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Visit Our Advertisers This is one the official guides to the Olympics won't be handing out, but it is vital to understanding the true context of the spectacle we are about to witness in Beijing.
The Tiananmen Massacre Map showing street locations in Beijing where on June 4, 1989, 150 of the demonstrators were killed, or the hospitals where their bodies were taken. As the text accompanying the map explains, the total number killed "remains unknown although estimates range from several hundred to several thousand." The information for this map was gathered by a group called the Tiananmen Mothers, started by Ding Zilin, a mother of one of the victims. Nineteen years have passed, but as one of the eye-witnesses in the Beijing streets and in Tiananmen Square itself to that night of June 3-4, 1989, I look at this map and in memory can still hear the first cracks of the bullets, feel the treads of armored personnel carriers shaking the pavement, and see the people looking grimly at the advancing rows of helmets, silhouetted against the burning roadblocks. They were clutching bricks and bottles against the guns of their own country's army. I remember a young man I saw closeup, shot in the chest, one of seven with bullet wounds I saw carried to a makeshift medical tent at the north end of Tiananmen Square during the final hours -- and wonder if any of them are named in this document. I remember the demonstrators sitting in the spring breeze, shortly before dawn, on the steps of the monument to China's Revolutionary Heroes, surrounded on three sides by tens of thousands of soldiers in the final standoff in Tiananmen Square -- and facing off against the huge portrait of Mao, the white Goddess of Liberty statue that stood in Tiananmen for less than a week before China's rulers knocked it down. Here's the account I filed that June 4th, recording what I had witnessed, and trying to answer my editor's question, what does it mean?
In that 1989 article, in the closing paragraph, I tried to set down something that still applies today; not least as visitors to Beijing survey the massive security efforts, not all of which are intended strictly to protect the Olympics: "No doubt when the Chinese government has finished dealing with its people, the tidy square will be presented again as a suitable site for tourists, visiting dignitaries and the Chinese public to come honor the heroes of China's glorious revolution. It will be important then to remember the heroes of 1989, the people who cried out so many times these past six weeks, Tell the world what we want. Some of the people who in their passion for liberty tried to face down the guns of their own government were in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. From what I saw, my best estimate is that more were shot or crushed to death in the surrounding streets, trying to stop the advancing troops from reaching Tiananmen -- which had become a symbol of the desire for freedom and justice.
what I wrote in early 2001, when Beijing was competing with Osaka, Istanbul, Paris and Toronto to host these games. Trying to imagine the Olympic torch lit in Beijing, I keep remembering another torch, put there not at the behest of the communist regime, but by the protesters who nearly 12 years ago rose up by the millions to defy China's tyranny. It was the torch held in both hands by the Chinese Goddess of Democracy -- patterned after our Statue of Liberty -- that for almost a week stood in Tiananmen Square, until it was destroyed by government troops on June 4, 1989. When that symbolic flame of freedom can be safely lit again in China, it will be fitting to award Beijing the Olympic Games. Until then, the Olympics can better keep faith with human dignity -- especially that of the Chinese people -- by going somewhere else."
Digg PJM Home 10 Comments Sin-U Nam: Tiananmen Massacre is still going on everyday in China near the border with North Korea. Hundreds of North Korean refugees are being violently repatriated every week to face imprisonment, torture, and execution by Kim Jong-il. A North Korean defector, Ms Cho Jin-hae is on hunger strike since Aug. Aug 7, 2008 - 3:04 pm T Peter: Thank God for Claudia's desperately needed clear trumpet call amidst the sickening chorus of compromise from mainstream Western media! Aug 7, 2008 - 7:22 pm Concerned Citizen: The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has used the games to intensify the persecution of Falun Gong. Falun Gong is a peaceful, Buddhist-based meditation and hundreds of thousands of these practitioners have been arrested in China. Recently, the persecution has stepped up, and flowed over to the US In the past month in Flushing, NY, a group of thugs incited by the local Chinese Consulate (the head of the Consulate was caught on tape admitting organizing and paying for it) viscously beat Falun Gong activists who were calmly standing on the sidewalk. Several of the thugs were arrested and 36 members of congress have called for President Bush to conduct an investigation.
html Also, practitioner's computers in the US have been hacked by the CCP, stealing information and names of other practitioners in China, who are then arrested. The Chinese think they have immunity from the laws of the US in the US In San Francisco, I have personally spoken with some of these people who have been persecuted in China -- old women, grandmothers whose homes were broken into and ransacked. They were then hauled off to prison and brainwashed, deprived of sleep and tortured. Aug 8, 2008 - 6:18 am ursa major: I have vowed not to watch one minute of NBC's coverage of the Olympics on any channel or cable program controlled by them nor will I read one line of newspaper coverage in honor of those brave people who died 19 years ago. And by the way, isn't it fitting that at the start of the Olympics, the Russians have begun making mischief in Georgia? Aug 8, 2008 - 7:51 am RE: Thank You, Claudia - for the truth telling you do.
v=O4xtkpO7ZqU The Tiananmen Massacre map illustrates what the world didn't see. Print many copies, then hand it out at the next moonbat protest you encounter. Aug 8, 2008 - 11:08 am Chaz: Maybe they'll fall in nine years (like Hitler's Third Reich and The USSR). With my mother being Korean, and myself having strong feelings of the issue, Communism would be a cancer best cut out sooner rather than later. Maybe the Nine Year rule will hold (being this: Any totalitarian regime that holds the olympics falls nine years later). If China were to no longer be communist, then North Korea would fall very shortly after. It's sad that we have a government going after people for deep breathing exercises, and yes, you can quote my dad on that.
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