Chen Ziming (陳子明), a Chinese dissident and democracy advocate who was accused by the Chinese government of fomenting the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and spent more than a decade in prison and under house arrest, died on Tuesday in Beijing. He was 62.
The cause was cancer, said Wang Juntao (王軍濤), a fellow dissident who was arrested and sentenced with Chen.
A reform-minded intellectual, Chen had a history of challenging government orthodoxy. He was first sent to prison in 1975 because of letters he had written criticizing the Gang of Four, the political faction surrounding Mao Zedong (毛澤東) at the end of his life.
In the 1980s, he and Wang founded an independent think tank, the Beijing Social and Economics Research Institute. He also published an influential periodical, Economics Weekly, that reported on the effects of China’s limited forays into a free-market economy. Previously, during a brief period of liberalization in the late 1970s, he helped found a pro-democracy magazine, Beijing Spring.
Chen and Wang offered counsel to the leaders of the student-sponsored pro-democracy demonstrations that led the government to declare martial law and culminated on June 4, 1989, with tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square, the site of the largest demonstrations and soldiers firing on and killing demonstrators.
In the aftermath, Chen and Wang — not radicals by any means and hoping to avoid violent confrontation — were condemned as the “black hands” of the democracy movement, the puppeteers who engineered the demonstrations. Each received a sentence of 13 years in prison.
Wang and Chen were both released in 1994, but Chen was rearrested in 1995, reportedly because he had staged a hunger strike to commemorate the events of Tiananmen Square. Because of ill health, he was allowed to go home in 1996 to finish his sentence under house arrest.
“We didn’t do too much,” said Wang, who now lives in New Jersey, in a telephone interview on Friday. “We organized a round table meeting to establish a command system for demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. But before that, before martial law, we tried to convince students to start with a hunger strike and to withdraw from Tiananmen Square, but we failed.”
Chen was born in or near Shanghai on Jan. 8, 1952, and grew up in Beijing. His father, an engineer, and his mother, a manager at a film production studio, were midlevel officials of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
As part of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, Chen was sent to Inner Mongolia, where he inoculated poor Mongols against diseases, helped devise water preservation systems and read political philosophy.
When he returned to Beijing in 1974 to attend Beijing Chemical Industry College, he was considered for admission to the CCP, but he was unsettled by turmoil within the central government. Mao and his more progressive second-in-command, Zhou Enlai (周恩來), were near death, and the Gang of Four appeared poised to seize power.
When Chen’s correspondence expressing alarm at the Gang of Four’s ascendance was intercepted, he was jailed and sentenced to “reform through labor,” performing menial tasks. Then, in April 1976, he took part in a citizen demonstration against the Gang of Four in Tiananmen Square and had his epiphany.
As recounted in Black Hands of Beijing, a 1993 book by George Black and Robin Munro about the events surrounding 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, Chen was at the front of the crowd standing before a poster that boldly challenged the Gang of Four’s authority. Prompted by other demonstrators, Chen read the words on the poster aloud for all to hear in a thrilling act of public defiance.
“From several rows back in the crowd, a voice yelled, ‘Comrades at the front, please read the poster out loud!’” the authors wrote. “Chen felt a gentle tap on the shoulder. ‘That hand on my shoulder,’ he told a group of friends several years later, ‘made a wave 10,000 feet high swell in my brain.’”
After his sentence was completed in 2002, Chen said, he continued to be monitored by the government and was barred from giving interviews for four years. He published articles only under pseudonyms. A Web site he started was shut down by the government in 2005 without explanation.
“I have been shunted back and forth between three departments: the police, the communications agency and the Beijing municipal news office,” he said in a 2006 interview with Radio Free Asia. “None of them will give me a straight answer about whose decision it was to close the site. They won’t give us a reason for the closure, either. They just pull the plug on you, because they can.”
Chen is survived by his wife, Wang Zhihong (王之虹), whom he married in 1981, and a sister, Chen Zihua (陳子華).
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