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China's June Fourth Prisoners: The Long Road to Justice
Remarks to the Foreign
Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong
for the 12th Annual Human Rights Press Awards
John Kamm
The Dui Hua Foundation
March 29, 2008
Protests erupt in a city
in western China, and then in other cities including Beijing. After a
period of restraint, the government deploys troops. Demonstrators
hurling rocks and setting fires are no match for the military. Many are
killed, many more arrested. The People’s Daily denounces the
counterrevolutionary rebellion instigated and abetted by international
anti-China forces. The Chinese government vows to crush the protests.
After the disturbances are put down, the search for protesters and their
leaders begins. Government notices appear setting deadlines for their
surrender: those who give themselves up will be treated leniently, those
who don’t, harshly. A most-wanted list of 21 protest leaders is
released.
The international community reacts with outrage. Demonstrations against
the Chinese government take place around the world. Politicians debate
what to do. Beijing pays no heed. The nationwide crackdown and manhunt
intensifies.
In the United States, a Democratic member of the House of
Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, embraces the cause of the protesters.
After consulting with colleagues, she decides to act, introducing
legislation to deny China unconditional access to the US market,
something Beijing badly needs to realize its economic and political
goals.
What I have just described took place in 1989, but there are eerie
parallels to the events of the last three weeks. In 1989, China was far
weaker, and ultimately the government and the ruling Communist Party
made concessions to international criticism and the threat of sanctions.
Whether Chinese leaders will do the same today is far from certain.
Chinese officials have bluntly told me that they are prepared to
sacrifice the Olympic Games to counter threats to national security.
In 1990, the first year of the debate in the US Congress over China’s
trade status, I was the president of Hong Kong’s American Chamber of
Commerce and the regional vice president of a large American
multinational corporation. I was invited to testify at the first
congressional hearings on China’s “most favored nation” trading status.
On the eve of my departure for Washington, I and other leaders of the
business community were hosted to a dinner by China’s senior
representative in Hong Kong.
In the midst of Minister Zhou Nan’s toast, I suddenly interrupted him
and appealed for clemency for a young student leader imprisoned in
Shanghai. Today, 18 years later, I call again for clemency. I ask the
Chinese government to release those still in prison for participating in
the events that took place in the spring of 1989.
After my first intervention, I took to drawing up lists of political
prisoners, traveling to Beijing and Guangzhou to deliver them to Chinese
officials. From 1991 to the end of 1994, I made 20 such trips. In
December 1994, I summarized the responses of the Chinese government to
these early lists and provided members of the press and the Chinese
government with this document. In February 1995, I traveled to Beijing
to get the government’s reaction to what I had done.
I was told by a minister that I had accurately reported what I had been
told. He agreed to continue receiving me and my lists. We reached an
understanding that in 1995 I would submit 100 “requests for information”
on prisoners—one list of 25 names each quarter. The Ministry of Justice,
which oversees China’s 700 prisons and 300 “re-education through labor”
camps, would make a good-faith effort to provide responses.
Two months later, the MOJ issued an internal regulation establishing a
reporting system for “important prisoners.” Among prisoners to be
reported on regularly to central authorities were those serving
sentences for crimes committed during “the two turmoils” (martial law in
Tibet in early 1989 and martial law in Beijing in June 1989) as well as
leaders of “the two illegals” (the autonomous student federations and
the autonomous worker federations) about whom the international
community had expressed concern. By simply asking about prisoners, we
could make them important.
By the end of the 1990s, nearly all the important prisoners associated
with the June Fourth protests had been released from prison, most before
the end of their sentences.
[1] But what of the hundreds if not thousands of
June Fourth prisoners whose names rarely if ever appeared on lists and
about whom the international community rarely expressed concern? These
prisoners were predominantly workers and peasants who were swept up in
the protests that engulfed Beijing and hundreds of other locations. They
had been convicted of destroying property and been branded
counterrevolutionary saboteurs or hooligans. Many received life
sentences or death sentences with two-year reprieve.
A year ago, I estimated that there were between 200 and 300 people still
in prison for offences committed during the April-June 1989 protests in
China. Over the last six months, Dui Hua has learned of the release of
several individuals originally sentenced to death with two-year reprieve
or life in prison, including:
-
Zhou Yan was a
23-year-old worker at a Shanghai textile factory in 1989 when he was
detained for infiltrating student and citizen organizations during the
1989 protests in the east China city in order to gather intelligence
for an unnamed foreign power and incite unrest. The People’s Daily
article on his arrest reported that Zhou organized a crowd of
demonstrators who shouted: “I love money but love freedom and
democracy more.”
Zhou was sentenced to life in prison for espionage and as recently as
the middle of 2006 an official government response indicated his
original sentence had not been adjusted. In late 2007, Dui Hua was
informed that he had in fact been released in June 2006 after several
sentence reductions.
-
Li Weihong was a
21-year-old worker at Hunan Fire Fighting Equipment Factory in
Changsha, Hunan Province, when he became involved in organizing street
protests that turned violent in April 1989. Li and six others were
convicted of hooliganism. All were executed except Li, who was
sentenced to death with two-year reprieve. Repeated inquiries as to
his fate yielded no replies until seven months ago, when Dui Hua was
told that, after five sentence reductions, Li would be released on
November 11, 2007. His release has been confirmed.
-
Hu Liangbin was a
young man when he was detained in Wuhan on June 7, 1989, for
overturning trucks, blocking traffic, and setting fire to a bus. He
was sentenced to life in prison. In a first-ever response, the Chinese
government late last year advised that Hu had been released on May 22,
2005.
-
Rui Chaoyang was an
18-year-old temporary worker at Xian’s Huanbao Boiler Company when he
was detained for involvement in the protests that broke out in the
northwestern Chinese city on April 21 and 22, 1989. He was
subsequently convicted of hooliganism and sentenced to life in prison,
according to Beijing Radio. In a communication to a foreign dialogue
partner, the Chinese government advised that Rui was released, after
three sentence reductions, on June 18, 2004.
-
Sun Hong was an
18-year-old worker at a fluorescent light factory in Beijing when he
was detained for burning military vehicles and stealing a gun in the
protests of June 4 and 5, 1989. According to the Beijing Daily, Sun
was sentenced to death with two-year reprieve. Recent information
received by Dui Hua states that, after nine sentence reductions, Sun
was released on July 7, 2007.
I now believe that there
are somewhere between 60 and 100 people still imprisoned for offences
committed during the protests that swept the country between April and
June 1989. Here is what we presently know about six of them:
-
Liu Zhihua is the last
imprisoned member of a group of workers who organized one of the
largest strikes that took place in June 1989, one that shut down the
Xiangtan Electrical Machinery plant in Xiangtan, Hubei Province.
Twenty-one years old at the time, Liu was convicted of “hooliganism”
for giving anti-government speeches and inciting a mob to “beat,
smash, and loot”. He was sentenced to life in prison, but this was
reduced in September 1993 to 15 years’ imprisonment. His sentence was
extended by five years in 1997 for involvement in a brawl, but it was
reduced for good behavior by two years in 2001. Since then, Liu has
been placed in solitary confinement twice. His sentence is due to
expire on January 16, 2011.
-
Miao Deshun was among
a group of five Beijing residents who were detained in June 1989 and
subsequently convicted of arson. He was sentenced to death with
two-year reprieve, a sentence that was reduced to life in prison in
1991. In 1998, his sentence was commuted to 20 years in prison, but
because in the Chinese system you don’t get credit for time served
when a life sentence is commuted to fixed-term imprisonment—a fact
that explains why so many June Fourth prisoners are still
incarcerated—Miao is not scheduled for release from Beijing’s Yanqing
Prison until September 15, 2018, at which time he will have spent 29½
years behind bars for setting a fire.
-
Unlike the other
prisoners talked about today, all of whom are Han Chinese, Gu Xinghua
is a member of the Miao ethnic group. According to a December 23, 1989
article in Shijie Ribao, Gu, a 25-year-old farmer from Hezhang County
in Guizhou Province, established the People’s Solidarity Party in the
winter of 1988. He and the party’s 40 members took advantage of the
1989 turmoil “to carry out activities and undermine the socialist
system.” Like many rural political organizations Dui Hua has studied,
the People’s Solidarity Party drew up a charter, issued a manifesto
sent to citizens around the country, made banners, and gathered
broadswords and muskets in preparation for an insurrection. Before
they could carry out their plans, Gu and the party’s other leaders
were arrested. Gu was sentenced to life in prison for
“counterrevolutionary armed mass rebellion;” after four sentence
reductions, he is due for release from Guizhou’s Guiyang Prison on
February 28, 2011.
-
The case of Wang Jun
has special relevance for those following the history of death penalty
reform in China. An 18-year-old temporary worker from Chengcheng
County, Shaanxi Province, Wang participated in a “serious political
disturbance” at the Xi’an Xincheng Factory on April 22, 1989, throwing
rocks, breaking street lamps and windows, and setting fire to several
vehicles. Wang was sentenced to death. His father appealed to the
Shaanxi Higher People’s Court, which referred the case to the Supreme
People’s Court in Beijing. The Supreme People’s court recommended a
verdict of death with two-year reprieve. After four sentence
reductions, Wang is due for release from Shaanxi’s Fuping Prison on
December 11, 2009. He has just celebrated his 37th birthday.
-
One of the most
interesting cases of an imprisoned June Fourth protester that Dui Hua
has found in a Chinese publication is that of the Shanghai pamphleteer
Yu Rong. From June to October 1989, Yu, an unemployed 34-year-old man
whose father had died in prison as a counterrevolutionary, distributed
1,450 reactionary leaflets on 52 occasions in five Shanghai districts.
His modus operandi was to drop the leaflets from tall buildings,
escaping before passers-by could read them and alert the police.
According to the January 1990 edition of People’s Police, this was the
largest case of counterrevolutionary incitement in the post-1949
history of Shanghai. Hundreds of officers under the guidance of
Shanghai’s party secretary, Zhu Rongji, spent nearly four months
trying to capture the culprit. They succeeded on October 2, 1989.
Under interrogation, Yu admitted to dropping bricks as well as
leaflets. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and placed in an Ankang
Hospital, one of several psychiatric detention centers that together
were studied by Robin Munro. We do not know whether he is still there.
Despite widespread knowledge of Yu’s activities on the part of
Shanghai’s populace, the case was virtually unknown to the city’s
sizable population of foreign diplomats, journalists, and businessmen.
-
Another Shanghai
prisoner from the 1989 protests is Wei Yingchun. Wei was 20 years old
when he allegedly set fire to a train that had plowed into protesters
blocking the tracks in protest of the crackdown on the demonstrations
in Beijing. Four people were executed for this crime; others were
given long sentences. Wei was sentenced to life in prison for
sabotaging transportation equipment. After six sentence reductions, he
is scheduled for release from Shanghai’s Baoshan Prison on January 24,
2010.
-
Shao Liangchen was
also given a long sentence for sabotaging transportation equipment.
Shao was a member of the Ji’nan (Shandong Province) Workers Autonomous
Federation. He was sentenced to death with two-year reprieve,
subsequently commuted to life in prison. His sentence was reduced four
more times, and he was due for release on November 4, 2006, when he
was diagnosed with leukemia on September 6, 2004. He was released on
medical parole two days later and died on November 7, 2005.
We know of the existence
of these men because Chinese journalists inserted their names in
newspapers and other official publications, and dedicated researchers
like Mickey Spiegel of Human Rights Watch in New York, Robin Munro now
of China Labor Bulletin in Hong Kong, and Joshua Rosenzweig and his Dui
Hua researchers in San Francisco found and published their names. It has
fallen to me to submit lists of their names to the Chinese government,
confident that by doing so their chances of better treatment and early
release are improved. Even today, Dui Hua still finds previously unknown
names of people detained in the spring 1989 protests. To date, we and
other NGOs have found hundreds of such names.
By contrast, we have found in official publications the names of only a
handful of the 742 people arrested for endangering state security in
2007. The Chinese government has sharply reduced reporting on political
crime and rarely volunteers the names of political prisoners. In this
respect, China is less transparent than it was in 1989. (Interestingly,
the Tibet Daily recently published the names of two Tibetans arrested in
the Lhasa protests.)
China’s June Fourth prisoners are now middle-aged men who have spent
their entire adult lives in prison. The protests for which they have
been sentenced would, for the most part, today be called “mass
incidents.” Most would likely be fined and given relatively short
sentences. Those serving sentences for counterrevolution and hooliganism
form a special group: these “crimes” were removed from China’s Criminal
Law in 1997. They are serving sentences for crimes that no longer exist.
Those June Fourth prisoners originally sentenced to life imprisonment or
death with two-year reprieve also received a supplemental punishment of
“deprivation of political rights.” After their release from prison, for
periods as long as nine years, there men must report regularly to the
public security bureau. They are ineligible to receive passports; they
cannot work for state enterprises or speak to reporters. They are
so-called “targeted people,” subject to surveillance and preventive
detention by the police. Both from the perspective of public safety
(they pose no threat) and basic fairness, the remaining June Fourth
prisoners should be released from prison.
Since virtually all of them are eligible for parole and all have already
received sentence reductions for good behavior, this should be a simple
matter. Local judicial authorities can order their release, perhaps with
guidance from Beijing. But if the Chinese government wants a much-needed
boost to its international image, then the Standing Committee of the
National People’s Congress should exercise its authority to grant an
Olympics amnesty. Such an amnesty would cover, at a minimum, prisoners
serving sentences for counterrevolution and hooliganism. It could
usefully be extended to long-serving prisoners convicted of other crimes
who have served the bulk of their sentences.
An Olympics amnesty would not only serve to burnish China’s image; by
releasing the remaining counterrevolutionaries and hooligans, China
would ease the way to ratification of the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights. Under the ICCPR, prisoners serving sentences
for crimes that are removed from the criminal law should be released. If
the crimes remain on the books but the punishments are reduced,
prisoners should benefit.
In a few days, it will be 40 years since Martin Luther King Jr.’s
assassination in Memphis, an event that triggered riots across America,
violent protests that were put down by police and national guardsmen.
Dr. King would have condemned the violence on both sides. He had an
unshakeable belief in the ultimate victory of justice, never admitting,
in the words of the poet Robert Browning, that “though right is worsted,
wrong will triumph.”
Dr. King was fond of quoting Reinhold Niebuhr and famously did so at the
end of his triumphant march to Selma: “The arc of the moral universe is
long, but it bends towards justice.” This is the faith that sustains
those working inside and outside China to secure the release from prison
of political prisoners. May God protect them till our work is done, and
may He touch the hearts of China’s leaders with the wisdom that the
greatest power is the power to be merciful.
[1]
“Important prisoners” from the protests that led to martial law in Tibet
fared far worse. Few received sentence reductions. The last of the
Drepung Monastery monks who played key roles in the protests, Ngawang
Phulchung was released from prison in October 2007 after serving 18½
years of a 19-year prison term for counterrevolution. A Lhasa university
student, Lobsang Tenzin convicted of murdering a policeman, is
still in prison. He continues to maintain his innocence. Lobsang Tenzin
will be released from Qushui Prison on April 26, 2013. (Return
to Speech)
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