Appeal to the press, artists, working places, libraries,
universities, and other
institutions of education
Give the Chinese students their history back!
Help mark the 23rd
anniversary of the Tiananmen
massacre. In 1989 the Chinese students occupied the Tiananmen Square in
Beijing for months in an attempt to press the Chinese government to take steps
towards democracy and to fight against corruption. But on 4th June
1989 the regime threw in the army against the unarmed students.
Give the Chinese their story back. The story is
banned in China, but all the students’ newspaper articles, fliers etc. have
been collected by the democracy
movement in Hong Kong.
These collections of Chinese
and English documents have now been put on the Internet from where they can be downloaded for free.
Many of the young dissidents were imprisoned in the
wake of the crackdown. Some are still in jail but they are no longer young.
China still practises a massive censorship on information on the massacre. And
it is impossible for Chinese people to obtain uncensored information about the
event.
In China the encroachments continue. The imprisonment
of Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo
is maintained and his wife is still under house arrest.
Thousands of Chinese students are today studying at universities and other
institutions of education in the West. Most of them do not even know their own
history due to the censorship. You can help to remedy this.
·
Therefore we invite
all pro-democracy institutions, scholars and working colleagues to download
and print out this documentation or burn it on a CD. Place it on the shelves of libraries
and hand it out as a gift to Chinese students on 4th June, the
anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre.
·
This way we can
make a contribution to preserve the memory of the victims and maybe inspire
a new generation of Chinese to see democracy as a possibility for China.
We call on everybody to support this initiative and to
mail this appeal to other institutions of education where there are Chinese students or
others who might be interested in preserving and distributing the knowledge
about the Tiananmen massacre.
The initiative of this appeal and informative
campaign is a co-operation between the democracy movement in Hong Kong and
Danish sculptor Jens Galschiot who in 1997 put up an
This year Jens
Galschiot has decided not to go to Hong Kong to
join the commemoration ahead of the 23rd anniversary of the
crackdown. On two occasions Hong Kong’s immigration authorities have refused
his entry without justification. So he will not risk once again booking an
expensive ticket and enduring a troublesome 24 hours flight and 6 hours of
interrogation just to be sent back immediately with the first plane.
It seems that China’s curbing of free speech has got a solid grip, also
in Hong Kong. Galschiot is just one of many critics who have been denied entry.
So the city is deprived of a cultural exchange that is taken for granted in all
open democratic societies. The expulsions
are a strident violation of the principle of ‘One country – Two systems’ that
was guarantied ahead of Hong Kong’s reunion with China in ‘97.
Useful links:
Download the documents about Tiananmen 1989: http://www.aidoh.dk/Tiananmen89
Galschiot’s activities related
to China: http://www.aidoh.dk/China-Activities
The democracy movement in Hong
Kong:
HK Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic
Movements of China
E-mail: contact@alliance.org.hk, internet: www.alliance.org.hk/english/index.html
Phone: +852 2782 6111
Contact
Jens Galschiot: E-mail: aidoh@aidoh.dk, Internet: www.aidoh.dk, tel. +45 6618 4058
Banevaenget 22, DK-5270 Odense N