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Tag: tiananmen square
Trump The Strong Man’s Campaign Of Revisionist History

Trump The Strong Man’s Campaign Of Revisionist History

If you ask Donald Trump, the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square was just a “riot.” He voiced his patently false view of the crackdown on student protesters in Beijing in 1989 at last night’s debate. This is not the first time Trump has spoke positively of undemocratic governments and politicians during this campaign.

Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper about comments he made supporting oppressive foreign governments, and specifically his comments on the crackdown in 1989, Trump responded with typical ambiguity. “That doesn’t mean I was endorsing that. I was not endorsing it. I said that is a strong, powerful government that put it down with strength. And then they kept down the riot. It was a horrible thing. It doesn’t mean at all I was endorsing it.” But, just like the David Duke controversy, he didn’t condemn what was a deplorable act of violence against Chinese students demanding representative government, either.

His response isn’t surprising, though, coming from a man whose supporters cite his “strength” as a positive trait they support. Trump has made “strength” a central part of his brand as he barrels towards the Republican nomination. In a victory speech after the South Carolina primary, Trump glorified militarism and strength.

“We’re going to build our military so big, so good, so strong, so powerful that nobody is ever going to mess with us, folks,” he said. One wonders how else he envisions using that big, good, powerful military if he ever becomes president.

Trump’s description of the student-led protests to demand democratic rule in China, which he called riots, runs contrary even to contemporaneous American accounts of what happened that day. On the 25th anniversary of the crackdown, Kate Phillips, an American teaching English in Beijing, wrote her account of the military’s response to the protesting students.

“It was a massacre. Most of the carnage occurred not in the Square or right around it, but in the western-approaching streets that led to the Square. I viewed the videotapes of bloody bodies that came in with camera crews, and I made phone calls to local hospitals and to the Chinese Red Cross,” she said. “We kept a running tally of the number of dead, which had reached 2,600 before everyone was ordered to stop talking to us.” While the death toll has been disputed, there was no doubt that hundreds of people were killed.

Following the violent crackdown, the Chinese state media downplayed the number of civilians killed in the crackdown. According to Phillips, state television spent the next few days exaggerating the number of soldiers who were killed. “The government initiated a whitewashing campaign, insisting that only a handful of civilians had died but that hundreds of soldiers had been beaten to death by rabble-rousers. In the coming days, Chinese television replayed tragic footage of these soldiers’ beatings,” she said.

Trump has singled out China as one of the reasons the U.S. is losing respect and economic strength on the global stage. “China has gotten rich off us,” Trump recently told CNN. “China has rebuilt itself with the money it’s sucked out of the United States and the jobs that it’s sucked out of the United States.” This despite the fact that much of his branded merchandise is made by foreign workers.

The bigger issue, of course, is Trump’s support of the Chinese government’s crackdown on dissent. But it fits with the patent disregard he has displayed for the press, protesters, and political opponents during his campaign. In many ways, Trump’s rhetoric indicates the sort of America he envisions: one that opens up libel laws and restores the “good old days,” when protesters left rallies in stretchers.

China Releases Footage Of Video Tiananmen Square Attack

China Releases Footage Of Video Tiananmen Square Attack

By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — In a break with its usual secrecy, the Chinese government on Tuesday released video of a deadly attack in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square last fall, along with a video purportedly made by the assailants.

The unusual step was designed to bolster Beijing’s claims that a recent string of attacks around China were the work of Islamic terrorists and not random acts of vengeance by disgruntled individuals.

Two pedestrians were killed and about 40 were injured in the October incident, in which a white vehicle drove through a crowd of tourists and then burst into flames in front of the Forbidden City in the center of the Chinese capital.

The video released Tuesday by the official New China News Agency was included in a 24-minute program, simply titled “Terrorism.”

One section, reportedly made before the attack, shows four people, including a toothless old woman, wearing black headbands and chanting, “God is great.”

The Chinese agency said three of the four — identified as the driver, his wife and his mother — were killed in the car that exploded at Tiananmen Square. In another section of the same video, another suspect is shown burning a Chinese and an American flag.

Chinese authorities also released high-resolution video, apparently captured by security cameras, of the vehicle jumping a curb, plowing through a crowd of pedestrians and bursting into flames under the iconic portrait of Mao Tse-tung. A black flag with Arabic script can be seen hanging from a window of the vehicle.

Besides the occupants of the vehicle, two tourists, one Chinese and one Filipino, were killed in the attack.

Chinese authorities say the attackers were inspired by the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, a shadowy organization seeking an independent state in Xinjiang, China’s northwestern-most region, which borders Pakistan and Afghanistan. Xinjiang is home to the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking, mostly Muslim ethnic minority.

This month, three Uighur defendants were sentenced to death by a court in Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital, on charges of organizing the Tiananmen Square attack. Some of the video shown Tuesday was released during the trial, but not widely distributed.

One of the Uighurs sentenced to death was interviewed for the program on terrorism. Wearing an orange prison vest, he is quoted as saying that the attack was inspired by DVDs and Islamic propaganda on the Internet.

“We started to watch these in 2013,” he says, according to a translator. “I downloaded it to my telephone and watched many times. … I feel so pumped up when I see it. I want to participate in holy war.”

The program was released at a news conference Tuesday by the National Internet Information Office. Besides bolstering the government’s claim that Islamic terrorists are at work in China, the video was designed to justify a crackdown on foreign Internet sites.

“We have strengthened our control over domestic sites, but the Internet is borderless, and terrorists have hidden their videos on many famous foreign social media websites,” the narrator intones in the video, as a screenshot of Google’s home page is displayed.

©afp.com / Philippe Lopez

Three Sentenced To Death In Tiananmen Square Car Attack

Three Sentenced To Death In Tiananmen Square Car Attack

By Julie Makinen, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — A Chinese court has sentenced three people to death and five others to prison in connection with a deadly terrorist attack in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square last fall, authorities said Monday.

Two pedestrians were killed and about 40 were injured in the October incident, in which a jeep drove through a crowd of tourists and then burst into flames in front of the Forbidden City in the center of the Chinese capital.

All three people in the vehicle — a man identified as Usmen Hasan, his mother, Kuwanhan Reyim, and his wife, Gulkiz Gini — died in the conflagration. A short video of the incident, apparently captured by closed-circuit security cameras, was released online Monday.

Authorities have blamed the attack on separatists from the restive northwestern province of Xinjiang, and the trial was held at the Intermediate People’s Court in Urumqi, the provincial capital. But officials released no personal details about the defendants, such as their hometowns, ages or occupations.

According to the state-run Xinhua News Agency, the seeds of the attack were planted in 2011, when three defendants, Husanjan Wuxur, Yusup Umarniyaz and Yusup Ahmat, formed a terrorist cell with the man who would go on to drive the jeep, Usmen Hasan. The group began recruiting members, the report said.

Those three were convicted of organizing and leading a terrorist group and endangering public security; they were given death sentences.

From December 2012 until September 2013, the news agency said, the group of four watched terrorism videos, began collecting weapons including explosives and guns, and started to plan deadly terrorist activities in Beijing.

On Oct. 7, Wuxur, Ahmat and two other defendants (who were not named) arrived in the capital along with the three attackers who would go on to die in the jeep. Umarniyaz later joined them in the city, the report said.

The group collected money to buy knives, gas masks, gasoline and the jeep itself; the report did not detail how they raised the funds. The attack was carried out around noon on Oct. 28.

Exactly what role was played by the defendants who did not travel to Beijing was unclear. Gulnar Tuhtiniyaz received a life term and Bujanat Abdukadir was given a 20-year sentence on charges of participating in a terrorist group and endangering public security.

The court gave three others, Tohti Mehmat, Tursunjan Abliz and Abla Niyaz, prison terms of five to 10 years for participating in a terrorist group.

Xinjiang is home to a Muslim minority known as Uighurs, many of whom complain of employment discrimination, religious restrictions and other poor treatment at the hands of majority Han Chinese. Urumqi has seen a number of terrorist attacks recently, including a deadly blast at a train station and an attack on a morning market last month that killed dozens.

On Monday, state-run media reported that more than 60 suspects have been arrested in Xinjiang in the last three weeks since the government began asking the public for tips on terrorist-related activities. The 60 are suspected of making 160 “blast devices,” and police said they had seized more than 80 pounds of explosive materials.

Police also said they had killed two suspects and injured another one on Sunday after a group of knife-wielding men attacked a chess-and-card parlor in the city of Hotan in Xinjiang. The men rushed into the game room on Yingbin Road at around 5:45 p.m., officials said, but the chess players fought back and pressed an alarm bell.

Data showed that since May 23 the public safety agencies in Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region have received more than 300 tips leading to the capture of more than 60 suspects accused of making more than 160 explosive devices.

Police officers also seized more than 80 pounds of explosive materials, two sites for illegally recording videos and a large number of flags instigating religious extremism.

©afp.com / Philippe Lopez

Few Visitors, Heavy Security As China Marks Tiananmen Square Anniversary

Few Visitors, Heavy Security As China Marks Tiananmen Square Anniversary

By Julie Makinen and Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — Stress kindness, value people, defend sincerity, worship justice, value harmony and seek an ideal world.

As the 25th anniversary of China’s bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters passed quietly, if tensely, Wednesday, two large video screens in the center of Tiananmen Square silently flashed a series of Communist Party slogans. No one here was supposed to acknowledge anything was out of the ordinary, but reminders of the extraordinary events of June 4, 1989, were in plain sight.

Troops in fatigues and helmets rode in white open-air jeeps, slowly lapping the plaza. Inside parked air-conditioned buses, scores of uniformed police cooled off until their next shift at security checkpoints. At the northeast corner of the square, a 36-year-old man with a scruffy mustache and a purple shopping bag struck up a quiet conversation with a Los Angeles Times journalist.

“You’re a reporter, right? They didn’t let you in, did they?” he said, almost under his breath.

Asked why he had come to Tiananmen on this day, he launched into a tale about his impoverished parents and other struggles of his family, despite the nation’s economic boom in the last quarter-century.

“Simple. I’m here because Xi Jinping doesn’t want anyone here today,” he concluded, glancing around a bit cagily after mentioning the Chinese president.

But how many others shared his sentiments — or even his awareness of the anniversary — was unclear. The state-run media do not mention it; China’s armies of Internet censors prevent any discussion of it; even some messages including the number “25” were blocked from social networking sites such as Weibo on Wednesday.

One Tiananmen visitor, a 24-year-old communications student, when asked if he knew what happened on the site 25 years earlier, replied with apparent sincerity, “No, what? I really don’t know.”

Another student of about the same age said he was “too young to remember” anything from that time, although he gave the impression he knew what had transpired.
Tourists seemed to understand that they were supposed to avoid the area. By late afternoon, the square had only a few hundred tourists and a far larger security presence. Armed police in khaki marched in formation. Plainclothes officers in pink polo shirts rode folding bicycles, and uniformed police in blue cruised on Segways. Undercover cops sported T-shirts tight enough to show off their biceps.

In the square, the party line kept flashing as small tour groups strode past the Monument to the People’s Heroes, an obelisk at the center of the plaza, just south of the video screens.

“To realize the Chinese dream of the great revival of the Chinese nation means realizing national prosperity and power, national rejuvenation, and people’s happiness.”

At the southeast corner of the square, a queue of several hundred people wilted in the sun, inching forward toward a security checkpoint. A man hawking rainbow umbrella hats tried to make a sale to the sweaty crowds. An infant, naked except for a T-shirt, wailed as his grandmother tried to entertain him. A young man in line, spotting a Westerner, asked: “Are you a journalist? Don’t waste your time.”

The line crept along for more than an hour. Police scrutinized each visitor’s national ID, checking each card with an electronic, hand-held scanner. Old women were body-wanded with metal detectors. Backpacks were X-rayed.

A Times reporter and two visiting friends from the U.S. were turned away after officers examined their passports, using a walkie-talkie to radio a supervisor with their visa numbers.

“You know why,” said one officer. “Come back tomorrow.”

AFP Photo/Philippe Lopez