ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, June 4, 1996 TAG: 9606040047
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
AMONG A nation of hundreds of millions, seven dissidents sent a petition to China's leaders last week asking for democracy, release of political prisoners and an investigation of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
That petition and one other, circulated by a People's University professor who lost her 17-year-old son in that bloody crackdown, are the only official protests within China (as far as Western reporters know) of an abominable event that seared itself on the world's memory. Or so it seemed.
Just seven years ago, a remarkable six-week flowering of open debate and calls for democratic reform drew increasing numbers of Chinese, many of them university students, to Tiananmen Square. The world watched in amazement. Seven years ago today, the "People's" Army turned its guns and tanks on the people and opened fire, dousing the flickering movement in the blood of its participants. The world watched in horror.
Hundreds, maybe thousands, died that day, by unofficial reports. The Communist Party has never made an accounting, in fact insists that no one died on the square. The Big Lie.
Only seven years later, most of the world seems to have forgotten. Official relations are as they had been. The Chinese economy is booming, its people are making money. Besides a grief-stricken mother and seven dreamers pressing for democracy in a "people's paradise," who cares what happened on Tiananmen Square that day?
No foreign power, apparently. But among the Chinese, there are those who remember, who have been harassed, jailed, driven into exile - silenced for now. Last year, eight major pro-democracy petitions were circulated, and their signers quickly taken out of circulation. The swiftness of the reaction reflects the fear, by an aging tyranny undergoing a succession struggle, of the power of democratic ideals.
More than a million people converged on Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1987. After 40 years of repressive, totalitarian rule, the crowds built day after day as people began to speak not any party line, but their own ideas. People had not forgotten how to think after 40 years of imposed thought. Nor will they in another 40, or another 400. The tyrants have only delayed, not defeated, the spread of democracy.
LENGTH: Short : 46 linesby CNB