The 4th June roses badges group together white and red roses. White symbolizes purity of the hearts while red passion - many young students and citizens scarified their lives in the 4th June massacre for democracy. Since then, red roses have been used to remember the victims, as if it was their blood that dyed the flowers crimson.

Wear the 4th June roses badges to call for Chinese government to treat the Tiananmen Mothers humanely such as assuring the rights to mourn freely their children and family members!

The CBC reporting in June 1989

Reading:

Wikipedia

The Tank Man - PBS

The Great Forgetting: 20 Years After Tiananmen Square -from the Chronicle of Higher Education

standoff at tiananmen - blog

Tiananmen at Twenty - The Nation

Silence on the Square - The Economist

Tiananmen - a look back - Kristie Lu Stout's summary for CNN

2 June 2009

Extracts from novelist Ma Jian's article in The Guardian newspaper:

The Chinese have made a faustian pact with the government, agreeing to forsake demands for political and intellectual freedom in exchange for more material comfort. They live prosperous lives in which any expression of pain is forbidden. When I talk to young Chinese about 1989, I am invariably accused of spreading false rumours and being a traitor to my nation; when I bring up the subject with my old friends, most of them laugh scornfully, as if those events are now irrelevant. But I know that behind this show of derision or apathy lies real fear. Everyone knows that attempts to break the Tiananmen taboo can still destroy a person's life and the lives of their families. The authorities, for their part, may have a monopoly of the nation's resources, but they can never fully control the nation's soul, and every day they live in terror that the intricate stack of lies they have constructed will collapse.

Meeting with survivor, Liu Hua - "It happened right here," he told me, "just by these white railings. A tank charged down Changan Avenue, and sprayed tear gas into the air. There was a big crowd of us. We were coughing and choking. We rushed on to the pavement, and I was squashed back against these railings. A girl dropped to her knees. I was grasping the railings with one hand to stop myself falling and with the other I offered her a handkerchief and told her to use it as a mask. Just as I was leaning over to hand it to her, another tank roared up and careered into us. Thirteen people were crushed to death but I only lost my arm. The tank commander knew exactly what he was doing."

Without these witnesses, we would become more and more distanced from the atrocity. In just 20 years, the Tiananmen generation that inspired people across the world to rise up against tyrannies has faded from view. School teachers, parents, newsreaders and armies of censors have collaborated in numbing a generation. It is left to brave survivors including Liu Hua, Chen Guang, and many others such as Ding Zilin, founder of the "Tiananmen Mothers" support group, to drag the dead back from oblivion and fight for truth.

Twenty years on

"In my eyes, my son did not die accidentally. He died in a massacre. Its inhuman atrocity, its violence will not change, not ever. By any international standards, a nation's army killing peacefully demonstrating students is a massacre." Ding Zilin

31 May 2009

The nights of June 3rd and June 4th mark the 20th anniversary of the deadly crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.

In the last 20 years China has modernised beyond recognition; money is being made; education and prosperity are objectives of all young Chinese; their is a new form of nationalism based around pride and superiority.

There are few audible cries for a widening democracy.

But the Beijing government will mark the sensitive date next Thursday with deafening silence.  Discussion of the brutal quelling of the student-led demonstrations, in which some three thousand Chinese were killed, is impossible.

The Tiananmen movement began in mid-April, when public grief over the death of former party leader and popular reformer Hu Yaobang gradually morphed into bold calls from students for political reform and steps to combat corruption.

Young students started to occupy Tiananmen Square, the symbolic centre of political power in China. A sense of euphoria saturated the plaza as they took part in rallies no one would have thought possible just weeks earlier.

There were banners everywhere. Calls for democracy and freedom filled the square, thousands went on hunger strike, and one charismatic activist, Wu'er Kaixi, brazenly challenged Premier Li Peng during a meeting broadcast live on state television.

Indeed, the whole world was watching, as news crews from around the globe gathered in Beijing to cover the historic visit by then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, only to stumble upon an event that would be far more significant.

In the corridors of power, the protests drove a wedge between hardline leaders led by Premier Li and moderates headed by Communist Party general secretary Zhao Ziyang.

The hardliners won, with patriarch Deng Xiaoping, China's most powerful man, tilting the balance in their favour. Zhao was removed from his post as party leader and spent 16 years under house arrest until his death in 2005.

The student movement was declared a "counterrevolutionary rebellion", and soldiers of the People's Liberation Army descended on the capital, crushing the protestors.

The number of people killed in the night of June 3-4 remains a mystery. Bizarrely China's official death toll is 241, including 36 students. Dissidents say thousands may have died.

Jan Wong of Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper, in her eye witness account estimates the number who died at 3,000.

The crackdown set off a wave of condemnation across the globe, and for several years China was treated as a near-pariah, as Western governments offered asylum to student leaders fleeing into exile.

But trade wins over protest and the the international community welcomed China back into the fold as Beijing's communist leaders transformed the country into the world's number three economy.

The wired world has made it far easier for students to access information the government doesn't want them to have. Today's students know what happened twenty years ago. But 20 years of government propaganda efforts have also had their effect. Many Beijing students are as critical of the pro-democracy demonstrators for creating the standoff as they are of the army and government for ending it so violently.

Wang Dan, a first-year history student who emerged as one of the leaders of the protest movement back in 1989, is now 40 years old and still trying to raise awareness of what happened that day. He recently issued a call for all Chinese to wear white, a traditional colour of mourning, this week on the 20th anniversary, a call that few ordinary Chinese will hear because of a state media ban on discussing either Tiananmen Square or dissidents such as Mr. Wang.

China’s Forgotten Revolution
By YU HUA - New York Times
Beijing - 31 May 2009

"THIS is the first time I am writing about Tiananmen Square. I am telling my story now because 20 years later — the anniversary is June 4 — two facts have become more apparent. The first is that the Tiananmen pro-democracy protests amounted to a one-time release of the Chinese people’s political passions, later replaced by a zeal for making money. The second is that after the summer of 1989 the incident vanished from the Chinese news media. As a result, few young Chinese know anything about it.

But most important of all, I realize now that the spring of 1989 was the only time I fully understood the words “the people.” Those words have little meaning in China today.

“The people,” or renmin, is one of the first phrases I learned to read and write. I knew our country was called “the People’s Republic of China.” Chairman Mao told us to “serve the people.” The most important paper was People’s Daily. “Since 1949, the people are the masters,” we learned to say.

In China today, it seems only officials have “the people” on their lips. New vocabulary has sprouted up — netizens, stock traders, fund holders, celebrity fans, migrant laborers and so on — slicing into smaller pieces the already faded concept of “the people.”

But in 1989, my 30th year, those words were not just an empty phrase.

Protests were spreading across the country, and in Beijing, where I was studying, the police suddenly disappeared from the streets. You could take the subway or a bus without paying, and everyone was smiling at one another. Hard-nosed street vendors handed out free refreshments to protesters. Retirees donated their meager savings to the hunger strikers in the square. As a show of support for the students, pickpockets called a moratorium.

If you live in a Chinese city, you’re always aware that you are surrounded by a lot of people. But it was only with the mass protests in Tiananmen Square that it really came home to me — China is the world’s most populous nation. Students who had poured into Beijing from other parts of the country stood in the square or on a street corner, giving speeches day after day until their throats grew hoarse and they lost their voices. Their audience — whether wizened old men or mothers with babies in their arms — nodded repeatedly and applauded warmly, however immature the students’ faces or naïve their views.

When I made a trip to my home in Zhejiang at the end of May, I had no idea when the protests would end. But I took the train back on the afternoon of June 3, and as I woke the next morning on our approach to Beijing, the radio was broadcasting the news that the army was now in Tiananmen Square.

The protests quickly subsided amid the gunfire. Students began to abandon Beijing in droves. When I left for the station again on June 7, there was hardly a pedestrian to be seen, only smoke rising from some charred vehicles and — as my classmates and I crossed an overpass — a tank stationed there, its barrel pointing menacingly at us.

By that time a train in Shanghai had been set on fire and service between there and Beijing had been suspended, so my plan was to take a roundabout route to Zhejiang. I have never in my life traveled on such a crowded train. The compartment was filled with college students fleeing the capital, and there was not an inch of space between one person and the next.

An hour out of Beijing, I needed to go to the toilet. But the toilet itself was full of people —“We can’t get the door open!” they shouted back. I had to hold on for the full three hours until we got to Shijiazhuang. There I disembarked and found a pay phone; I appealed for help from the editor of the local literary magazine. “Everything’s in such chaos now,” he said. “Just give up on the idea of going anywhere else. Stay here and write us a story.”

So I spent the next month holed up in Shijiazhuang, but I had a hard time writing. Every day the television repeatedly broadcast shots of students on the wanted list being taken into custody. Far from home, in my cheerless hotel room, I saw the despairing looks on the faces of the captured students and heard the crowing of the news announcers, and a chill went down my spine.

Then one day, the picture on my TV screen changed completely. The images of detained suspects were replaced by scenes of prosperity throughout the motherland. The announcer switched from passionately denouncing the crimes of the captured students to cheerfully lauding our nation’s progress.

Today, few young Chinese know anything about what happened at Tiananmen Square, and those who do only say vaguely, “A lot of people in the streets then, that’s what I heard.”

The people. Still, it was not the rallies in Tiananmen Square that made me truly understand these words, but an episode one night in late May. Martial law had been declared by that time; students and residents were guarding major intersections to keep out armed troops.

I was then living in the Lu Xun Literary Institute. Practically every lunchtime I would ride my rickety old bike to Tiananmen, lingering there through the evening and into the early hours.

In Beijing in late May, it’s hot at midday but cold at night. I was wearing only a short-sleeved shirt when I set off after lunch, and by late that evening I was chilled to the bone. As I cycled back from the square, an icy wind blew in my face. The streetlights were dark, and only the moon pointed the way ahead. Then as I approached the Hujialou overpass a wave of heat suddenly swept over me, and it only got hotter as I rode further. I heard a song drifting my way, and a bit later I saw lights gleaming in the distance.

Thousands of people were standing guard on the bridge and the approach roads beneath. They were singing lustily under the night sky: “With our flesh and blood we will build a new great wall! The Chinese people have reached the critical hour, compelled to give their final call! Arise, arise, arise! United we stand .... ”

Although unarmed, they stood steadfast, confident that their bodies alone could block soldiers and ward off tanks. Packed together, they gave off a blast of heat, as though every one of them was a blazing torch.

That night I realized that when the people stand as one, their voices carry farther than light and their heat is carried farther still. That, I discovered, is what “the people” means.

Yu Hua is the author of “Brothers.” This essay was translated by Allan Barr from the Chinese."