[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 76 (Monday, June 3, 2013)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E768-E769]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     WITNESSES TO TIANANMEN SQUARE

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. FRANK R. WOLF

                              of virginia

                    in the house of representatives

                          Monday, June 3, 2013

  Mr. WOLF. Mr. Speaker, following is the article I referred to earlier 
today in my one-minutes speech.

                [From the Washington Post, June 2, 2013]

Witnesses to Tiananmen Square Struggle With What to Tell Their Children

                            (By William Wan)

       Beijing.--From a young age, Qi Zhiyong's daughter asked him 
     how he lost his leg.
       To everyone else in the world, Qi always responded to the 
     question with an unflinching, often angry, answer: He lost 
     his left leg when soldiers fired on him and other unarmed 
     civilians during protests at Tiananmen Square in one of 
     modern history's most brutal crackdowns.
       But when his daughter asked, Qi choked back the words.
       ``I lost it in an accident,'' he mumbled for years.
       The lie, however, burned at him, he said.
       In the 2\1/2\ decades since the protests' violent end, 
     China's government has largely scrubbed Tiananmen from 
     history. Bullet holes on the streets of Beijing have long 
     been patched over. The government has barred any independent 
     inquiry and censored all mention online. Instead, Tiananmen 
     Square has been reduced to a single euphemistic sentence in 
     most school textbooks, making vague reference to ``political 
     turbulence in 1989.''
       But for those who were part of the student-led protests 
     against government repression and corruption, those dark 
     morning hours of June 4, 1989, remain etched in memory and, 
     in cases like Qi's, on their bodies. That generation must now 
     decide what to tell their children about that day, if 
     anything at all.
       For many, the decision is colored by how their own views 
     have changed over time. In interviews with more than a dozen 
     survivors, a few wondered whether the democratic cause they 
     fought for was misguided by youthful passion. Others have won 
     asylum abroad, and when they talk of Tiananmen to their 
     children, it is as history--just one part of their life's 
     larger story.
       But the dilemma is often more complicated for those who 
     remain in China, where public mention of Tiananmen can result 
     in government retribution. To this day, officials maintain 
     that the decision was necessary for stability, and the 
     anniversary is marked with thousands of police officers 
     patrolling the square and chasing off journalists.
       Those who have found successful careers in business, law 
     and academia often talk of it only in private, fearful of 
     consequences for themselves and their offspring.
       Even some of those who have soldiered on as activists 
     deliberately say little of Tiananmen to their children, who 
     grow up not fully understanding why police barge into their 
     homes each year as the anniversary approaches to interrogate 
     and spirit away their parents for weeks without explanation. 
     Some children experience restrictions and warnings at school.
       For most parents, it comes down to a choice between 
     protecting their children from the past or passing on 
     dangerous and bitter truths about the authoritarian society 
     they continue to live under.
       It is something Qi and his wife have wrestled with 
     throughout their 14-year-old daughter's life. The two have 
     fought so often and so heatedly on the subject that neither 
     dares mention 1989 at home anymore.


                         `The veil was lifted'

       A 33-year-old construction worker at the time of the 
     Tiananmen protests, Qi took a detour that night toward the 
     central Beijing square with co-workers out of curiosity, not 
     activism. Qi, who later converted to Christianity, now likens 
     the moment that troops fired without warning at the crowd 
     around him to a baptism of sorts.
       ``The veil was lifted from my eyes, and I saw the party for 
     what it really was,'' he said.
       In the hospital, he said, as doctors tried to salvage his 
     bullet-torn left thigh, he took a purple antiseptic liquid 
     and, to their chagrin, angrily scrawled on his leg: ``This 
     bullet belongs to the Communist Party's army.
       After the amputation, he was forced to give up his 
     construction job and has not found work since. By the time Qi 
     Ji was born in 1998, her father had become a full-time 
     activist, protesting the government's maltreatment of the 
     disabled and democracy advocates, along with other human 
     rights abuses.
       Qi's wife warned him early on: Say what you want about the 
     government to everyone else, but Ji is too young. Why create 
     problems for her, his wife argued. Why poison her against the 
     society she must live in?

[[Page E769]]

       ``But I don't think it's a bad thing for her to understand 
     this government,'' Qi said on a recent afternoon while 
     waiting for his daughter's return from school. ``I want her 
     to be prepared to handle life and to face these problems. Why 
     should we cover up the truth and let her live in illusion?''
       For Qi, the Tiananmen crackdown--or June 4, as it is 
     commonly referred to in China--has become the defining moment 
     of his life.
       While most people, including some former Tiananmen 
     protesters, have learned to avoid the topic, Qi carries 
     business cards listing his job title as ``Disabled Victim of 
     June 4.'' His home telephone number, cellphone number and e-
     mail address end with deliberately chosen digits: ``89 64.'' 
     And on the back of his cards, he has emblazoned this slogan: 
     ``Facts written in ink cannot conceal the truth written in 
     blood.''
       His family lives in a cramped Beijing apartment, dependent 
     on his wife's $320-a-month job as a drugstore sales 
     assistant, while Qi cares for their daughter and supports 
     human rights causes--work that has resulted in long stretches 
     of detention and frequent government harassment.
       Qi's wife, Lu Shiying, wishes he would let go of what 
     happened 24 years ago. She recently declined to meet with 
     foreign journalists and warned Qi against it.
       ``How come others are able to move forward?'' she often 
     asks him, he said. ``You were not the only victim on June 
     Fourth.''


                         `Nothing to be gained'

       Kong Weizhen also was shot and lost the use of his left leg 
     that night. But after seeing the danger and futility of his 
     anti-government activism, he abandoned the opposition work 
     that had brought him to the streets. Instead, he tried to 
     make a new life for himself within the existing system.
       He became a salesman and worked his way up to owning a 
     computer store. He even tried in vain to join the Communist 
     Party at one point--an attempt, he says, to increase his pay 
     for the sake of his 12-year-old daughter.
       ``My family is now my first priority,'' he explained in a 
     phone interview. ``There's nothing to be gained from telling 
     her about June 4. If I tell her, she may form some dangerous 
     resentment against the party. . . . I just want her to have a 
     safe and happy life.''
       The only reason he would tell her, he said, is if another 
     anti-government protest erupted. ``If that happened, I would 
     use my own example to teach her what such movements can 
     accomplish and what they cannot. And I would ask her to get 
     as far away as she can.''
       But even those who have devoted their lives to fighting for 
     the democratic ideals of 1989 disagree on how much to tell 
     their children. Many of them now form the core of China's 
     dissident community.
       ``I don't want my children to know,'' said Zhang Lin, a 
     rights activist in Anhui province who has spent many years in 
     jail on state subversion charges.
       In February, authorities pulled his 10-year-old daughter, 
     Anni, from school as an apparent punishment to her father. 
     The incident spurred dozens of other activists to stage a 
     hunger strike in front of the school. Weeks later, Anni was 
     allowed to resume class, but only in another town far away.
       His daughter now loses her temper easily, Zhang said, and 
     has become obsessed with cartoons in which the good guys beat 
     up the bad. ``I don't want my children to follow the same 
     path as me,'' he said.
       In a phone interview, his daughter said, ``I don't know why 
     the police keep coming,'' though she knows it's related 
     somehow to her father.
       When asked about June 4, she responded: ``What is June 4? I 
     haven't heard anything about it.''


                          `I have no regrets'

       Qi said he doesn't begrudge other parents their personal 
     decisions, but he worries that staying silent contributes to 
     the gradual purge of China's collective memory.
       To this day, he said, his amputated stump hurts whenever he 
     hears the crack of fireworks. He avoids passing Tiananmen 
     Square, he said, because he tastes blood whenever he gets too 
     close.
       In the end, suppressing all mention of June 4 in front of 
     his daughter proved impossible. And after his daughter turned 
     10, a teacher made a passing reference to the date while 
     talking about the physical space of Tiananmen Square.
       That night, with Qi's wife still at work, his daughter 
     mentioned it to him, and the memories poured out. The 
     clacking advance of tanks. The shocking sound of gunfire. The 
     blood he saw all around him and the sudden pain and darkness.
       In the years that followed, he secretly told her more and 
     more. They watched banned videos about that day on overseas 
     Web sites. They talked about the party and its instinct for 
     self-preservation.
       He watched both proud and pained as June 4 began to color 
     her worldview as it had his.
       She became both more rebellious and more mature, he said. 
     Like her parents, she now refers to the police watching their 
     home as ``dogs,'' but she accepts without questioning when 
     school leaders exclude her from trips abroad and from student 
     parades at Tiananmen celebrating China's Communist rule.
       Lately, she's talked of becoming a kindergarten teacher so 
     she can teach kids how to think for themselves about what's 
     right and wrong.
       ``All parents want their children to live a happy life, but 
     I have no regrets about telling her,'' Qi said. ``Only after 
     she first tastes the bitter can she know what the sweet is.''
       Qi's wife now knows that her daughter knows. But the family 
     recently reached a kind of detente--similar to the one in 
     Chinese society at large. When together at home these days, 
     the family simply avoids all mention of Tiananmen Square, 
     June 4 and what happened that day 24 years ago.

                          ____________________