When Will Beijing Say Sorry?

Not long after he was released from prison
in 1998, Wang Dan visited me in Taiwan. It was the first meeting of China’s two
most-wanted Tiananmen student leaders in nearly a decade, and we had a lot to
talk about. We were still talking the next day when the sun came up.

 

Wang Dan and I studied at different
universities, and we didn’t meet until the early days of the Tiananmen
protests. It had been 10 years since the killings in Beijing on June 4 1989 had
set our lives on different trajectories. He had spent his time as a political
prisoner; I had spent mine living the good life in France, the U.S. and finally
Taiwan. That didn’t mean we didn’t have a lot of things to talk about. We did. Above
all, we had to talk about whether we had done the right thing. Neither of us could
be completely sure we had.

 

It was a difficult night, and it was a
particularly difficult because, among the many things that came up, we talked
about Ding Zilin. On the night of June 3, 1989, when I had already begun a
flight to freedom that would take me to Hong Kong within a month, Ding Zilin’s
17-year-old son, Jiang Jielan, joined the protests on the streets of Beijing,
even though his mother had begged him to stay home. I was one of the leaders of
those protests, and so was Wang Dan. Three hours later Ding Zilin’s son was
shot dead.

 

So much of what happened that night and
early the next day is still a mystery. We don’t know, for example, how many
Beijing students and citizens were shot dead like Ding Zilin’s son—hundreds,
thousands; you choose. I don’t think we ever will. But Ding Zilin, at least, has
spent the last 15 years bravely reminding us that it happened. She does still, by
persuading other families to stand up and count the ones they lost. She gets
arrested on a regular basis, especially as June 4 approaches, but she continues
to remind us—as she put it five years after she lost her son—that the
“blood-splattered streets of Beijing have been paved over with a new
concrete—brand-named ‘economic progress.’” As the head of the Tiananmen Mothers
Campaign, which calls on the Beijing government to accept accountability for
the bloodshed, she has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, and in a braver,
more honest world she would get it.

 

When her name came up that night with Wang
Dan, I felt a lot of things, but mostly I felt guilty. I felt guilty about
having survived and having made it to France and the U.S. when so many others
died. I felt guilty that I had not stayed behind and gone to jail like Wang Dan.
I felt guilty that I had not done enough to remind the world that the China I
had failed to change had got no better since I left. I felt guilty that perhaps
I was in some way responsible for the death of Ding Zilin’s son. 

 

I felt so guilty that I suggested to Wang
Dan that we make a telephone call that I had put off making for far too long.
Wang Dan—who had her number—made the call, and after a few words of greeting, he
said: “Wu’er Kaixi is with me, and he has something he wants to say to you.”

 

I took the phone and said to Ding Zilin the
only thing that could be said.

 

“Sorry,” I said to her. “I can’t even ask
you for forgiveness.”

 

“I’m just happy that you finally called,”
Ding Zilin said back.

 

All three of us began to cry, and I said:
“We can’t replace the son you lost, but Wang Dan and I want you to think of us as
your sons.”

 

That happened more than six years ago, and
the 15th anniversary of Tiananmen is upon us already—15 years in exile for me,
a decade in and out of prison followed by five years of exile for Wang Dan, and
15 years mourning a son for Ding Zilin. Some of my pain lifted when I spoke to
Ding Zilin that night, but not all of it—I will spend the rest of my life regretting
the lives that were lost in 1989. I am taking this occasion to say it publicly
to Ding Zilin and to everybody who lost someone they loved.

 

Wang Dan and I were young men who thought
we could change the world, and we inadvertently led a lot of people to their
deaths. That has caused a lot of pain to a lot of people, and an apology is a
first step towards healing that pain. However, it should not be forgotten that
the most important apology—the apology that would allow my exiled generation to
go home—is still to come. That apology belongs to the men who ordered the
shootings.

 

I have spent months thinking about how the
15th anniversary of Tiananmen should be marked. It has been difficult to decide.
The world has changed. These, in so many ways, are less idealistic times than
those giddy days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and before freedom came to
the Eastern Bloc and Nelson Mandela emerged from jail—when anything briefly seemed
possible. But, if, for just one day, we could return to that idealism, in the
spirit of the students who took to the streets of Beijing in 1989, I would ask
the world to spend it looking hard at the China with which it has struck its
business deals, and remembering that the mothers of Beijing are still waiting
for their apology. Until it comes, China will remain a dark place where a
mourning mother who challenges the official monopoly on the truth faces summary
arrest, and where idealistic young students who seek democratic change are
forced into exile.

 

Without that apology, China’s progress of
the past 15 years is an illusion. The introduction of the economic freedoms
that has brought prosperity to urban China since Tiananmen is an
acknowledgement by the Chinese people that students of my generation had a
right to protest. But the lack of an apology is a reminder that China’s new
prosperity continues at the expense of freedom of expression and democratic participation.
An apology, in short, would signal the long-suppressed next stage of
Tiananmen’s unfinished revolution. 

 

——This article is published at the Wall Street Journal, June 4th, 2004.  15th Anniversay of the Tiananmen Massacre.