The fifteenth anniversary of the events in Beijing of June 4, 1989 is approaching. Fifteen years ago, the government used armed forces and tanks to crackdown on the peaceful petition of students and residents in Beijing and other cities, causing the death of many innocent people. This tragedy greatly damaged the sprouts of democracy that had been planted in the post-Mao period. It also has postponed indefinitely the reform of China's political system and ruling party. For a long time, the government used slogans to justify ¡°June 4th¡± as a cracking down of ¡°counter-revolutionary riots.¡± After years of crushing propaganda, ¡°June 4th¡± ¨C the ¡°cracking down of the rioters¡± ¨C apparently has been removed from the memory, discussion, and thoughts of 1.4 billion Chinese people.

Open discussion of ¡°June 4th¡± remains the most extensively forbidden topic within Chinese society today. Those events are the terror that cannot be removed from our hearts, enshrouding all of Chinese society and fixing a dark shadow over the ruling party. The tragedy of ¡°June 4th¡± is like a bullet lodged deep within the collective body of society. It's profoundly set in the minds of the martyred and massacred, the participants and on-lookers, and to those who have come later. Mothers and fathers who have to face up to their sons and daughters, teachers who must confront their students, writers who must contend with their readers, all of us who in the silence of the past fifteen years have struggled, faltered, been angry and numb in our innermost hearts, and have not known whether or even how to talk about that fragment of our history. But, somewhere between truth and terror, and between individual conscience and public life, one must come to a choice.

The shadow of ¡°June 4th¡± has paired individual conscience and public life into opposing counterparts. The coercive silence and memory lapse of the past fifteen years have caused unrelenting damage to Chinese society's enlightened values and emotional welfare. This is a miserable reality. Given the authorities' painstaking maintenance of the taboo against speaking out about ¡°June 4th,¡± public and political reconciliation exist in a far-off and uncertain future. Yet without such public and political reconciliation, there will never be true democracy. The threat and burden of violence jeopardizes the possibility that the ruling party will attempt clarification and truth. Under this threat, the moral fiber and courage of China's intellectuals are draining away like flowing sand. When parents, teachers and intellectuals throughout society do not have the courage to expose the biggest political lie to the next generation, the social justice and conscience that we had hoped for is lost. Truth is irrevocably lost.

After six years of coerced silence, Ding Zilin, Zhang Xianling and other family members of the victims came forward in 1995 with a jointly signed ¡°Open Letter on the Sixth Anniversary of June 4th¡± to the Chinese National People's Congress¡±; Xu Liangying, Wang Ganchang and others wrote "Welcoming the United Nations' Year for Tolerance with an Appeal for Tolerance in China¡±; Liu Xiaobo, Chen Xiaoping and others wrote a letter "A Lesson Learned in Bloodshed: Why We Must Advance Democratic and Legal Reform"; and Wang Dan, Lin Mu and others wrote "Suggestions on Safeguarding Human Rights and Maintaining Social Justice¡±; among other appeals. All of these open letters marking the sixth anniversary of ¡°June 4th¡± requested rectification of the ¡°June 4th¡± legacy, specifically the release of political prisoners. Instead, right before that sixth anniversary, the government arrested Liu Xiaobo, Huang Xiang, Wang Dan, Liu Nianchun, Chen Ziming and others who had participated in the open appeals. This suppression only extended further the shadow of ¡°June 4th¡± and made a mockery of their peaceful dissent. Once again, Chinese society was subject to forced silence and memory lapse with the threat of ultimate terror.

Nevertheless, following the example of these courageous writers, in addition to the frequent appeals of overseas Chinese communities, there still existed a small number of Chinese intellectuals at home who mustered the courage to seek truth and reconciliation, continuing to make their voices heard by demanding that the injustice of June 4, 1989 be redressed with political reconciliation and tolerance. Examples were Wang Donghai et al., ¡°An Open Letter to the National People's Congress on the Seventh Anniversary of June 4th¡± in 1996 and ¡°An Open Letter to My Countrymen on Political Reconciliation and Democratic Reform¡± by the famous dramatist Wu Zuguang and others. Yet, these isolated individuals who dared to make their voices heard would go on to suffer government surveillance, arrests and punishment for many years. Their isolation was compounded by the fact that they did not have widespread support from intellectuals within China. On the contrary, over the past fifteen years, the majority of intellectuals ¨C including some of us ¨C chose to be on-lookers, avoiding ¡°June 4th¡± for their own safety or maintaining a careful distance from the more outspoken dissidents.

The government's continued tyranny and prohibition of freedom of expression have caused ¡°June 4th¡± to become the most taboo words in the Chinese language. This nightmare is crushing the ruling party, and all of Chinese society. People have been forced to relinquish the truth, and thus to relinquish their peace of mind, faith in morality, and personal integrity. At the same time, the suppression of ¡°June 4th¡± strangled the courage and energy of civil society's opposition to political corruption. During the 1990s, the market reforms implemented by the government ¨C though able to achieve economic successes ¨C in the end have been powerless to systematize effective mechanisms to control the system from corrupting itself. Chinese society thus has gradually become an unhealthy society that lacks necessary fundamental political confidence and moral support.

While the National People's Congress (NPC) and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) were in session this year, Dr. Jiang Yanyong, a widely respected physician who exposed the government's cover-up of the SARS epidemic last year, came forward again to expose China's ills. Dr. Jiang wrote an open letter to China's leaders, describing his eyewitness account of the ¡°June 4th¡± event, guaranteeing the truth with his reputation. Similarly, Professor Ding Zilin, representative of the Tiananmen Mothers organization, with 124 victim families, wrote a public appeal to all members of the Standing Committee and representatives of the NPC and CPPCC. Both letters requested the ruling party to confront the truth of ¡°June 4th¡± by publicly acknowledging and confessing their crimes. The courage of Jiang Yanyong, Ding Ziling, and their supporters has earned our respect. With the fifteenth anniversary approaching, we choose to stand with Dr. Jiang, Professor Ding and all others with the courage to seek truth and reconciliation. We publicly proclaim our views of ¡°June 4th¡±:

1. We believe that the student and citizens' peaceful demonstration and petition in 1989 were legal and just. It was an exercise of the constitutional rights of citizens to protest and demonstrate, and to peacefully petition the government. The ruling party's decision to deploy armed forces to suppress this movement was a mistake, and resulted in the government's slaughter of its own people. This is the most serious political crime committed by the ruling party and its government administration.

2. We are no longer willing to allow ourselves and our children to continue to live with the shame of this government's imposed silence. We don't believe that forced silence and memory relapse will bring about reconciliation or democracy in public life. Therefore, we appeal to committed intellectuals, news media outlets and the public to unite our strength in breaking the silence and allowing the words ¡°June 4th¡± to enter public discourse. We appeal to the authorities to remove the prohibitions against speaking of ¡°June 4th¡± and to allow each citizen to openly discuss, think about, and tell the story of that time, so that every child will understand what happened in China fifteen years ago.

3. We demand that the National People's Congress use their constitutional powers to establish a special commission to investigate the events of ¡°June 4th¡±. We demand that the government declassify the relevant documents of the event in order to unearth the truth. Further, based on this foundation for reconciliation, we must mourn for the dead. We demand that those responsible for the actions taken on ¡°June 4th¡± in the Party, the government and armed forces openly ask for forgiveness of the people in written and oral statements, and bow their heads three times to the dead.

4. Finally, we advocate reconciliation and tolerance. Our demand for truth is not an exercise in revenge, rather we earnestly desire reconciliation and through that process of reconciliation, to advance democracy. In the end, constitutional democratization is a process by which the government legitimates a political system of checks and balances. Therefore, we appeal for the approval of legislation to protect freedom of expression and freedom of the press, and to protect freedoms of assembly, protest, demonstration, and association. We believe that the government must deal honestly with this burden of the recent past, and truly respect human rights. It must disassemble the authoritarian logic that regards freedom of speech as a storm and the public as an enemy. Only, only if the reconciliation between people and the government is carried out can there be the promise of democracy.

Lastly, we pay our belated respects and condolences to the martyrs of June 4, 1989.

Signers of the petition:

Scholars in China (33):

Bao Zhunxin, Bei Chun, Fan Yafeng, Jiang Qishen, Hao Jian He Yongqin, Liu Xiaobo Liao Yiwu, Liang Xiaoyan, Li NaN, Li Jian, Mao Yushi, Pu Zhiqiang, Qiu Feng, Ren Bumei, Shi Tao, Sun Wenguang, Teng Biao, Wang Junxiu, Wang Zhijing, Wang Tiancheng, Wang Guangze, Wang Yi, Xu Youyu, Xu Xiao, Yu Jie, Yu Shicun, Yang Yinbo, Zhuang Liwei, Zhao Cheng, Zhao Dagong, Zhang Zuhua, Zheng Nianhuai

The overseas scholars: (32):

Cai Chu (US), Chen Pokong (US), Chen Maiping (Sweden), Chen Kuide (US), Feng Chongyi (Sydney), Fu Zhengming (Sweden), Guo Luoji (US), Huang Heqing (Spain) Huang Xiang (US), Yu Lan (US), Hu Ping (US), Kang Zhengguo (US), Kong Jiesheng (US), Liu Binyan (US) Liu Guokai (US), Liao Tianqi (Germany), Perry Link (US), Ma Jian (UK), Meng Lang (US), Mo Li(Sweden), Qiu Yueshou (Sydney), Shen Tong (US), Wang Dan (US), Wang Youcai (US), Wu Fan (US), Yi Ping (US), Yu Haocheng (US), Yang Fengshi (US), Zhong Weiguan (Germany), Zhang Yu (Sweden), Zhang Weiguo (US), Zheng Yi (US)

2004-5-20