By Jay Scott Kanes

HONG KONG – The lesson most Chinese people learned from the Beijing Massacre on June 4, 1989, one they never forgot, involves the ruthlessness of their own leaders and the brutality of People’s Liberation Army soldiers.

“I’ll tell you the difference between now and 1989,” said Bao Pu, a 43-year-old dissident, human-rights activist and publisher now living in Hong Kong. Twenty-one years ago, he survived the military crackdown on pro-democracy, anti-corruption protesters in China’s capital city and nation-wide.

“In 1989, no one believed the soldiers would open fire,” he said. “So, today, why does no one protest in Tiananmen Square? It’s because everyone believes that if you go there to protest, you’ll be shot. We’ve been convinced.”

The sight of soldiers gunning down unarmed student-protesters isn’t easily forgotten. Bao Pu could have fallen among the thousands of massacre victims. But having survived, he remembers clearly: “With my own eyes, I saw people shot. In the beginning, we smelled the tear gas and heard ‘bang, bang’. It looked almost like fireworks.

“At first, when people heard the noises, we thought the soldiers were shooting rubber bullets – until we saw people with holes in their stomachs.

“It really was a very strange phenomenon. Soldiers had been pointing guns at us, and no one believed they’d shoot. That’s why so many people were on the streets. If you knew that by going to a certain place you’d be shot, you wouldn’t go there, would you?”

Then aged 22, Bao Pu studied as a senior at the Beijing University of Science and Technology. Optimistically, even joyfully, he’d joined other student-protesters on Beijing’s streets. Together, they called for democratic reforms, social justice, economic fairness and an end to rampant corruption.

For weeks, “everybody took to the streets to protest,” he recalls. “All of a sudden, many Chinese people had felt like they had an opportunity to express themselves freely. As a student then, I realized for the first time that was how things were supposed to be, that if we had something to say we should be able to say it without fear.”

But Chinese leaders unleashed the military. Thousands of people died in a bloody crackdown witnessed by the foreign media and condemned worldwide. Some of the most violent clashes happened near Bao Pu’s home.

Later, Bao Pu studied international relations and public administration, earning a Masters degree from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. In 1992, he became active with Human Rights Watch in New York. As a career, he worked with a management consulting firm. In 2000, he came to Hong Kong where he’s an editor and publisher with New Century Press.

Since the 1989 Beijing Massacre, has China made any progress at all on issues like freedom of expression and human rights? “I’ll answer by using the year 1992 as a divider,” Bao Pu said. “After Chairman Mao Tse-tung, there was a period from 1976 until 1992 when people debated whether China should go into a market economy. That debate ended in 1992.

“People also contemplated the idea of political reforms. But what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and then to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe solidified the Communist Party in believing that any political reform would bring down the Party itself.

“So by late 1992, all debate was over. The outcome is that China will continue with economic reforms. It’s committed to a market economy. But politically, there’s a renewed insistence on authoritarian autocracy. Since 1992, that’s what the leadership has shot for, so on freedoms, the past two decades have been a setback. Certainly, there’s less freedom and the situation is worse than in the mid-to-late 1980s.”

Since the Beijing Massacre, nearly no one living in China has protested in Tiananmen Square. “Just two possibilities exist,” said Bao Pu. “One is that everyone believes in the government and has no more grievances. The other is that they’re convinced they’d be shot.”

No one active in the Massacre has faced justice. Officially, the student protesters remain classified as hooligans.

“Despite all the changes that the Communist Party has allowed so as to develop a market economy, the big issue -- that the Party is above the law -- remains unresolved,” Bao Pu said.

“Yes, China has a lot of new buildings, but those don’t mean the distribution of wealth is just.”

(Source: Tiananmen Mothers Campaign)




(Source: Tiananmen Mothers Campaign)




(Source: Tiananmen Mothers Campaign)




(Source: Tiananmen Mothers Campaign)