Chen Ziming, jailed leader of China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising, dies at 62
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Version 0 of 1. Chen Ziming, an activist branded as one of the “black hands” behind the 1989 pro-democracy uprising in Tiananmen Square, which was crushed by the Chinese government, died Oct. 21 at his home in Beijing. He was 62. The cause was pancreatic cancer, according to Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post. Mr. Chen, who was convicted of sedition in 1991, spent about 13 years behind bars or confined to his apartment. In response to economic pressure from the United States, Chinese authorities released him in 1994 but imprisoned him again in 1995 after he staged a 24-hour hunger strike commemorating Tiananmen. Suffering from testicular cancer and other illnesses, he was allowed to go home, under house arrest, in 1996. Even after his sentence ended, the scholarly but impassioned Mr. Chen was under constant surveillance, he told interviewers. He published political commentaries under 30 pseudonyms. With permission from various government agencies, he started a Web site called “Reform and Construction,” but it was shut down, he said, for no apparent reason. “They just pull the plug on you because they can,” he told Radio Free Asia in 2006. In the years before the Tiananmen Square massacre, Mr. Chen, a biochemist by training, was one of China’s most prominent social scientists. With his longtime colleague Wang Juntao, he founded an influential think tank, ran a dissident magazine called Beijing Spring, published the reform-minded Economics Weekly and started China’s first independent political surveys. “No project worried the authorities more,” George Black and Robin Munro wrote in their 1993 history, “Black Hands of Beijing.” Funding came partly from U.S. organizations such as the Ford Foundation and the National Science Foundation. A finding that 72 percent of Chinese believed democracy to be the best form of government “provided explosive evidence of the country’s frustrated mood,” the authors wrote. Although Mr. Chen was a political moderate, authorities saw him as a threat, said Yang Jianli, a Chinese dissident who spent five years in prison on spying charges. “We have a lot of intellectuals and some good organizers but rarely are they combined,” Yang told the Los Angeles Times this week from a human rights conference in Oslo, Norway. “Chen was among the very few who could think, devise strategy and organize.” Yang, who heads a Washington group called Initiatives for China, said Mr. Chen exerted “a tremendous influence” among intellectuals. However, he had less sway over the legions of protesters camped out in Tiananmen Square. Asked to intervene by government officials and pressed by student leaders for counsel on tactics, Mr. Chen and his colleagues at first tried to mediate. When the government imposed martial law, they urged the protesters to withdraw. Hundreds of them — thousands, according to some estimates — were killed on the square and the streets leading to it when the tanks rolled in June 4, 1989. At Mr. Chen’s trial for “counter-revolutionary incitement,” he denied charges that he and Wang Juntao were the demonstration’s masterminds — or, in the parlance of prosecutors, its “black hands.” While China has undergone dramatic economic and social changes since Tiananmen, the government still suppresses any commemoration of the event. Its 25th anniversary went unmentioned in state-run media this year. Born in 1952, Mr. Chen grew up in privilege and attended elite schools in Beijing before he was assigned to work in Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution. For six years, he inoculated peasants against infectious diseases, worked in the fields and, at night, read Marx and Lenin in his yurt. A rising star in the Communist Party, he was admitted to the University of Science and Technology but was arrested in 1975 for “counter-revolutionary offenses.” He had written his friend a letter criticizing national leaders. The following year, Mr. Chen had to report to a labor camp, but before he did so, he took part in a large-scale Tiananmen demonstration against the “Gang of Four” running the country. When the Gang of Four fell in October 1976, Mr. Chen resumed his studies. He and his wife, Wang Zhihong, organized a chain of correspondence colleges before he co-founded the Beijing Social and Economic Sciences Research Institute. She is his only known survivor. As the explosive 1989 Tiananmen protest started, Mr. Chen and Wang Juntao agonized over how deeply to involve themselves. “The democracy movement had turned into a tidal wave that threatened to wash away all their . . . patient years of work to create the independent intelligentsia that China lacked,” Black and Munro wrote in “The Black Hands of Beijing.” “On the other hand, if they chose to stand aloof, could they ever look in the mirror again?” On the 25th anniversary of Tiananmen in June, Mr. Chen called for the government to reverse the verdicts against him and others as “an important, symbolic step.” Mr. Chen was allowed to come to the United States earlier this year for medical treatment in Boston. Asked once why he had not, like Wang Juntao and other dissidents, gone into exile, he was incredulous. “I am Chinese,” Chen said. “Why should I live in another country?” |