Chinese dissidents and human rights advocates gathered online Wednesday evening for a candlelight vigil to remember those killed during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, urging the world not to look away or tolerate communist China’s crimes.
The Victims of Communism Memorial Fund, a human rights organization dedicated to carrying the memory of those afflicted by left-wing totalitarianism, organized and broadcast the event. Given ongoing Chinese coronavirus social distancing measures, speakers “attended” the event from separate locations. The event occurred in the shadow of vandals, acting amid a nationwide wave of radical leftist violence, defacing Washington, DC’s, Victims of Communism memorial – a statue of the “Goddess of Liberty,” which Tiananmen protesters hoisted in the square before the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) rolled its tanks in.
In addition to discussing the lasting legacy of the pro-democracy advocates killed on June 4, 1989, in Beijing, the speakers noted that the communist policies that led to the complete erasure of the Tiananmen Square massacre from the Chinese internet, Chinese history books, and the Chinese public memory in the country are behind the obfuscation that resulted in extended delays in alerting the world to the potential threat of the newly discovered coronavirus in Wuhan, China.
“Unfortunately, the evil regime of the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] is still raging on the land of China, and it is still using brutal and cruel methods to suppress and persecute the Chinese people,” Chen Guangcheng, a Chinese human rights attorney and former political prisoner, said at the vigil. “Not only we must not forget the CCP’s June 4th massacre, but we must also record each and every crime that the CCP has done to persecute the Chinese people over the past 30 years, and be prepared to hold them accountable.”
“The appeasement policy must come to an end,” he added.
Chen made the case that the communist regime’s “existence poses great threats to the freedom, security, and health of the people around the world. … in short, if the CCP evil regime is not destroyed, the world would not have real security and freedom.”
“When a regime runs roughshod on its own people, it will sooner or later bring disasters beyond its border in one way or another,” Jianli Yang, the founder and president of Citizen Power Initiatives for China, said at the event, making the argument that an appropriated outraged global responses to the Tiananmen massacre would have prevented an emboldened China from deceiving the world on the coronavirus pandemic.
“It is a well-established fact that if, when the coronavirus first broke out in Wuhan, there had been any space in society and government to sound the alarm – if the government had not suppressed the truth and misled the world – hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved,” Yang said. “By the same token, if the Chinese communist regime, instead of slaughtering the Tiananmen protesters, had accepted their request of political reform, the world would not have been plunged into the catastrophe we are experiencing today.”
Leaked Chinese documents show that the first diagnosed cases of novel coronavirus in Wuhan were identified in November 2019. China did not make public the discovery of a new virus until January, and multiple reports have revealed evidence that Beijing pressured the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) to hide evidence that the virus was transmissible from person to person.
Pastor Bob Fu, the head of the Christian human rights organization China Aid, asserted that Beijing is using “the same pattern of lying, covering up, and afflicting so many millions of lives” in its response to the pandemic as it did with the crackdown in 1989.
The Chinese Communist Party has been claiming [throughout] the past 31 years that nobody had been killed in Tiananmen Square, so they are good at telling lies and covering up,” Fu said. “A year ago, the Chinese communist regime unleashed this coronavirus, the Communist Party virus, to not only afflict millions of Chinese, but still afflicting millions, hundreds of millions of citizens around the globe.”
“Because of that, millions of American children and throughout the world are not able to go to school. Millions of moms cannot send their children, cannot bring their children to churches, the synagogues, to mosques. This is a crime against humanity,” he affirmed.
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation concluded the event by offering in absentia its Human Rights Award to Chen Qiushi, a citizen journalist who disappeared, likely detained by Chinese political police, while attempting to report on the reality in Wuhan at the height of the outbreak there. Participants then all lit candles in their homes in honor of those who died fighting for basic human dignity 31 years ago.
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