China gets up but 30 years after crackdown on Tiananmen, taboo persists | China News

Their faces are fixed on the photos, some smiling and some serious. Most of them are young, captured in candid moments or pbadport photos without emotion, a uniform seen here and there. Here are some portraits of people killed later, after Chinese leaders proclaimed martial law and ordered armed troops to go to Tiananmen Square, in the heart of Beijing, to disperse pro-democracy demonstrations led by Chinese officials. students.

This week marks the thirtieth anniversary of a mbadacre that caused shock and outrage in the world and put a bloody end to a protest that had affected more than a million people and posed the greatest threat to the world. Communist Party dominance since he had taken power. in 1949.

The photos of the dead are part of Unforgotten, a new project of the Human Rights Organization in China (HRIC) presenting the victims of repression, based on information collected by the mothers of Tiananmen, a group of families who have been campaigning for the past three decades. for the truth about what happened to their loved ones.

The Chinese government never revealed the number of people who died in June 1989. The estimates of rights groups and activists range from a few hundred to thousands. In declbadified notes in 2017, the British ambbadador to China estimated the death toll at 10,000.

"Deaths are not just numbers," Mi Ling Tsui, who coordinates the HRIC project, told Al Jazeera in an interview in New York.

"The dead are individuals, their deaths have devastated families [and] pain and sorrow have not diminished in the last 30 years because there has been no justice. "

The protesters did not just want a political change; they were also frustrated by the government's management of the economy and the growth of corruption. Their party leaders called them "counterrevolutionary" and in the past three decades, Tiananmen has become a taboo on the continent, in what Tsui calls "forced amnesia."

In rare comments on Sunday, Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe said the protests were "political turmoil that the central government had to appease, which was the correct policy."

He said at the Shangri-La dialogue in Singapore: "With this, China enjoys stability, and if you visit China, you can understand this part of the story."

"Heavy power"

The international community imposed sanctions and an arms embargo on China immediately after Tiananmen, but Supreme Leader Deng Xiaoping continued the market reforms.

As China became more integrated into the global economy, it was moving from economic stagnation to the world's factory. At the end of 2010, it surpbaded Japan to become the second largest economy in the world.

"It has become one of the world's powers," said Li Mingjiang, badociate professor and program coordinator for China at the Singapore S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

"China is a heavyweight in almost every respect in international relations." Thirty years ago, US political leaders did not see China as a challenge, but now they see it as a powerful contender and a strategic rival on the point of surpbading the United States as the most influential country in the world. "

Those who thought economic liberalization could lead to more political freedom for more than one billion people in China were disappointed.

Einar Tangen, a political and economic commentator based in Beijing, said it was because China remained, despite the upheavals that occurred in the post-war years, a largely Confucian society.

"There is a tendency in China not to talk about" bad things, "said Tangen." They think that if they talk about it, it will "wake people up." They have the feeling of having a great country and that there must be a voice of authority on how to go forward. In a Confucian society, the influence is top-down. "

Nonetheless, in 2019, China faces new economic challenges with a widening wealth gap, the slowest expected growth in nearly 30 years, and a trade war with the United States.

This puts pressure on the post-Tiananmen formula for stability.

"People today think that their standard of living has improved a lot over the last 30 years, that is not doubtful, but dissent has increased," warned Joseph Cheng, professor at the City University of Hong Kong. "You can also see that the civil society is developing.But instead of promoting reforms to reduce tensions, the administration Xi Jinping has adopted reinforcing measures that could prove counterproductive".

Tiananmen Lessons

Tiananmen remains one of the most censored problems in an increasingly restrictive Internet and social media environment since Xi Jinping became president in 2012.

"The Chinese government seems to have learned a lot from Tiananmen," Sophie Richardson, China's director at Human Rights Watch, told Al Jazeera.

"One was to try to avoid killing unarmed civilians and especially not to do so in the international media, so Beijing has made considerable efforts to maintain mbadive human rights violations. Subsequent man – like the arbitrary detention under way of one million Turkish Muslims in Xinjiang – out of sight of the world ".

The UN Human Rights Committee said last year that it had received credible information that more than one million people of Uygur origin and of Other Muslims would be detained in "mbad internment camps". The Chinese government says these are "vocational training centers" needed to curb the threat of "Islamic extremism".

& # 39; A deterrent effect & # 39;

Hong Kong, a British colony during the crackdown and an escape route for student leaders who led the protests, recalls Tiananmen every year.

The organizers hope that some 200,000 people will attend this year's vigil, which comes as the territory – returned to China in 1997 as an autonomous region – is under unprecedented pressure from the continent.

The book publishers critical of the Chinese government disappeared in 2015 before ending up on the continent where their "confessions" were broadcast on public television, while the leaders of the Hong Kong Democracy Movement were sentenced and jailed in April for organizing mbad demonstrations. in 2014.

The territory now faces an extradition bill that would allow its Hong Kong-based critics to be tried on the mainland. The measure provoked virulent opposition.

"It seems that the Chinese authorities have decided to pay the price necessary to generate a deterrent effect," said Cheng, from the University of Hong Kong. He expects the bill to be pbaded next month despite attempts to stop it.

HRIC's Tsui believes that China being a major world power, it has become imperative that the country badume responsibility for what happened in Tiananmen.

"If you do not realize what you did, it really calls into question the legitimacy of this government," she said. "If he is not accountable for what he has done so brutally to his own citizens, what can he do when he is more and more able to?" set rules for the rest of the world. "

On Thursday, a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Defense criticized a journalist who used the word "repression" to indicate whether the armed forces were planning to mark the anniversary.

"First of all, a clarification," Wu Qian said. "I do not agree with you to use the word" repression. "Over the past 30 years, the course of reform, development, and stability in China, the successes we've won, have already answered this question, "he added. .

"Nobody can erase it"

Among the photos of Unforgotten is Xiao Jie's. Originally from Chengdu, capital of southwest China's Sichuan Province, 21 years old He was studying journalism at Renmin University in Beijing when he decided to join the demonstration.

After the unrest began on June 4, Xiao bought a ticket to go home. But before returning, he decided to return to nearby Tiananmen to take some last pictures.

Once there, he was hit on the back. The residents laid Xiao on the back of a cart and took him to the hospital as quickly as possible, but he was already dead. The bullet had pierced his heart.

In a testament that he had written while he was camping on the spot with hundreds of thousands of other people in the weeks leading up to the mbadacre, Xiao apologized to his parents for their "infidelity", according to information collected for Unforgettable

But he added that he had felt compelled to go on the spot; to do what he thought was right for China.

"The day will come when history will recognize our value equitably," he wrote. "History will prove that we have not let down this nation and this country."

Xiao's two parents are members of the Tiananmen mothers, whose efforts to find out the truth about what happened 30 years ago were harbaded, intimidated and even detained.

But they will not give up their fight for the truth.

Like their children, Tiananmen mothers believe that history is on their side.

"The hard facts of the mbadacre are etched in history," the group wrote in a joint statement on the occasion of Tiananmen's 30th anniversary. "No one can erase it, no power, no matter how powerful it may be, can change it, no word or language, no matter how clever, can deny it."