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