Victims’ families still press China to concede ’89 deaths
BEIJING — The man was in his 80s and dying. The woman was 73 and held his hand. They each lost a son in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and fought for decades to get China to acknowledge the deaths.
But Duan Hongbing would not live to see that day.
“I held his hand and told him that I won’t give up,’’ the woman, Zhang Xianling, said she told Duan on a visit to his Beijing hospital bed. She said he squeezed her hand and closed his eyes in response, no longer able to speak. He died last year, a few days after that promise was made.
As the 21st Tiananmen anniversary approaches tomorrow, the aging parents of victims fear their cause will die with them. The oldest of the Tiananmen Mothers, as the group is called, is 94 years old. The group’s leader, retired professor Ding Zilin, says more and more members die each year.
“Can it be that you really want to wear us all down or wait for our deaths so that the problem will naturally disappear?’’ the group wrote in an essay addressed to the Chinese government and made public this week through the group Human Rights in China, based in New York.
http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2010/06/03/tiananmen_mothers_fear_history_will_die_with_them/
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