Melinda Liu: When We Talk About Tiananmen
[Melinda Liu was named Newsweek Beijing bureau chief in late 1998, returning to the bureau she herself opened in 1980... Her coverage of the Hong Kong handover in 1997 and Sino-U.S. relations in 1996 helped win the magazine the Overseas Press Club's Ed Cunningham Memorial Award for best magazine reporting from abroad....Liu was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is a magna cum laude graduate of Radcliffe College, Harvard. She is President of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China, and in October 2005 launched a Newsweek Web column titled "Asia Rising." http://www.newsweek.com/id/32420 ]]
... We still don't have a credible official number for the civilians who died due to the repression, for example. If the government simply told the truth about the number and identities of June 4 victims, it would help begin to clear the air.
Recently I also visited the elderly former university professor Ding Zilin, who founded the Tiananmen Mothers group after her son was killed near the square. She told me she's collected the names of 195 victims of the bloodletting—mostly workers—whose relatives have dared to come forward. The total is believed to number at least in the hundreds.
Shards of truth are emerging slowly, bit by bit. This spring a former soldier named Zhang Shijun went public for the first time, giving an interview to the Associated Press about his unit's role in the military crackdown (though, as a medic, he says he was unarmed). He hinted at the commission of atrocities by other People's Liberation Army units, but declined to give details. Zhang is one of very few military men who've called for a reassessment of the protest movement, which authorities still sometimes call a "counterrevolutionary" riot.
This process of official re-evaluation—what in Chinese political jargon is referred to as a "reversal of the verdict"—took place after the tumultuous 1966-76 Cultural Revolution and resulted in thousands of citizens being politically rehabilitated. But after Zhang's story was published, he suddenly wasn't accessible to the media anymore.
Other demobilized soldiers are becoming more relaxed about discussing 1989—though not always with the spin you might expect. While interviewing a jobless migrant worker in Chongqing not long ago, I discovered he was an ex-soldier. Unsolicited, he started reminiscing about the years he spent stationed in and near Beijing. "I was there when martial law was declared in 1989," he said casually, "First I was based in the university district, helping keep students from leaving the campus to demonstrate in Tiananmen." He went on to recount how, on July 16, he was reassigned to the square itself—this time "to help stabilize things and keep demonstrators out of Tiananmen."
I asked him how he assessed those events two decades later. "Back then I believed the unrest was counterrevolutionary violence." (No big surprise here, since this was the government line.) What he said next was startling, however: "Today we have an era of peace; it's the dawning of an economic age. Now I no longer think the protests were counterrevolutionary. Anyway, the Communist Party has reversed its verdict on them."
I tried to correct him: it wasn't true that the verdict had been overturned. In fact activists were still being detained simply for demanding the government make such a reversal. "Well, they've been partially reversed, anyway," he said blithely. Still, I tried to interrupt. But this was his story—and he was sticking with it....
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... We still don't have a credible official number for the civilians who died due to the repression, for example. If the government simply told the truth about the number and identities of June 4 victims, it would help begin to clear the air.
Recently I also visited the elderly former university professor Ding Zilin, who founded the Tiananmen Mothers group after her son was killed near the square. She told me she's collected the names of 195 victims of the bloodletting—mostly workers—whose relatives have dared to come forward. The total is believed to number at least in the hundreds.
Shards of truth are emerging slowly, bit by bit. This spring a former soldier named Zhang Shijun went public for the first time, giving an interview to the Associated Press about his unit's role in the military crackdown (though, as a medic, he says he was unarmed). He hinted at the commission of atrocities by other People's Liberation Army units, but declined to give details. Zhang is one of very few military men who've called for a reassessment of the protest movement, which authorities still sometimes call a "counterrevolutionary" riot.
This process of official re-evaluation—what in Chinese political jargon is referred to as a "reversal of the verdict"—took place after the tumultuous 1966-76 Cultural Revolution and resulted in thousands of citizens being politically rehabilitated. But after Zhang's story was published, he suddenly wasn't accessible to the media anymore.
Other demobilized soldiers are becoming more relaxed about discussing 1989—though not always with the spin you might expect. While interviewing a jobless migrant worker in Chongqing not long ago, I discovered he was an ex-soldier. Unsolicited, he started reminiscing about the years he spent stationed in and near Beijing. "I was there when martial law was declared in 1989," he said casually, "First I was based in the university district, helping keep students from leaving the campus to demonstrate in Tiananmen." He went on to recount how, on July 16, he was reassigned to the square itself—this time "to help stabilize things and keep demonstrators out of Tiananmen."
I asked him how he assessed those events two decades later. "Back then I believed the unrest was counterrevolutionary violence." (No big surprise here, since this was the government line.) What he said next was startling, however: "Today we have an era of peace; it's the dawning of an economic age. Now I no longer think the protests were counterrevolutionary. Anyway, the Communist Party has reversed its verdict on them."
I tried to correct him: it wasn't true that the verdict had been overturned. In fact activists were still being detained simply for demanding the government make such a reversal. "Well, they've been partially reversed, anyway," he said blithely. Still, I tried to interrupt. But this was his story—and he was sticking with it....