Saturday, June 4, 2011
On June 4, 1989, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sends tanks rumbling into Tiananmen Square from various angles with the goal of crushing peaceful pro-democratic demonstrations at all cost. The result is the vicious killing of hundreds and possibly thousands of unarmed civilians—including many people not participating in the peaceful demonstrations at all. As the news of the brutal attacks reverberates across the world, heads of state express their shock and condemn the CCP’s violent suppression of the demonstrators, many of who are university students. President George H. W. Bush says he deeply deplores the use of force, and three weeks later imposes economic sanctions on China. U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher says she was “shocked and appalled by the shootings.” Years later, footage of one man, alone and unarmed, boldly shuffling to confront a column of army tanks, remains imprinted on the minds of millions around the world that watched the news broadcast of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Twenty-two years after the massacre, the CCP has not taken responsibility for its brutality. The regime recently approached families of the victims offering private payoffs, but with no mention of an apology or any intention to publicly admit responsibility for the atrocity. The Tiananmen Mothers—a group that continues to fight for a change in the CCP’s position on the massacre—issued an open letter rejecting the conditional payoff and called upon the government to formally, and openly discuss the issue. In the letter about the payoff offer, the Tiananmen Mothers state, “The visitors did not speak of making the truth public, carrying out judicial investigations, or providing an explanation for the case of each victim. They only raised the question of how much to pay, emphasizing that this was meant for that individual case and not for the families in the group as a whole.” While public mention of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre is prohibited in mainland China, large remembrance events are held every year, including this one, in both Hong Kong and Taiwan.
