Bloody June Fourth (六四) in Beijing, 23 Years Later

Blood was shed.  People were killed.

Twenty-three years has passed since 4 June 1989, and the wounds have not healed.

The wounds would not heal unless the Chinese authority admits its crime against its own unarmed, peacefully demonstrating people, mostly young students as me and sympathetic Beijing citizens.

Chinese government wants the world to forget.  Yet we remember.  If the young people didn't know, we ought to keep telling the tragic story.

According to Huffington Post:

The father of a man killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown has hanged himself after two decades of failed attempts to seek government redress.

A support group for parents of the crackdown's victims said Monday that 73-year-old Ya Weilin's body was found in an unused underground parking garage below his residential complex.

Zhang Xianling, a member of the group, says Ya killed himself out of despair and to protest the government's long-standing refusal to address the grievances of the victims' relatives.

His death comes about a week ahead of the anniversary of the night of June 3-4, 1989, when the military crushed the weeks long, student-led protests, possibly killing thousands of students, activists and ordinary citizens.

The victim families were not the only one who had made moves.  Even the those who were, in various degrees, responsible for the tragedy had attempted.

Then Mayor of Beijing, Chen Xitong, had his memoir published, trying to distance himself for the decision of crackdown.  So did the then prime minister Li Peng, who was largely blamed on the decision, along with then supreme leader Deng Xiaoping.

The late Deng's family had made such an attempt to, claiming that he held no official title.

Maybe there was some truth in it that no a single person was one hundred per cent responsible for it; but collectively, as the part of the ruling apparatus, they cannot easily spin such disclaimer.

All they can do is trying to whitewash themselves but the stains on their hands would be just as hard to wash as those on the hands of Lady Macbeth.

There were more clamoring for 平反 (rehabilitate) of the event.  Yet, it is wrong to ask the culprit to rehabilitate such event.  The demand should be calling for Chinese government to admit its crime and take full responsibility for the tragedy, and pursue justice to punish such crime against its own people, and ask for forgiveness from its people.

They have no moral standing to rehabilitate their own crimes.