WASHINGTON–A bipartisan group of lawmakers gathered in the capital today to commemorate the Tiananmen Square Massacre and celebrate the continued struggle for democracy in China.
The event near the steps of the Capitol Building was led by members of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and featured several survivors of the 1989 incident in Tiananmen Square.
“We stand with the victims of Tiananmen Square and all those currently facing the oppression of the Chinese Communist Party,” Select Committee Chair John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) said.
June 4 marks the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, in which communist troops in Beijing mobilized against thousands of student-led demonstrators, killing hundreds or thousands of unarmed civilians.
Estimates vary due to CCP efforts to suppress discussion of the event, but most sources claim that the CCP’s military wing slaughtered between 500 and 1,000 protesters.
Perhaps the most famous image of the event in the United States, though one heavily censored in China, is a short video of the “tank man,” an unknown Chinese man who stood in front of a column of tanks as they were leaving the day after the massacre.
The man’s identity, and his ultimate fate, remain unknown all these years.
Nevertheless, Select Committee ranking member Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) held a poster featuring a photo of the incident. The tanks, he said, were emblematic of the “thuggish, brutal Chinese Communist Party that thought to squash the freedom of this man and countless others.”
Mr. Krishnamoorthi condemned CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping for ongoing crackdowns on speech and expression in China, as well as various other human rights abuses.
“[Xi is] telling the world that he will send those tanks again against anyone who stands up for freedom, and he will deem his own people enemies of the state,” he said.
Former House Speakers Kevin McCarthy and Nancy Pelosi also attended the event, praising the tank man’s courage and the ongoing efforts of China’s overseas pro-democracy movement.
“We do not know his name, but we know his actions,” Mr. McCarthy said.
“I am proud that we will never hide the fact that we stand with the man with the tank. And we will honor him everywhere we go until no longer will there be tanks in China [sent] after their own people.”
Among the survivors present at Tuesday’s event was Wang Dan, a preeminent student leader during the protests who was subsequently imprisoned and ultimately exiled to the United States.
Mr. Wang said that the CCP remained the great adversary of democracy and personal freedom. Speaking of his admiration for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he said that he also had a dream—a dream of a democratic China.
‘My Own Chinese Dream’
“I have my own Chinese dream. I dream that one day, the Chinese people will live in freedom and dignity. For 35 years, I have not forgotten this dream for a single day.”Zheng Xuguang, another dissident present at the 1989 incident, said that the essence of the United States’ confrontation with China was the struggle between freedom and the CCP’s totalitarianism.
“For the CCP, the Cold War never ended,” he said. “Today, Xi Jinping’s regime is not starting a new Cold War. It is a continuous struggle between the CCP regime and the free world.”
Also present was the pro-democracy elder Wei Jingsheng, whose terse critiques of the CCP helped to galvanize the Chinese democracy movement in the 1970s.
Mr. Wei was not present at the Tiananmen Square Massacre, as he was already serving time in a CCP prison for writing an essay that accused the CCP of creating a dictatorship and argued China would need to embrace democracy to become a fully modern country.
In all, he served 18 years in the regime’s prisons on various charges before being exiled to the United States in the 1990s.
Speaking through an interpreter, Mr. Wei said that the pro-democracy movement was necessarily opposed to the “extreme Marxist ideology” of the CCP.
He continued to believe, he said, that the Chinese people’s desire for real democratic governance would one day topple the CCP and usher in a greater era of peace on the world stage.
“The next ideological and revolutionary movement in China we believe will be able to change China’s Communist Party’s autocratic regime, [to] alter the world’s geopolitical landscape, [to] promote the trend of global democratization, [to] stop the current democratic retreat, and bring lasting peace to the world.”
