The People's Republic of Amnesia by Lim Louisa

Author:Lim, Louisa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2014-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

In an essay dating from 1991, Liu Xiaobo wrote, “When we look at those ‘Tiananmen Mothers’ who so tirelessly persist in seeking justice for victims, can elite survivors like us not show a bit more compassion, a better sense of equality and justice, by being sure that moral credit goes to those people who suffered far more than we did, and to whom such credit in the first place rightly belongs?”

Liu also turned his pitiless glare onto the other student leaders and activists, whom he chided as being “opportunists large and small” especially when viewed against the quiet dignity of the Tiananmen Mothers. “Why is it that we scarcely hear the voices of the people who paid the heaviest prices, while the luminaries who survived the massacre can hardly stop talking?”

Ding Zilin, for one, was not impressed. She felt that Liu’s effusions were self-serving, especially given the number of essays he was churning out. Her attitude toward him was harsh, she admits. After he was released from a later prison term, Ding Zilin refused to see him for several years, despite his repeated pleas that he should be allowed to make an apology to her. Besides her frustration at what she saw as his insincerity, she feared the consequences of his refusal to stop writing excoriating criticisms of the Communist Party. She repeated to me what she had told him: “I gave you the chance to voice a self-criticism. I accepted your empty words. I accepted your tears. I accepted your foolish kneeling in front of my son’s ashes. I accepted all of this and forgave you. So why did you go on writing these essays?”

On Liu’s Nobel Peace Prize, both women are plainspoken. “I would never have imagined it,” said Zhang Xianling bluntly. The prize was a gift from the Communist Party, they both believe, sealed by the 11-year jail sentence he received in 2009. He is a creature defined by his defiance of the party. And so, as Zhang Xianling points out, are the Tiananmen Mothers. “If the Communist Party hadn’t repressed the Tiananmen Mothers, we wouldn’t be here today. If after the killings, they had apologized and resolved the issue legally, we probably wouldn’t exist. All of this is created by them.”

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