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.

Most Fortunate Chinese - Beijing Residents, on Drought and Water Project in China

Beijing is the absolute center of China - in a country spanning of over four time zones, only time used there is Beijing standard time.  Either the number of a train is even or odd, depends on if it goes to or fro Beijing.  When I grew up, one resident in my home city got a ration of about one pound meat, 7 oz. cooking oil, etc. per month, while Beijing residents could purchase almost everything, with no real quantitative limits.  The only inconvenience was the limit they could buy at one time.  As long as they went back to the queues, they were allowed to buy as much to their hearts' content.  Dad had many opportunities of going to Beijing on business trips and every time, he would brought back large amount of amazing food, unknown or unfamiliar to the people in the desolate Manchuria, such as deep fried doughs, and twists soaked in honey.  Dad called himself of of those "Manchurian Tiger" charging into Beijing, a favorite term Beijing residents disparagingly called people from materially challenged bitter cold Manchuria.  Beijing residents were very privileged indeed.

That tradition has survived to the new century.  The first Chinese Olympic took place in no other city than Beijing.  People from all corners spent vast amount of money to sustain a month-long inflated pride of Beijing residents, with no benefits to other places whatsoever.

When Beijing residents are thirsty, millions people lose their homes in the provinces.

Beijing and several other northern cities are suffering from thirst.  Yet, Beijing has built many golf courses and ski resorts, all notorious for water consumption.  Instead, Chinese government, after the controversial Three Gorges Dam, is now embarking on an even more ambitious, and more controversial water project - South-North Water Diversion Project.

Guardian reported that

The dam is not the only hydro-engineering project that has come under scrutiny as a result of the drought. The state's massive south-north water diversion project, which aims to tap the normally moist Yangtze basin to supply arid northern cities like Beijing, is also being called into question because one of its source reservoirs at Danjiangkou has fallen 4m below the minimum requirement for its operation.

"This is bound to have an impact on the diversion project," said Zhang Junfeng, an environmental activist with Green Earth Volunteers. "Water storage at Danjiangkou reservoir is already at a dead level and I think the situation will get worse year by year because this is partly due to climate change."

New York Times reported that 

Beijing has about 100 cubic meters, or 26,000 gallons, of water available per person. According to a standard adopted by the United Nations, that is a fraction of the 1,000 cubic meters, or 260,000 gallons, per person that indicates chronic water scarcity.

The planning for Beijing’s growth up to 2020 by the State Council already assumes the water diversion will work, rather than planning for growth with much less water, said Mr. Wang, the former official.

City planners see a Beijing full of golf courses, swimming pools and nearby ski slopes — the model set by the West.

“Instead of transferring water to meet the growing demand of a city, we should decide the size of a city according to how much water resources it has,” Mr. Wang said. “People’s desire for development has no end.”

Yangtze region is suffering the worst drought in fifty years - The Three Gorges Dam upstream had been blamed by many quarters - and the second largest lake in China, with the size of 1/6th of Lake Erie, has dried up.  There will be up to four million people relocated due to Three Gorges Dam and the Water Diversion Project would affect more people, in almost unimaginable scale.

If the Three Gorges Dam was crazy, this new project is pure insanity.

The more I think about it, the more I resent the fact that entire China population sacrifice themselves for the benefit of several million privileged residents in the most indulged Beijing.

However, whenever I complained too much, I remembered their heroic deeds in the trying time of May and June of 1989, then, my antipathy towards Beijing residents would dissipate, somewhat.

Twenty-Two Years Later - on the Fourth of June (1989.6.4)

It is hard to believe that twenty-two years have passed since that fateful fourth of June. It was a most disturbing day I've ever lived and but the memory of it was rather hazy now. Perhaps, I have tried to suppress the trauma?

I cannot help wondering now that since that day, how many people have passed away and how many have been born. How many still have memories of that day or any knowledge of it at all and how many have totally forgotten or are ignorant of it?

How many have become richer and how many poorer? How many have lost their humanity, courage, conscious and reason and how many have traded their innocence for advancement?

How many have been troubled by conscious and how many remained gleeful of the pain of the others? How many have been trying to remember and remind and how many have tried to erase any trace of it from their own minds and history? How many have been mute and how many have been speaking with almost no audience?

I do not know. Probably I will never know. In the end, i hardly matters. What matters is that someone will remember and remind.

It is raining in Berkeley, California - unseasonable and unreasonable - rationality seems to do not belong to this day. I have nothing to offer, except for my dimming memory and some images of flowers - pictures of flowers in May - to the suffering souls.

六月四日 -- 4th of June

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera wrote:

Almost from childhood, she knew that a concentration camp was nothing exceptional or startling but something very basic, a given into which we are born and from which we can escape only with the greatest of efforts.

We all carry something very basic, a given into which we were born and from which we can escape only with the greatest of efforts. We all do. It is up to us to break out of the bondage.