I know I am laying myself open to mockery now by referring to another (pseudo? please?) dictatorship, but I DO think, in the run up to June 4th, that everyone's been rather quiet on Tiananmen. I don't mean the media, actually, since there have been all sorts of articles saying what's been said before (what more is there to say, really?) but people round here, in general. It has not been mentioned in the Mother's Queue (ahem!). I don't think I've even really discussed it with R. Which is a bit odd, because I do sometimes think that the silence of the people on the ground, so to speak, is probably more alarming than any enforced silence of the press.
I haven't put this particularly articulately. But I've been chatting to former student who was there on June 4th 1989 and now chooses not to live in China. We were talking about the Tiananmen Mothers' Organization, set up by two mothers bereaved of their sons during the flare-ups at the end of the protest. The strength of the now elderly ladies to keep going is astounding. Living under virtual house arrest, one of the founders of the organisation, now in her seventies, was kicked out of Beijing for the entire Olympics and still has State Security Bureau officers sitting on her doorstep whenever there is a ceremony or memorial they prefer her not to attend. You'd think the image of a frail old lady in mourning for her murdered son being bullied by the Big Bad Boys in Green would be a PR disaster. But, in China, evidently not.
JXM tells me that Ding Zi-Lin, the founder of The Tinanmen Mothers' Organisation, once said she had been energised by her pain at losing her son and that gave her the will to continue fighting. "There are plenty of people who feel strongly about this, " he always says, "but not everyone has an easy platform to say it". We talked of one class we had together, along with 5 or 6 younger Chinese students, when the matter had come up. The younger ones were wide-eyed with surprise to hear what had happened. I was wide-eyed to hear they didn't already know. JXM rolled his eyes and went off for coffee, not seeming to mind too much. He has, he reckons, learnt when it is not worth being bothered.
Back to the Tiananmen Mothers' Organisation. I wanted to see if there was any direct translation of their mandate and came across 2 interesting things in the process. Firstly, a petition on Amnesty's website. I don't usually do these (you could end up a full time devotee to Petitioning of Many Causes) but this one specifically urges that the rights of the Tiananmen Mothers be respected and thus grabbed me, somewhat.
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/ASA17/023/2008/en
"Using this petition, signatories can express their concern over the ongoing failure of the Chinese authorities to address the serious and widespread human rights violations committed in the military crackdown on the 1989 pro-democracy movement. Signatories urge the Chinese administration to stop all harassment of the Tiananmen Mothers and other such activists and end all policies of censorship to allow full public debate about the events on 3-4 June 1989."
And secondly, a rather magnificient letter written by a Professor at the Beijing Film Academy.
She may well be talking about one specific event and its consequences in one context, but what she says has a poignancy on many levels. The afterglow of the post-reading ponder took me through unpacking the dishwasher, cleaning the floor and making supper. Brilliant.
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/05/cui-weiping-why-do-we-need-to-talk-about-june-4th/
Afterthought:
1. This has reminded me that I've been meaning to learn more about Las Madres De Plaza De Mayo in Argentina. And still haven't. Must try harder etc.
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