Chinese dissidents watched Europe pick up their movement (Feature)

By Bill Smith Oct 21, 2009, 5:08 GMT

Beijing - 'The fall of the Berlin Wall told the world what a beautiful country meant, what freedom and democracy meant,' says Chinese dissident Qi Zhiyong, comparing the events of Eastern Europe in 1989 with those of China that same year through the present.

'Now in China, there are police, armed police patrolling everywhere, which makes people feel horrible,' Qi told the German Press Agency dpa as China's Communist Party tightened security in Beijing for October's celebrations of its 60 years in power.

Qi took part in China's democracy protests in spring 1989. He was trying to leave Beijing's Tiananmen Square just after midnight on June 4, when he was shot in the leg as armed troops and tanks cleared away the last protesters.

For seven weeks, the rest of the world had watched to see how the party would handle the biggest open challenge to its rule since it founded the People's Republic of China in 1949.

Tens of thousands of protesters occupied Tiananmen Square each day, attracting a growing number of foreign journalists. But the military suppression of the democracy movement destroyed the hopes of many Chinese dissidents that the Communist Party might allow political reform.

The few dissidents who had escaped from China could only look on with envy as they watched the dramatic changes unfold in Eastern Europe in late 1989.

Wu'er Kaixi, a student leader of China's 1989 protests, was in France by the time the Berlin Wall fell.

He remembered watching television reports of student protests in Romania later in 1989, and seeing 'No China' banners appealing to the government not to repeat the crackdown in Beijing.

Wu'er Kaixi felt that Chinese protesters - hundreds of whom were believed to have died during the military crackdown - had sacrificed themselves for what became 'one of the biggest changes in the late 20th century.'

'Somehow we cannot enjoy the fruits of these changes,' he told dpa in Taiwan recently.

'Whereas the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union has collapsed, and my fellow student leaders in Hungary and Poland became ministers or parliamentarians, we have to live in exile and I haven't seen my parents for 20 years.'

Wu'er Kaixi had appealed in vain for protesters to clear part of Tiananmen Square on May 14, 1989, the day before former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev visited Beijing for the first talks with China in 30 years.

The continued occupation embarrassed Chinese Communist Party leaders by forcing them to abandon plans for a traditional state welcome in the square for Gorbachev.

'Staying in Tiananmen Square was always a matter of debate among the students. It's only natural in a mass movement in the name of democracy, and of course we had different voices,' said Wu'er Kaixi, now an investment banker based in Taiwan.

Qi, who had worked for a painting firm in 1989, was shot in the left leg and feared he would not survive after emergency treatment was delayed for hours amid the chaos in Beijing.

Following months of hospital treatment, including two amputations, Qi was 'extremely pessimistic,'

'I lost my leg, I had elderly parents, a wife and child at home. I didn't know what to do,' he said.

Despite his near death in 1989 and the repression that followed, including police beatings and threats to him, Qi has continued to promote human rights and democracy in China, gaining strength in recent years through his new Christian faith.

'I am happy that June 4 (1989) let me know what are democracy and human rights,' Qi said.

Qi said he still received messages of encouragement from Wang Dan, another exiled student leader of the 1989 protests.

US-based Wang said he saw Charter '08, issued in November by 303 leading rights activists and intellectuals based in China, as a 'continuation from June 4.'

Charter '08 was modelled on the Charter '77 written by intellectuals in the former Czechoslovakia demanding their own freedoms.

The publication of the charter for democratic reform in China showed that 'all those intellectuals cannot keep silent forever,' Wang said.

In June, the government charged dissident writer Liu Xiaobo with subversion for organizing the charter, which demanded sweeping changes to create a 'free, democratic and constitutional state,' and urged the release of all political prisoners.

Whatever the future holds for Charter '08, Wang believed that Chinese dissidents had already played a part in the fall of Communist governments in Eastern Europe in 1989, and the end of the Cold War between the Soviet bloc and the United States and its allies.

'All of these events started from June 4,' said Wang, who remains banned from visiting his family in China.

'I really feel sorry about that because we're really victims, but I'm really proud of that,' he said of the legacy of China's 1989 protests.