By Wu’er Kaixi
& Shen Tong
When the retired military
doctor who blew the lid on China’s attempts to cover up the full extent of SARS infections in Beijing last year recently
spoke out again, I was moved by his courage.
In China, even today, few people have
the strength of conviction to send a letter to the National Assembly – as Jiang Yanyong did on February 24 – suggesting that the Chinese Communist Party’s assessment of a historical event demands reappraisal. They cannot be
blamed. That Jiang’s letter made international
headlines after appearing on a Hong Kong
website is a sign not of Chinese timidity but of Jiang’s boldness.
Jiang’s letter
concerns the Tiananmen crackdown of June 4, 1989, a democratic student movement that led to
the exile, imprisonment and death of many of my fellow students. The “1989 counter-revolutionary riots” have now come to be known as
the “1989 political disturbances,” he notes. He then asks: “If they were ‘political disturbances,’ did they really need to be suppressed
by mobilizing several hundred-thousand troops? How it was necessary to use guns
and tanks to brutally kill ordinary people?” His
response: “I suggest Tiananmen be renamed
the 1989 patriotic student movement.”
I applaud Dr. Jiang’s courage, and say to him, I agree such
an assessment is long overdue. We who participated in the protests against
official corruption, in favor of China opening up to the West and in
support of increased democratic
participation – those of us who are still
living – did so because we cared. We were young and we wanted to make China a better
place. And, while we failed in some ways, we did not fail entirely. China has
indeed become a better place. Students of today – students who
are the same age I was when I was driven into exile – have
prospects my generation could only dream of. And they have those prospects, at
least in part, because the student movement of 1989 compelled the Chinese
government to make sweeping reforms that allowed private entrepreneurship to
flourish.
But let us not forget that
Jiang’s letter is also a reminder of just how the student movement failed, of
how China
has not changed, of how little freedom Chinese have to speak out. And, let us
not forget that the publication of Jiang’s letter on
the Internet – it has reportedly circulated
widely in China
– is a reminder too that Beijing
continues to repress freedom of speech at its own risk. As Jiang himself puts
it: “People should always be able to speak – and to speak
the truth.”
A popular line of thinking
propagated by the Chinese government, and followed by some China watchers
and most business leaders with an eye to investment in the world’s largest growing market, is that in a country as large, as populous and
as potentially unstable as China,
stability must come first. There is a great deal of truth to this – until stability becomes an excuse for oppression. Arguing that a
reassessment of Tiananmen is simply a means of expressing the will of the
people, Jiang points out towards the end of this letter, “When so-called stability oppresses everything, it can only result in even greater instability.”
Jiang writes movingly of his
own memories, of treating victims of the People’s Liberation
Army at Beijing’s PLA No. 301 Hospital, where he was a surgeon
on the night of June 3, saying that in all his years as a doctor he had never
seen injuries like them and that they haunt him to this day. He writes of Nobel
Peace Prize nominee Ding Zilin, who lost her 17 year-old-son that night, and
has campaigned tirelessly ever since for the government to take responsibility
for its actions. “So far,” he writes, “we have not had a word in answer,”
Jiang writes with the
conviction of a man who feels that Tiananmen is a wound in the psyche of modern
China
that has not healed because it has been ignored for too long.
A nationally respected surgeon, Chinese Communist Party member and a
veteran of the People’s Liberation Army, he also
tells us that these feelings are shared amongst Party members in far higher
positions than his own. His letter records a 1998 meeting with former president
Yang Shangkun, in which Yang called the Tiananmen Incident “historically, the Party’s biggest mistake,” adding that “in the future” it would “definitely be reassessed.”
As we approach the 15th
anniversary of Tiananmen, I pray that Yang’s vision of
the future and the rightful outcome of Jiang’s plea are at
hand. I say this not only because I think it is time my generation were allowed
to come home, but also because I agree with Jiang that, in a China that buries
its past and exiles and imprisons those who dare to speak what others only
bottle up inside, stability is merely an illusion.
—— Published March 12th 2004, By Asian Wall Street Journal
