On the 26th Anniversary of Tiananmen

Massacre an Open Letter to Fellow Students

in Mainland China
By a group of overseas Chinese students, letter penned by Gu Yi, published: May 27,
2015
This letter, written in Chinese, has been circulating through email groups and on social
media since May 20. Yesterday the Chinese Communist Party-run Global Times gave
it a free publicity push double strength (here and here). The Editor

Object 1

We are a group of Chinese students born in the 1980s and 1990s and now studying
abroad. Twenty-six years ago on June 4th, young students, in lifes prime with
innocent love for their country just as we are today, died under the gun of the Peoples
Liberation Army in Beijings streets. This part of history has since been so carefully
edited and shielded away that many of us today know very little about it. Currently
outside China, we have been able to access photos, videos and news, and listen to
the accounts of survivors, unfettered. We feel the aftershocks of this tragedy across
the span of a quarter century. The more we know, the more we feel we have a grave

responsibility on our shoulders. We are writing you this open letter, fellow college
students inside China, to share the truth with you and to expose crimes that have been
perpetrated up to this day in connection with the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989.
Around 9:30 on the night of June 3rd, 1989, gun shots tore the tense streets of Beijing.
On that day, troops enforcing martial law opened fire on students and residents who
had protested peacefully for nearly two months. The demonstrations were initiated by
college students but people from all walks of life participated, numbering over 300,000
at the peak. The center area of the peaceful sit-in was in Tiananmen Square. It was a
time when the nation had been encouraged by the relatively freer and more open
political atmosphere throughout the 1980s, people had had trust in the Communist
Party and held expectations of a government that called itself the peoples
government. At a time when economic crisis threatened and corruption worsened,
students and residents wanted to have a dialogue with the nations leaders to make
the country a better place. Never for a moment did the peaceful demonstrators dream
that a planned massacre was awaiting them.
Per orders from Deng Xiaping, Li Peng and other Chinese leaders, the PLA forced its
way toward Tiananmen Square to clear out the student occupiers. They drove tanks
with machine guns mounted on top, and they shouted I will not attack if I am not
attacked while opening fire on civilians. On its route at Muxidi (), several
hundreds of unarmed civilians fell in streaming blood shouting Fascists!, Murderers!
Among them was Yan Wen (), a 23-year-old mathematics student at Peking
University, shot dead by bullets to his thigh. He was there with a camera to record
history. Another was the 17-year-old high school student Jiang Jielian () who
had been determined to go to the Square to be with older brothers and older sisters
there. 19-year-old Wang Nan () was yet another who fell, and the bullet-holed
helmet he wore is now on display in Hong Kong. The 21-year-old Wu Xiangdong (
)had with him a death notice that read, For democracy and freedom, for the fate of
the nation, every ordinary person has a responsibility. According to witness accounts,
the troops that had entered the Square beat clusters of students with batons even
though the two sides had already agreed on the student withdrawal; at Liubukou (
), tanks chased, and ran over, a column of students who had left the Square and
were walking back to their campuses. Fang Zheng, a senior at Beijing Sports
University, lost his legs to speeding tank tracks. There had been unconfirmed reports
that pockets of protesters were encircled and executed en mass. Around June 4th,
massacres also occurred in Chendu, Sichuan province, and elsewhere.
In mid and late June that year, the government issued three versions of a report on
quashing the riots. It portrays the civilians as a rioting mob and presents precise
numbers of dead and wounded among the troops and the loss of vehicles, but at the
same time, it is vague and contradictory on the number of civilian deaths. Questions
remain: why were the weaponized troops unable to defend themselves [if there was
indeed a riot]? If they were unable to defend themselves, how did they break through
the blockade of hundreds and thousands of civilians? What caused the people of the
nation to gather in the streets of the capital to prevent the troops from moving forward?

The report claims that the civilian deaths were few. If so, why repeatedly alter the
number of death and never publish an accurate count? If the report is to be believed,
the civilians attacked the soldiers first. If so, why was the first death among soldiers
not reported until more than three hours after the troops opened fire and blood bathed
Muxidi? During the protest, police once confided to Zhou Fengsuo (), one of the
student leaders in the Square, that Beijings public order has never been so good as
the last two months of disruption and riot. According to the memoir of Hou Dejian
()[the Taiwanese poplar singer] who stayed until the last moment in the
Square, students insisted on non-violent principles even at the last moment of forced
withdrawal and threw away any possessions that could be used to attack.
Meanwhile, the atrocities of the troops were recorded in photos of bleeding wounded
and stacked bodies, videos of shooting civilians, hospitals body identification notices
and body counts, shocking reportage by Wu Xiaoyong of Central Peoples
Radio Broadcast, not to mention the persistent questioning of Tiananmen Mothers
over the last twenty-six years. If all of these are lies as the government claims they
are, what is making these parents, now white-headed and frail, seek justice for so
many years while sacrificing a normal life?
Last year on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, this writer met with some of the survivors
of the massacre. The MC read aloud a partial list of the dead, and people proceeded
in a long line to pay respects with flowers. From hundreds to thousands, there have
been different numbers and we might never know exactly how many died that year in
Beijing. But people witnessed many shocking crimes, and perhaps many more
occurred at unknown corners without witnesses. Some witnesses have grown old,
others have passed away, and still others dare not speak even though they now live
safely overseas. The Chinese government has never dared to publicize the exact
number of deaths, and in dealing with a historical event of such magnitude, it first
portrayed it, solemnly, as an anti-revolutionary riot, and then over the time it
downplayed it as a political ripple, systematically erasing it from the collective
memory of a generation. June 4th has become a sensitive time each year, an
unmentionable date. Such an enforced taboo is a reverse proof that the atrocities
against civilians in 1989 are something the Communist Party would rather keep mum
about, although this is a Party with a murderous history of civil war, anti-rightist
movements, and the Cultural Revolution.
A classmate of this writer believes that the events from twenty-six years ago are too
far back, todays China is getting better and better, and he lives a very happy life. As I
walked on the Avenue of Eternal Peace two years ago, I saw no trace of blood or
bullets but skyscrapers and the bustling of people and cars. We live in prosperity, but
what kind of prosperity it is our imagination is constantly challenged by the
astonishing scale of high and low ranking officials, the marriage of power and money
that the students opposed twenty-six years ago has become the prevalent model of
the state economy. Xi Jinpings regime waves the banner of anti-corruption, but
ordinary people are thrown in jail as trouble makers for holding signs asking officials to
disclose their assets. The clans of Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng, whose hands were

stained with the blood of students, have become filthy rich. We are shocked to
discover that we are governed by officials whose family members live abroad. In other
words, we are ruled by a bunch of foreigners, and China is merely the goose that lays
golden eggs for them.
Twenty-six years ago, students wanted freedom of the press; and twenty-six years
later, all media are still controlled by the Partys Propaganda Department, and
journalists and lawyers are being put in jail for invented crimes. Gao Yus crime was
leaking state secrets, or the ruling partys latest ideological guidelines. Some of my
friends are of the opinion that those who draw the Partys ire do so because they are
famous and conspicuous. We, on the other hand, are mere ordinary people who dont
care about politics. But are ordinary people safe from harm? Think about Xia Junfeng
(), Xu Chunhe (), and the daughter of Tang Hui (). No one is safe in
a dictatorial system.
When North Korean soldiers crossed the border and killed innocent Chinese, and
when Burmese bombers bombed Chinese territory, this government merely
protested. Come to think about it, the PLAs only military victory in the last thirty years
was the bloodbath in Beijings streets on June 4th, 1989!
This is fragile and distorted prosperity. Stability maintenance expenses are as big as
the military budget; the Great Fire Wall is being stacked ever higher. They all indicate
that, at any moment, truth can come to broad daylight, and the prosperity can
collapse.
A voice inside China that says, the Tiananmen Massacre was unfortunate, but the
Chinese Communist Party has learned a lesson, and we dont want to obsess over it.
But the suppression has never stopped: the truth about June 4th is still covered up,
the dead still do not have closure, some survivors have served long prison terms,
Tiananmen Mothers are prevented by security police from paying visits to their
childrens burial sites. Last year, a group of scholars was detained for having a home
seminar to remember that day, and a female student at the Beijing International
Studies University was disappeared for proposing a technology to spread the truth
about the Tiananmen Movement.
Meanwhile, the man who made the decision to open fire on students and civilians has
been admired and extolled as the chief designer [of Chinas economic rise], and
neither officers nor soldiers who directed the killings have been tried in a court of law.
Do not expect this regime to plead guilty. Nor will they confess to errors as they did
after the Cultural Revolution ended, because they know all too well that, once they
acknowledge their crimes, they will likely be engulfed by the peoples wrath. They
claim they have the ownership of a universal truth, but they have built high walls on
the Intenet, and they hide in dark rooms to delete news as well as comments. Such is
their confidence in guiding theories and their confidence in the path chosen.
This is the killers regime. The gun fire on June 4th shot dead their legitimacy, and
what they have accomplished since June 4th is not important. We do not ask the CCP
to redress the events of that spring as killers are not the ones we turn to to clear the

names of the dead, but killers must be tried. We do not forget, nor forgive, until justice
is done and the on-going persecution is halted.
This writer and the signers of this letter know very well that there are consequences in
writing and signing this letter. But this is our responsibility, and we hope fellow students
inside China know this part of history, and reexamine the violence and atrocities since
the Communist Partys beginning in 1921. From Jingangshan (, one of CCPs
early bases in Jiangxi province) to Tiananmen Square, millions of innocent people
have died, and we must remember them, but also reflect on wave after wave of
sufferings. We have no right to dictate your minds or ask you to do something, but we
do have a dream: we dream that, in a future not too far from now, each one of us can
live in a country free of fear where history is restored and justice realized. This is the
China Dream we have we, a group of Chinese students studying abroad.
Written by:
Gu Yi (, University of Georgia, slmngy@uga.edu)
Co-signed by:
Feng Yun (, University of Central Lancashire)
Chen Chuangchuang (, Columbia University)
Zheng Dan (, Adelphi University)
Chen Bingxu (, Missouri State University)
Jin Meng (, Northwest Missouri State University)
Lu Yan (, University at Albany, SUNY)
Wang Xiaoyue (, University at Albany, SUNY)
Wang Jianying (, University of Missouri)
Meng Li (St. Johns University)
Wu Lebao (, Melbourne, Australia)
You can sign it too:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1mXmqrVdrmeahW9j8lrBMwupdfIaS3KE2bbKfW5r2sY/viewform
Related:
Chinese students in the west call for transparency over Tiananmen Square, Guardian,
May 25, 2015.

(Translated by China Change)

Chinese original 26
Posted by Thavam