The Chinese government was globally condemned for its crackdown on the protesters, and several countries imposed sanctions, including the ongoing European Union arms embargo. The Chinese government has rebuffed all efforts to seek a re-examination of the events of June 1989.
In 1990, then-President Jiang Zemin dismissed international condemnation of the Tiananmen Massacre as "much ado about nothing." In January 2001, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao defended the use of deadly force against unarmed civilians in June 1989 as "...timely and resolute measures...extremely necessary for the stability and development of the country."
"The Chinese government has made it virtually impossible for people to know about this major event in their own recent history," said Richardson. "And that should raise profound concerns globally about the government's capacity for manipulating information and evading accountability."
The Tiananmen Legacy
Ongoing Persecution and Censorship
Ongoing Persecution of Those Seeking Reassessment.
Tiananmen's Survivors: Exiled, Marginalized and Harassed.
Censoring History.
Human Rights Watch Recommendations.
To the Chinese Government.
To the International Community.
Ongoing Persecution of Those Seeking Reassessment
The Chinese government continues to persecute those who seek a public reassessment of the bloody crackdown. Chinese citizens who challenge the official version of what happened in June 1989 are subject to swift reprisals from security forces. These include relatives of victims who demand redress and eyewitnesses to the massacre and its aftermath whose testimonies contradict the official version of events. Even those who merely seek to honor the memory of the late Zhao Ziyang, the secretary general of the Communist Party of China in 1989 who was sacked and placed under house arrest for opposing violence against the demonstrators, find themselves subject to reprisals.
Some of those still targeted include:
Ding Zilin and the Tiananmen Mothers: Ding is a retired philosophy professor at People's University in Beijing whose 17-year-old son, Jiang Jielian, was killed in central Beijing on June 4, 1989. Ding has since become the spokesperson and driving force behind the Tiananmen Mothers, a loosely organized group of around 150 family members of other June 1989 victims. Security forces routinely subject Ding to detention, interrogation, and threats demanding silence from her and other Tiananmen Mothers members ahead of "sensitive" dates, particularly June 4. "China has become like an airtight iron chamber and all the demands of the people about June 4, all the anguish, lament and moaning of the victims' relatives and the wounded have been sealed off," reads a petition by the Tiananmen Mothers, signed by 127 people and submitted to China's parliament in March 2008.
Jiang Yanyong: Jiang is a 77-year-old army surgeon who treated some of the victims at Beijing's 301 Military Hospital in the immediate aftermath of the June 1989 military assault. Jiang first gained public prominence in 2003 for exposing the government's cover-up of the country's outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. In March 2004, Jiang wrote a letter to China's parliament, the National People's Congress, urging a reassessment of the government's position on the Tiananmen Massacre. The letter exposed the brutality of the June 1989 massacre, including the People's Liberation Army's use of "fragmentation bullets of the kind banned by international convention." Jiang subsequently told foreign media the government's response to that letter was to dispatch state security forces to abduct him from his office, hold him for seven weeks at an army guesthouse, and subject him to "study sessions." After being allowed to return home, Jiang was placed under house arrest for several months and barred from overseas travel. In March 2009, Jiang wrote a letter to Chinese President Hu Jintao demanding an apology for the period he spent in detention in 2004 and the subsequent months of house arrest.
Zhang Shijun: Zhang is a 40-year-old former soldier who took part in the military crackdown in Beijing on June 3-4. In March 2009, Zhang published an open letter to Chinese President Hu Jintao urging an official reassessment of the "June 4 tragedy, the event in China's recent history that causes bitter weeping and choking back tears." Zhang was detained by security forces shortly after his letter was made public, and remains under detention in an undisclosed location.
Sun Wenguang: Sun, a 75-year-old retired professor in Jinan City, Shandong province, was assaulted on April 4, 2009, by five plainclothes thugs who appear to have been working at official behest. He was en route to Jinan's Martyrs' Park to mourn Zhao Ziyang, the Chinese Communist Party secretary-general who tried to prevent the use of force by the military in June 1989. Zhao was stripped of his position following the crackdown and spent the last 15 years of life under house arrest in Beijing. The assault on Sun, which left him with three broken ribs, occurred just minutes after he had evaded some 20 uniformed police who attempted to prevent him from leaving the university campus where he lived.
Tiananmen's Survivors: Exiled, Marginalized and Harassed
The Chinese government is particularly hostile toward those individuals it has identified as part of the leadership of the 1989 Tiananmen student protests. Student leaders who served time in prison or fled China in the aftermath of the bloody crackdown of June 1989 have become unwilling exiles. Several of those former protest leaders have been turned back from China by Chinese immigration officials even when trying to visit aging family members they left behind or to attend their funerals. Student organizers who stayed in China remain subject to tight surveillance and harassment despite having served long prison terms for their participation in the protests of June 1989. Perhaps most tragically, survivors maimed or handicapped in the June 1989 military assault in Beijing and other major cities continue to face pressure from state security forces to lie or stay silent about the causes of their injuries.
Tiananmen survivors who continue to suffer due to the role they played in the student protests in 1989 include:
Wang Dan: A former Beijing University student leader who topped Beijing's Tiananmen most-wanted list until his arrest in 1989, Wang received a four-year prison sentence in 1991, was released in 1993 when China was bidding to host the Olympics, was re-arrested in 1995 for "subversion" and was sentenced to an 11-year prison term in 1996. Wang was sent to the United States in 1998 on medical parole and has been barred from return by Chinese immigration officials who have refused to issue him a new Chinese passport. In 2008, Wang launched a campaign to urge the Chinese government to allow him and other blacklisted former Tiananmen protest leaders to return to China in line with Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which specifies that, "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."
