25 years after Tiananmen, scholars protest detentions

As Beijing authorities tighten security in the run up to the 25th anniversary of the 4 June military crackdown on pro-democracy student protestors in Tiananmen Square, scholars have pressed the government to release detained academics and rights activists – and to review the official version of the event.

Rights groups said dozens of lawyers, academics and activists have been detained in advance of the sensitive anniversary of an event that still has a deep impact on Chinese political thinking.

Other activists have been questioned by police or placed under house arrest, as the authorities try to prevent people publicly remembering those who died in the crackdown, Amnesty International has said.

An official death count from the 4 June 1989 crackdown was never released, and officially the protests are described as a ‘counter-revolutionary riot’. The solitary ‘Tank Man’, who stood in front of a convoy of armoured vehicles to prevent the military advance on students, is one of the iconic images of the crackdown.

Open discussion of the event in which the army turned on student protesters is taboo in China and demonstrations are banned.

Human rights groups have said detentions have been more widespread and started earlier than was the case with previous 4 June anniversaries.

Chow Po-chung, an associate professor in Hong Kong Chinese University’s department of government and public administration, said last week that his scheduled lecture at Sun Yat-sen University, in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, had been cancelled a day after he posted a photograph of the 1989 student protests at Tiananmen Square on social media.

“Since others are not talking, then let me spell it out. This is serious repression of academic freedom and freedom of thought,” Chow wrote on Weibo on 14 May, in a post that has since been deleted.

Open letter

In an open letter to Chinese Premier Xi Jinping, a number of academics from Hong Kong, the United States and France raised the cases of detained activists and academics. The detained include:

• • Xu Youyu, a noted historian and research fellow of the Institute of Philosophy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
  
• • Hao Jian, a professor at the Beijing Film Academy.
  
• • Dissident writer Hu Shigen.
  
• • Civil rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, who was one of the students protesting in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and who has represented many dissidents.
  
• • Writer Liu Di.

The intellectuals were ‘criminally’ detained earlier this month, their lawyer Shang Baojun said on 5 May.

“The citizens were detained because they discussed an event that took place 25 years ago and that had a profound impact on the course of Chinese history,” the open letter said, describing their detention as “illegal”.

The alleged reason for the detention was that on 3 May the intellectuals were among 15 participants in a meeting billed as a “2014 workshop on Beijing’s June 4”, held in a private residence in the capital, the letter said.

However, the authorities have said the detainees were held for “creating a disturbance in a public place, causing serious disorder”.

“These detentions raise many disturbing questions. For example, how can a private meeting ‘create disturbance in a public place’?” asked the scholarly letter released by the Tiananmen Initiative Project, which is dedicated to keeping alive public debate on the Tiananmen crackdown.

Revision call

During the 3 May meeting the participants had discussed how to prevent the fading of memories of the Tiananmen incident, and called for a government investigation into the crackdown.

Joseph Cheng, a professor of political science at Hong Kong’s City University and one of the signatories of the Tiananmen Initiative Project letter, told University World News:

“This is the 25th anniversary, so it’s a more important anniversary and the issue remains unresolved. There are a lot of people who want the truth, they want the official party history to reverse the verdict on Tiananmen Square [which presents the crackdown] as a kind of anti-revolutionary turmoil.

“Chinese leaders including Xi Jinping have been reluctant to engage in political reform. Instead they would like to emphasise economic growth,” Cheng added. “However, civil society is certainly developing in China, and dissatisfaction with this kind of approach is growing.

“Maintaining this kind of approach requires a severe crackdown [on dissent] and this is exactly what we see today.”

A revision of the official version of events could have wide-reaching political implications.

“Above all else we all understand that a reversal of the official verdict will generally be interpreted as a sign of the beginning of serious political reform in China,” Cheng said. Moves towards more democracy in China was one of the key demands of students in 1989.

“The scholars we are writing [in the open letter] about are exactly the kind of people who express this kind of dissatisfaction with Xi Jinping’s approach. The common characteristic [of the detainees] is that they want to see serious reform instead of just holding onto power by the leadership.”

Separately, some 100 academics in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea expressed concern over the safety of the same group of detained Chinese intellectuals.

In their own open letter the academics including Ken Suzuki, a professor of Chinese law at Hokkaido University and a number of historians, sinologists and scholars – 60 of them from Taiwan and South Korea – said the detainees had “continued their rational and peaceful intellectual endeavours to heal the deep wounds” of the 1989 crackdown.

People’s Republic of Amnesia

A Beijing-based foreign correspondent for the United States National Public Radio, Louisa Lim, has been speaking in advance of her forthcoming book People’s Republic of Amnesia – Tiananmen revisited, about the Communist Party’s efforts to erase the history and memory of the Tiananmen crackdown within China.

The 4 June event does not appear in history books or on the internet, and people face punishment and harassment if they bring up the protests, she said.

Lim told Canada’s CBC radio last week that she had showed the ‘Tank Man’ photograph to 100 Chinese students at four top universities. Only 15 were able to identify the picture and several were nervous about what it showed.

People who recognised the picture "would almost shrink away", she said, while others showed "no flicker of recognition on their faces".