Letter from overseas students breaks silence on Tiananmen

Visitors cross the road near a security check point into Tiananmen Square on a rainy day in Beijing yesterday

They were born too late to remember the night 26 years ago when Chinese troops slaughtered hundreds of pro-democracy student activists in the heart of Beijing. Many grew up hearing only government accounts of the event, which paint the massacre as the unfortunate conclusion to some vague political intrigue.
Nonetheless, this June 4, 11 Chinese university students living overseas were trying to break through the official silence with a widely circulated, passionately worded letter that encourages their compatriots to learn more about the Tiananmen massacre — a watershed event that has defined China ever since.
Written by University of Georgia graduate student Gu Yi, and co-signed by 10 other overseas Chinese students, the letter has become one of the few flashpoints as this year’s anniversary arrives, with Chinese authorities on guard against even the tiniest of commemorations.
The letter remembers the government crackdown and demands that the Chinese leaders who gave the orders late on June 3 and in the early morning hours of June 4, 1989, be held responsible.
“We do not ask the (Chinese Communist Party) to redress the events of that spring as killers are not the ones we turn to to clear the names of the dead, but killers must be tried,” the letter reads. “We do not forget, nor forgive, until justice is done and the ongoing persecution is halted.”
An online copy of the document has reached readers in China with the help of software that let PDFs get past Chinese censors, Gu said. The document has already drawn a strong rebuke from the Communist Party-run Global Times, which said in an editorial that the students “harshly attacked the current Chinese regime, twisting the facts of 26 years ago with narratives of some overseas hostile forces.”
Gu said he was addressing Chinese students who had not seen the troves of photos, film footage and eyewitness accounts about the massacre that he came across only after he left China to study.
“All they need to know is actually very simple,” Gu said. “Some people died, and some people killed them. If you understand that, you don’t have to understand a lot more.”
In what’s become an annual ritual, Chinese police were stepping up their vigilance in the capital yesterday to prevent any remembrance of the event. References to the massacre are nowhere to be found in Chinese media, and censors scrub social media posts that mention the event or its date.
The students’ letter was not the only one to mark the anniversary. A group of relatives of those killed in the massacre also issued a statement demanding that Chinese leaders be brought to justice and that the victims’ families win compensation.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying responded yesterday to the relatives by arguing that the country’s rapid economic growth over the past 26 years justified the crackdown.
“As for the political turmoil that happened in the late 1980s, the Chinese government and party have already made a clear conclusion,” Hua said. “The great achievements China made during the past 30 years in the practice of reform and opening-up have shown that China’s development path is absolutely correct, and wins resolute supports from 1.3 billion Chinese people.” Jack Chang, Beijing, AP