Tiananmen & Human Rights

Rep. Christopher Smith, Washington Times June 4, 2009

In May, veterans of the 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement spoke out about the 20th anniversary of the tragic slaughter of Tiananmen Square and U.S. policy toward China.

Twenty years ago earlier, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators gathered in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere in China to call for peaceful democratic reforms. In the face of these massive demonstrations, the Chinese Communist Party hesitated. Apparently some in the party's leadership considered the tragedy communist rule had been for countless millions of lives destroyed by famines, cultural revolutions and totalitarian controls under its regime.

But we know what happened. On June 4, 1989, Jiang Zemin pushed the reformers aside, cleared the square with tanks, and shot to death thousands of peaceful demonstrators.

In 1996, during a visit to the United States at the invitation of President Clinton, Gen. Chi Haotian, China's defense minister and the general in command at Tiananmen Square, boldly proclaimed that "Not a single person lost his life in Tiananmen Square." According to Gen. Chi, the Chinese army did nothing more violent than "pushing of people."

Gen. Chi was honored not only with a meeting with Mr. Clinton in the White House, but was accorded full military honors, including a 19-gun salute and visits to military bases. Rather than getting the red carpet, Gen. Chi should have been held to account for his crimes against humanity.

To counter this affront, I quickly put together a hearing of eyewitnesses to the Tiananmen Square massacre, including some journalists. I also invited Gen. Chi or anyone from his government to testify before our committee. They were no-shows.

One witness, Xuecan Wu, former editor of the People's Daily, was singled out for punishment and received four years in prison for trying to tell the truth to his readers. Mr. Wu called Gen. Chi's claims "shameless" and told my subcommittee he personally saw "at least 30 carts carrying dead and wounded people."

Eyewitness Jian-Li Yang, vice president of the Alliance for a Democratic China, testified: "I saw trucks of soldiers who got out and started firing automatic weapons at the people. Each time they fired the weapons, three or four people were hit, and each time the crowd went down to the ground. We were there for about an hour and a half. I saw 13 people killed."

Time magazine's David Aikman, another eyewitness, told Congress: "Children were killed holding hands with their mothers. A 9-year-old boy was shot seven or eight times in the back, and his parents placed the corpse on a truck and drove through the streets of northwest Beijing on Sunday morning. 'This is what the government has done,' the distraught mother kept telling crowds of passersby through a makeshift speaker system."

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