Tag Archives: Tiananmen

Renee Xia and Perry Link: China: Detained to Death

 China: Detained to Death

Renee Xia and Perry Link

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Chinese Human Rights Defenders
Chinese legal rights activist Cao Shunli (1961–2014)
On May 3, fifteen Beijing citizens—scholars, journalists, and rights lawyers—gathered informally at the home of Professor Hao Jian of the Beijing Film Academy to reflect on the twentieth-fifth anniversary of the 1989 June Fourth massacre in Beijing. Two days later, five of the participants were arrested and charged with “creating a disturbance in a public place, causing serious disorder.” All five remain in detention.

Two of the five people have serious medical conditions: philosophy professor Xu Youyu, sixty-seven, has high blood pressure and diabetes; human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, forty-nine, suffers both these conditions plus high cholesterol. Both take daily medications, but officials confiscated their medicines when they arrived at the detention facility, saying that detention-center staff are in charge of all medications. The next day both men were offered pills that they did not recognize. Xu was afraid of ingesting them and declined. Pu reluctantly accepted them.

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The People’s Republic of Amnesia-The Legacy of Tiananmen Square

The People’s Republic of Amnesia

The Legacy of Tiananmen Square

9780199347704
Price: $27.95

Format:
Hardback 240 pp.
6.125″ x 9.25″

ISBN-10:
0199347700

ISBN-13:
9780199347704

Publication date:
May 2014

Imprint: OUP US

Louisa Lim

Despite its emergence from backward isolation into a dynamic world economic power, a quarter-century after the People’s Army crushed unarmed protestors – labeled anti-revolutionaries – in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, the defining event of China’s modern history remains buried. Memory is dangerous in a country built to function on national amnesia. A single act of public remembrance might expose the frailty of the state’s carefully constructed edifice of accepted history, one kept aloft by strict censorship, blatant falsehood, and willful forgetting. Though the consequences of Tiananmen Square are visible everywhere throughout China, what happened there has been consigned to silence.

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An Open letter to Xi Jinping regarding illegal detention of Chinese scholars

 TIANANMEN INITIATIVE PROJECT

纪念”六四” 25周年倡议

An Open letter to Xi Jinping regarding illegal detention of Chinese scholars

05/13/2014

President Xi Jinping

Mr President:

We have learned that our fellow scholars Xu Youyu, Hao Jian, and Hu Shigen, and civil rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang and writer Liu Di, were criminally detained for “creating a disturbance in a public place, causing serious disorder”. The alleged reason for their detention was that on 3 May they were among the fifteen participants in a “ 2014 Workshop on Beijing’s June Fourth” that took place in a private apartment in Beijing.

These detentions raise many disturbing questions. For example, how can a private meeting “create disturbance in a public place”? These citizens were detained because they discussed an event that took place twenty-five years ago and that had a profound impact on the course of Chinese history. How can a discussion among scholars, lawyers and writers at someone’s home be considered a “disturbance”? As you have often reminded your Japanese counterparts, to be strong, a nation must confront its past. As scholars who have devoted our lives to the study of China, we are convinced that this country will only benefit from a free exchange of ideas that helps to establish historical truth.

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Perry Link:China After Tiananmen: Money, Yes; Ideas, No

Perry Link:China After Tiananmen: Money, Yes; Ideas, No
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David Turnley/Corbis
Soldiers and demonstrators at Tiananmen Square, May, 1989

The June Fourth Massacre in Beijing has had remarkable longevity. What happened in and around Tiananmen Square twenty-five years ago this June not only haunts the memories of people who witnessed the events and of friends and families of the victims, but also persists in the minds of people who stood, and still stand, with the attacking side. Deng Xiaoping, the man who said “go” for the final assault on thousands of Chinese citizens protesting peacefully for democracy, has died. But people who today are inside or allied with the political regime responsible for the killing remain acutely aware of it.

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