An anguished cry for liberty and justice to be honored and remembered

The weekend came and went with almost nobody remembering the significance of June 3 and 4, 1989 – in short, the "massacre" 17 years ago, in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

The square looks splendid and serene today. A place of pilgrimage for rubbernecking tourists from all over the planet, and from other provinces of China, with Mao Zedong’s immense portrait dominating it (although Deng Xiaoping detested him) from its red perch at the entrance to the Forbidden City. Wide and charming Chang’an Boulevard, where thousands of students and workers had clashed with police and PLA soldiers, from near the entrance of Zhongnanhai – the ruling government officials’ compound – to the area near the Great Hall of the People is choked with the vehicular traffic of progress, and all spruced up in joyful anticipation of the coming Olympic Games. Hundreds died there, but there remains not a single bloodstain on the pavements.

In Tiananmen itself, where PLA troops once fired AK-47s into the crowd, and Armored Personnel Carriers trundled relentlessly forward to crush protesters and tents, while the demonstrators fought back with primitive Molotov cocktails, knives and rusty swords, only occasional Winter sandstorms ruffle the huge space. Perhaps close to a thousand perished there – while the military and police suffered 6 dead, and hundreds injured. To be fair the PLA troops had initially shouted "We will not attack the people unless they attack us first (renbufanwo, wobufanren) – but when they did attack, it was give no quarter. The first to enter had been elements from the 27th and 38th Group Armies. The troops had been given orders to clear the square before Sunday dawn. The soldiers complied. To defy a military order was to invite the supreme penalty, "execution" for oneself. It was a tragedy all around. The final frenzy was savage and remorseless.

Just before dawn at 5:23 a.m. that Sunday, June 4, 1989, an armored unit at the northern end of the Square crushed the Goddess of Democracy (a replica put up by the demonstrators of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor). But not before some in the armored group removed the statue’s torch as a souvenir.

Remember that world-famous photograph of a lone youth in a white shirt and trousers, carrying a jacket, bravely blocking and stopping a column of tanks on East Chang’an Boulevard, near the Peking Hotel? This was 19-year old Wang Weilin.

What happened was that the tank commander in the lead tank tried to convince him to go away. Indeed, Wang had clambered atop the tank’s front to converse briefly with the tank commander. Then he dropped down to resume his position blocking the column.

The lead tank gunned its engine. A group of onlookers surged forward and dragged Wang off to safety. By then, it was mostly over anyway. The confrontation with the tank column had occurred on Monday, June 4 – after the demonstrations had already been smashed.

Did government agents subsequently track down Wang Weilin, arrest him –and condemn him to "execution" as the rumor went? He’s disappeared completely, but history will forever have etched on its memory that unforgettable photograph.

The real purges took place in the weeks following the Tiananmen crackdown – with more than 4,000 students and workers seized where they lived or where they hid in other parts of the country. Some 1,730 were convicted and sent to prison. However who really knows what the actual toll was in wounded, maimed – and killed on the spot, or imprisoned and executed?

Who remembers, or cares?

In Hong Kong, the Cardinal recently invested with the Red Hat by Pope Benedict XVI, the highest official of the Roman Catholic Church in China, His Eminence Joseph Cardinal Zen commemorated and honored the 17th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square killings with a Mass in the Cathedral and an address before a prayer-meeting held next-door in an indoor basketball court. Zen praised and defended the students and workers who had made their courageous but hopeless stand in 1989.

"All they asked for was a clean government," he said. "Is that a sin?"

It took guts for the Cardinal to speak out so forthrightly – for Hong Kong is one of the People’s Republic of China’s SARS, a part of China ruled ultimately by Beijing.

Did the protesters sin? Of course they did: they sinned against the all-powerful State. A mortal sin.

* * *

This journalist was in Beijing two weeks before the 1989 incident, and already there were demonstrations and protest marches. The "democracy wall" where messages and announcements were posted was full of letters and manifestos asking for – in truth, demanding more liberty and freedom of speech.

I looked into the faces of scores of demonstrators, and found hope, even happiness in them, with the euphoric feeling rippling through the crowd that China was on the brink of reform and beyond that freedom, more than the Four Freedoms proclaimed decades earlier by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Deng Xiaoping was being regarded by many as the harbinger of change and a better life. They were ready to joyously bury Mao and his wife’s vicious Cultural Revolution under their own Revolution of Rising Expectations. But this was not to be. I lunched at the Peking Hotel where many of the news media people were camped out. I headed for the airport. The expectant, hopeful expression on those faces haunt me still.

Three forlorn, but admiring cheers, I say, for the brave demonstrators of Chang’an and Tiananmen – who had envisioned a New China, free and true!

It is fashionable nowadays to brown-nose and suck up to the rising economic and military Power of China – with prosperity bursting from every seam, to bring "blessings" to many of its 1.3 billion people with a recorded 9 percent annual growth.

Indeed, as is said, China may soon enough achieve Superpower status almost on a par with its suspicious rival but indispensable economic "partner," the United States of America.

China is not just the Flavor of the Year but the most courted and admired – its coveted markets sending American, European and Asian companies scrambling for a share of the Feast. Tiananmen’s killings? They’ve been swept under the rug – one of those Persian knock-offs so readily available in the discount stalls. Without Wal-Mart China, it’s said in humor or irritation, China’s prosperity might be crimped, but without China, Wal-Mart’s shelves might be empty. Everything is made in China these days, including the flag of the USA.

Yet, we stand bareheaded this week in remembrance of those kids, teenagers to adult workers alike, who cried out for freedom, as Andres Bonifacio and his Katipuneros did at Balintawak – or Pugad Lawin. A cry which touches the heart.

Someday, we pray, all the Chinese people will enjoy the liberty for which they yearned – and for which they sacrificed their lives, their dreams, and their curtailed tomorrows.

Tomorrow will surely come.

* * *

June 1989 was a memorable one for this writer, too. Four days after Tiananmen, I had arrived in Kuala Lumpur for the formidable Dr. Noordin Sophiee’s well-known Pacific Roundtable Forum, one of his famed discussions.

I had been scheduled to speak at a forum on the former states of Indo-China – Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Imagine my surprise when I was informed by the Strategic Studies Institute that instead I would be speaking at a big Forum on China, particularly on the Beijing Tiananmen Square "incident." Sus, I exclaimed. I had been prepared for another lecture, and all my notes, background material, and other China diaries had been left behind in Manila.

"Nonsense, Max," Noordin had dug me in the ribs. "You can always talk from the top of your head!"

Believe me, I was nervous. They had set up an ad hoc Forum in the main auditorium, into which hundreds of journalists, academics, China-watchers (who knew better, I was certain, than myself), and other interested listeners had already booked themselves – and paid for their tickets.

Came the crisis hour. I found, to my left, they had seated China’s Ambassador, a charming gentleman with the unforgettable name of H.E. Go Gang. Let’s go then, Gang, I quipped silently to myself, but failed to grasp the humor of the situation. To my right was the well-known expert from the University of California, Berkeley, my old friend of previous conferences and forums in different cities, Dr. Bob Scalapino. There was a speaker from Japan, too, and one from the local prestigious University.

Luckily, I had tucked into my bag at the very last minute a newly-published, thin volume of the poems of the great Zhou Enlai. And so, I read out a poem of the late Chinese Premier and used it as a take-off point for an interpretation of why the Chinese authorities had done what they did – and why those young people had had the courage to protest. I recalled my two and a half hour meeting with Premier Zhou, when I headed a Filipino delegation to China in 1964. Zhou had received us in the Great Hall of the People fronting Tiananmen on one side and Chang’an on the other – where the June "battled" had raged.

During the subsequent Open Forum, a professor in the audience stood up to ask me why the Chinese rulers had ordered the attack knowing that the world would condemn them for it. I replied that they were probably relying "on the collective amnesia of mankind."

What did this mean? The questioner pressed me.

I pointed by way of example that the Soviets had crushed the Hungarian rebellion by inviting Pal Maleter, its leader, for a peace talk under a flag of truce, but had instead seized and executed him. They had also sent Russian and Warsaw Pact tanks into Prague, Czechoslovakia, to smash the Second Spring or "Socialism with a Human Face" challenge of Alexander Dubcek. After an initial explosion of outrage and indignation, the rest of humanity had simmered down, I recalled, and it was soon "business as usual" with Moscow. The world, I commented, would eventually "forget" Tiananmen – and Beijing would once more be in the good graces of the rest of the world.

Bob Scalapino sprang to his feet in anger and indignation: "No, Max. "You’re dead wrong!" He declared, almost shouting. "The world will never forget, nor ever forgive that monstrosity!"

Sadly, I shook my head.

"Bob, Bob," I said, "I wish you were right. But the world will quickly forget. And you Americans, may I predict, will probably be among the first to deal once more with Beijing, even tout China as a friend and partner!"

Has this not come to pass? That Forum was in June 1989. It is now June, 2006.

How the world turns.

In our own land, amnesia also operates. Look at the Marcoses. Look at yesterday’s Heels, as well, who’re hailed as Heroes.