25 Years Later The Bloody Legacy of the Tiananmen Square Massacre Continues to Inform China’s Policy of Political Repression

June 11, 2014 by admin

On Tuesday the Wall Street Journal published the story of Zhang Kun, an idealistic 26-year-old whose chance discovery of some Tiananmen Square Massacre footage led him to question his assumptions about his government and eventually brought him into the Chinese reform movement.

Mr. Zhang became involved with the New Citizens Movement, an initiative aimed at facilitating China’s transition to a civil society. The organization was launched in 2010 by Xu Zhiyong, a civil liberties lawyer, and supported by venture capitalist Wang Gonguan. Shortly after the movement’s leaders were detained Mr. Zhang was taken away by Chinese security forces and held in a Detainment center where he was interrogated and subjected to torture. The brutal treatment suffered by Mr. Zhang is tragic in its banality within the Chinese system.

Since the Tiananmen Square crackdown, the Chinese government has tightened its grip on its populace, fearing that a small spark of dissent could quickly grow into widespread calls for change and another outbreak of mass protests. Their response to the New Citizens Movement’s calls for reform has been characteristically brutal. Mr. Zhang was only one of a number of other courageous individuals associated with the New Citizens Movement to be arrested as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to stamp out the nascent initiative.