This is what the vile Rats in Beijing are capable of doing to their own people. You can just imagine what they will do to us if only they get a chance! The saddest part of this, of course, is that we would seize the chance to state truthfully and without doubt that "the Han Chinese people are different from the Han Chinese Dictatorship". But we know full well that this is despicably false: however sad it might be, the unquestionable reality is that the Han Chinese people are contemptible accessories to their murderous Dictatorship. - Which is why we must show them all the hatred we can muster, so as to turn these Rats back to their sewers where they are least able to harm the rest of humanity. In remembrance of the martyrs of Tiananmen Square.
· May 28, 2019
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BEIJING — For three decades, Jiang Lin
kept quiet about the carnage she had seen on the night when the Chinese Army
rolled through Beijing to crush student protests in Tiananmen Square. But the
memories tormented her — of soldiers firing into crowds in the dark, bodies
slumped in pools of blood and the thud of clubs when troops bludgeoned her to
the ground near the square.
Ms. Jiang was a lieutenant in the
People’s Liberation Army back then, with a firsthand view of both the massacre
and a failed attempt by senior commanders to dissuade China’s leaders from using
military force to crush the pro-democracy protests. Afterward, as the
authorities sent protesters to prison and wiped out memories of the killing,
she said nothing, but her conscience ate at her.
Now, in the run-up to the 30th
anniversary of the June 4, 1989, crackdown, Ms. Jiang, 66, has decided for the
first time to tell her story. She said she felt compelled to call for a public
reckoning because generations of Chinese Communist Party leaders,
including President Xi Jinping, have expressed no remorse for the
violence. Ms. Jiang left China this week.
“The
pain has eaten at me for 30 years,” she said in an interview in Beijing.
“Everyone who took part must speak up about what they know happened. That’s our
duty to the dead, the survivors and the children of the future.”
Ms. Jiang’s account has a wider
significance: She sheds new light on how military commanders tried to resist
orders to use armed force to clear protesters from the square they had taken
over for seven weeks, captivating the world.
The
students’ impassioned idealism, hunger strikes, rebukes of officials and
grandiose gestures like building a “Goddess of Democracy” on the square drew an
outpouring of public sympathy and left leaders divided on how to respond.
She described her role in spreading
word of a letter from senior generals opposing martial law, and gave details of
other letters from commanders who warned the leadership not to use troops in
Beijing. And she saw on the streets how soldiers who carried out the party’s orders
shot indiscriminately as they rushed to retake Tiananmen Square.
Even
after 30 years, the massacre remains one of the most delicate topics in Chinese
politics, subjected to a sustained and largely successful effort by the
authorities to erase it from history. The party has ignored repeated calls to
acknowledge that it was wrong to open fire on the students and residents, and
resisted demands for a full accounting of how many died.
The authorities regularly detain former protest leaders and the
parents of students and residents killed in the crackdown. A court convicted four men in
southwestern China this year for selling bottles of liquor that referred to the
Tiananmen crackdown.
Over the years, a small group of
Chinese historians, writers, photographers and artists have tried to chronicle the chapters in
Chinese history that the party wants forgotten.
But Ms. Jiang’s decision to challenge
the silence carries an extra political charge because she is not only an army
veteran but also the daughter of the military elite. Her father was a general,
and she was born and raised in military compounds. She proudly enlisted in the
People’s Liberation Army about 50 years ago, and in photos from her time as a
military journalist, she stands beaming in her green army uniform, a notebook
in hand and camera hanging from her neck.
She
never imagined that the army would turn its guns against unarmed people in
Beijing, Ms. Jiang said.
“How could fate suddenly turn so that
you could use tanks and machine guns against ordinary people?” she said. “To
me, it was madness.”
Qian
Gang, her former supervisor at the Liberation Army Daily, who now lives abroad,
corroborated details of Ms. Jiang’s account. Ms. Jiang shared hundreds of
yellowing pages of a memoir and diaries that she wrote while trying to make
sense of the slaughter.
“More than once I’ve daydreamed of
visiting Tiananmen wearing mourning clothes and leaving a bunch of pure white
lilies,” she wrote in 1990.
‘The
People’s Military’
Ms. Jiang felt a stab of fear in May
1989 when radio and television news crackled with an announcement that China’s
government would impose martial law on much of Beijing in an effort to clear
student protesters from Tiananmen Square.
The protests had broken out in April,
when students marched to mourn the sudden death of Hu Yaobang, a popular
reformist leader, and demand cleaner, more open government.
By
declaring martial law across urban Beijing, Deng Xiaoping, the party’s leader,
signaled that armed force was an option.
Researchers have previously shown that
several senior commanders resisted using military force against
the protesters, but Ms. Jiang gave new details on the extent of the resistance
inside the military and how officers tried to push back against the orders.
Gen.
Xu Qinxian, the leader of the formidable 38th Group Army, refused to lead his
troops into Beijing without clear written orders, and checked himself into a
hospital. Seven commanders signed a letter opposing martial law that they
submitted to the Central Military Commission that oversaw the military.
“It was a very simple message,” she
said, describing the letter. “The People’s Liberation Army is the people’s
military and it should not enter the city or fire on civilians.”
Ms. Jiang, eager to spread the word of
the generals’ letter, read it over the telephone to an editor at People’s
Daily, the Communist Party’s main newspaper, where the staff were disobeying
orders to censor news about the protests. But the paper did not print the
letter because one of the generals who signed it objected, saying it was not
meant to be made public, she said.
Ms. Jiang still hoped that the
rumblings inside the military would deter Deng from sending in soldiers to
clear the protesters. But on June 3, she heard that the troops were advancing
from the west of the city and shooting at people.
The
army had orders to clear the square by early on June 4, using any means.
Announcements went out warning residents to stay inside.
But Ms. Jiang did not stay inside.
She remembered the people she had seen
on the square earlier in the day. “Would they be killed?” she thought.
She
headed into the city on bicycle to watch the troops come in, knowing that the
confrontation represented a watershed in Chinese history. She knew she risked
being mistaken for a protester because she was dressed in civilian clothes. But
that night, she said, she did not want to be identified with the military.
“This was my responsibility,” she said.
“My job was to report major breaking news.”
Ms. Jiang followed soldiers and tanks
as they advanced into the heart of Beijing, bursting through makeshift
blockades formed with buses and firing wildly at crowds of residents furious
that their government was using armed force.
Ms. Jiang stayed close to the ground,
her heart pounding as bullets flew overhead. Bursts of gunfire and blasts from
exploding gasoline tanks shook the air, and heat from burning buses stung her
face.
Near midnight, Ms. Jiang approached
Tiananmen Square, where soldiers stood silhouetted against the glow of fires.
An elderly gatekeeper begged her not to go on, but Ms. Jiang said she wanted to
see what would happen. Suddenly, over a dozen armed police officers bore down
on her, and some beat her with electric prods. Blood gushed from her head, and
Ms. Jiang fell.
Still, she did not pull out the card
that identified her as a military journalist.
“I’m
not a member of the Liberation Army today,” she thought to herself. “I’m one of
the ordinary civilians.”
A young man propped her on his bicycle
to carry her away, and some foreign journalists rushed her to a nearby
hospital, Ms. Jiang said. A doctor stitched up her head wound. She watched,
dazed, as the dead and wounded arrived by dozens.
The brutality of that night left her
shellshocked.
“It
felt like watching my own mother being raped,” she said. “It was unbearable.”
Ms. Jiang has long hesitated to tell
her story. The head injury she suffered in 1989 left her with a scar and
recurring headaches.
She was interrogated in the months
after the 1989 crackdown, and detained and investigated twice in following
years over the private memoir that she wrote. She formally left the military in
1996 and has since lived a quiet life, largely ignored by the authorities.
In recalling the events over several
interviews in recent weeks, Ms. Jiang’s voice often slowed and her sunny
personality seemed to retreat under the shadow of her memories.
Over the years, she said, she waited
for a Chinese leader to come forward to tell the country that the armed
crackdown was a calamitous error.
But that day never came.
Ms. Jiang said she believed that
China’s stability and prosperity would be fragile as long as the party did not
atone for the bloodshed.
“All
this is built on sand. There’s no solid foundation,” she said. “If you can deny
that people were killed, any lie is possible.”
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