Tiananmen protesters still jailed in China, 22 years on

[cory777]

Source: Reuters

BEIJING, June 3 (Reuters) - Twenty-two years after China's bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests, at least five people remain in jail for joining in the tumult.

For China's ruling Communist Party, the 1989 demonstrations that clogged Tiananmen Square in Beijing and spread to other cities remains a taboo topic, all the more so this year when the government has launched a campaign to stamp out dissent after the uprisings in several Arab countries.

The anniversary of the suppression of the student-led movement falls on Saturday, and three men who joined in the protests, Jiang Yaqun, 75, Miao Deshun, 48, and Yang Pu, 47, remain in Beijing's Yanqing prison, where sick inmates are held.

Two others -- Chang Jingqiang, 43, and Li Yujun, 48, -- are being held in another Beijing jail.

Read more: http://www.trust.org/trustlaw/news/tiananmen-protesters-still-jailed-in-china-22-years-on

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[east texas lib]

1. Ain't Maoism great?

[Octafish]

6. Capitalist just love what Mao has wrought.

Know your BFEE: Olympic Games Show Who’s Best Friends Forever with Authoritarians and Dictators

[davidpdx]

2. It isn't too surprising given that the Chinese lock up thousands they deem political criminals

And support the brutal North Korean regime that does the same. I'd like nothing more then to see both governments collapse.

[me b zola]

3. Makes me wonder

Do they demonize their political prisoners the way we do here?

[east texas lib]

5. Do we execute protesters and bill their families for the bullets the way they do there?

All things considered, I think I'd rather be here.

[Lars39]

4. The entire graduating class was punished.

My husband works with one of the students. Instead of graduating, she was sent off to work in a shipyard. She only got to the US because she heard of a loophole...learn English and you can go to the US.

[pampango]

7. WP: Hong Kong remembers Tiananmen as Beijing cracks down

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia-pacific/hong-kong-remembers-tiananmen-as-beijing-cracks-down/2011/06/04/AG4UG0IH_story.html



In the one small patch of China that nurtures memories the Communist Party wants buried, tens of thousands gathered Saturday night in Hong Kong to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, galvanized in their orderly outrage by China’s current crackdown on dissent, the most sweeping in two decades. Unlike on the Chinese mainland, where public discussion of the Tiananmen killings is taboo, this former British colony has made remembrance of the military assault on student protesters in Beijing an emblem of both its own freedoms and its Chinese patriotism.

Hong Kong has mourned the crushing of the Tiananmen student movement each year since 1989 with a candlelight vigil, but Saturday’s commemoration in Victoria Park was one of the biggest in recent years, said Lee Cheuk-yan, chairman of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, one of the organizers.

The ministry responded angrily to a call Saturday by the U.S. State Department for “the fullest possible public accounting of those killed, detained or missing” and an end “to the ongoing harassment of those who participated in the demonstrations” in Tiananmen Square. This, said the Chinese spokesman, is “a rude interference in China’s internal affairs and its judicial sovereignty.”

In a quiet challenge to Beijing’s insistence that tolerance of dissenting views leads to chaos, Hong Kong protesters left virtually no litter and even scraped up candle wax that had dripped on the ground. Organizers estimated the crowd at 150,000 or more. Police put the figure at half that, but independent observers said it seemed larger.