The image was taken down very quickly from the paper's website but it has been preserved - Roland, as usual, has it saved. The fact of its publication, however, suggests that the protests of 1989 live in the memory of Chinese people. Global Voices has some of those memories.
Below the fold are some of my memories, from a post I wrote in 2006:
Seventeen years ago I was in Nanjing,
finishing up a year of teaching. My students, Chinese graduate
students from various places but many from Beijing, had been drawn into
the massive demonstrations that had swept across our city. We all kept
close watch on what was going on in the capital.
When we
awoke on the morning of the 4th, the TV was blacked out. Every so
often an announcement that a "counter-revolutionary riot" had broken
out in Beijing scrolled across the darkened screen. Then, an old
ping-pong match came on. From VOA and BBC we came to learn what had
happened: perhaps the worst single military action against unarmed
civilians in the history of the PRC. It was, plain and simple, a
massacre.
The Nanjing students continued to protest for 2-3
days. They started a "long march" to Beijing, in solidarity of the
citizens there who had been gunned down. But, while there was no mass
violence in Nanjing, the arrests began and the protests ground to a
halt. My students dejectedly retreated from the streets. We did not
have final exams or papers; we were all too depressed and exhausted.
My wife and I left China two weeks later, sobered by what we had seen
and heard and lived.
Seventeen years ago the ruling group
of the PRC, after pushing aside their colleagues who were trying to
maintain peace, made a decision for violence. They - and especially
Deng Xiaoping - are responsible for a terrible act of inhumanity. Deng
may have achieved great results with his single-minded commitment to
economic reform but, in the end, he chose death for the citizens of
Beijing. He did not have to. It was entirely possible to find a
solution that would have maintained the hegemony of the CCP without
killing hundreds and hundreds of people that day. Perhaps he would
have had to yield a tiny fraction of the Party's power and recognize an
autonomous student union; but he could have chosen a peaceful way out
and still have protected the overwhelming political power of the Party
and the momentum of economic reform.
Yes, the students may
have made tactical errors in how they carried out the protests. But we
should not blame them for the ultimate violence that killed so many
Beijing citizens. Deng and the Party elders killed those people, and
they did not have to.
The silence on June 4th, imposed by Party censors, is just another sad example of a government too fearful to let its own people know their history. The CCP reproduces national ignorance. It hides the truth of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and June 4th, and sulks behind the sickly smile of Chairman Mao at Tiananmen.
Thanks for writing this post and remembering.
Posted by: Elliott Ng | June 04, 2010 at 11:59 AM
My greetings from Praze, Sam, and thanks for the reminder.
Posted by: Kenneth Thomas | June 04, 2010 at 02:53 PM