Tiananmen: A letter from a doctor who cannot forget
written by: Jonathan Mirsky, 12-Mar-04
 LONDON - The Chinese army doctor who forced the government last year to admit that SARS had become a national crisis has now dared open China's most sensitive political issue: the Tiananmen Square killings in Beijing in June 1989.
In a letter to the prime minister, several deputy premiers, the Politburo and the chairman and deputy chairman of the National People's Congress, which is now in session, Jiang Yanyong refers to the students in the square as innocent patriots "fighting corruption and bureaucratic racketeering."
The demonstrators on the square were supported by most Chinese, Jiang writes. But "a small number of leaders who supported corruption resorted to means unprecedented in the world and in China. They acted in a frenzied fashion, using tanks, machine guns and other weapons to suppress the totally unarmed students and citizens, killing hundreds of innocent students in Beijing, and injuring and crippling thousands others. Then the authorities mobilized all types of propaganda machinery to fabricate lies and used highhanded measures to silence the people across the country."
It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of what Jiang has written, especially when some China-watchers in the West maintain that Tiananmen is a dead issue in China. Jiang is aware of it in terms of his personal safety: "Of course I have considered the consequences that I might encounter after writing this letter," he said.
One of the surest ways to attract the police and a lengthy prison sentence in China is to suggest that what happened in Tiananmen was more than an "incident," as the government usually describes it, or to deny that it was a "counter-revolutionary uprising."
The most astonishing part of Jiang's appeal is his account of visiting Yang Shangkun in 1998. Yang, then retired, had been China's president in 1989 and those who were in Tiananmen on the night of May 19 remember his voice booming out of the loudspeakers in the middle of the night, warning the demonstrators that martial law had been declared and they were now in danger. Jiang told Yang, who died later that year, of the bloody scenes in Army Hospital 301, where he was a director of surgery, when scores of dead and dying students were carried in: "Lying before me this time were our own people, killed by children of the Chinese people, with weapons given to them by the people, in Beijing, the magnificent capital of China."
"Yang indicated that the June 4 incident was one in which the Communist Party committed the most serious mistakes in its history," write Jiang. "He said he could not do anything to correct the mistake, but that the mistakes would be corrected in the future."
In his letter, Jiang writes that he has been especially moved by Ding Zilin, a professor whose 17-year-old son was killed on the night of 3-4 June. She has organized 200 parents and relatives of other victims, and has been constantly harassed since she began petitioning the government to account for the Tiananmen dead. Jiang knows about such Party persecution. During the Cultural Revolution, he, like many intellectuals, was exiled to western China, where he fed horses. Last year, after he wrote to Time magazine and local television stations exposing official lying about the real extent of SARS, which led to the dismissal of China's health minister, he was ordered not to speak to foreigners.
But for Jiang, Tiananmen is the worst of the Communist Party's crimes since the Cultural Revolution, and he has sided with Professor Ding in her search for justice.
"Who among us does not have parents, children, and brothers and sisters?" he writes in his open letter to Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and other top officials. "... Anyone whose family members were unjustly killed should voice the same request. Each Chinese Communist Party member, Chinese citizen and human being must courageously support this just demand."
Jonathan Mirsky is former East Asia editor of The Times of London.
Published in: International Herald Tribune
|
