Tiananmen Memory Haunts Demonstrators Still in China

On 15th Anniversary, Crackdown Is Ever-Present

BEIJING, June 3 -- There are quiet moments with his 4-year-old son at his apartment in the suburbs when Zheng Xuguang manages to forget the event that changed his life 15 years ago: the violent crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

He was a leader of the student protests, No. 9 on the government's "most-wanted" list, but he withdrew from dissident politics soon after leaving prison. He lost a series of jobs because police harassed his employers. He then decided to stay home and earn a living by playing the stock market.

Yet Zheng can't escape the memories: the exhilaration of marching through the city with a crowd of hundreds of thousands; the horror of a tank crushing a friend's legs; the pallor of a student's body carried out of a hospital on a wooden board; the voice of the doctor who told him 45 other bodies had already been taken away. Fifteen years ago Friday, the ruling Communist Party sent troops to end weeks of peaceful protests in Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, in an act of violence that China has yet to fully recover from.

At the time, the government issued a list of 21 most-wanted student leaders. Today, most of them have fled or been sent into exile in the United States or Europe. But Zheng is one of seven still living in China under the same authoritarian government that they protested against and that ordered its soldiers to fire on them. Their stories offer a lesson in how China has learned to live with what happened in Tiananmen Square, but without forgetting or forgiving.

The government has labored to put the June 4, 1989, massacre behind it, suppressing public discussion of the event while highlighting the rapid economic growth China has achieved in the years since. But the memory of Tiananmen continues to mar China's reputation abroad, and at home it remains a powerful symbol -- and potential rallying point -- for those dissatisfied with the Communist Party's monopoly on power.

The party defends the Tiananmen crackdown as necessary to maintain stability, and it has resisted calls to reassess its decision to send in troops. It has formally acknowledged errors before, including Mao Zedong's destructive 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, but Tiananmen is particularly sensitive because a reversal could prompt fresh demands for democratic reform. Earlier this year, the party began requiring officials to watch a four-hour documentary defending the crackdown, the Reuters news agency reported Thursday. And the Chinese leader ousted in 1989 for opposing the crackdown, Zhao Ziyang, remains under house arrest at age 84.

In recent weeks, the government has detained or placed under surveillance dozens of dissidents and relatives of those killed in 1989, as it does every year to prevent any commemoration of the June 4 anniversary. Among those who appear to have been detained is Jiang Yanyong, 72, a military surgeon who became a national hero after helping to expose the government's coverup of the SARS outbreak and who wrote a letter this year calling on the government to admit its error in ordering the Tiananmen crackdown.

In addition, human rights groups have identified about 125 people still in prison on charges related to their participation in the protests, mostly workers who rallied behind the students. The total number behind bars is estimated to exceed 500.

One of the seven student leaders still in China, Yang Tao, 34, was arrested again in May 1999 on subversion charges for attempting to mark the 10th anniversary of the massacre. He was released last year after completing a four-year sentence, but declined an interview request. A friend said that police had ordered him not to speak to reporters and that he was worried about how he would support his elderly father if he were arrested again.

Another of the student leaders, Wang Zhixin, 36, also said it was inconvenient for him to be interviewed. But four others agreed to discuss their lives since the crackdown, including two who asked to be interviewed by telephone because they were under police surveillance.

All of them said they had been barred from returning to college after being released from prison in the early 1990s and have had difficulty finding steady work because many people are afraid to hire or do business with them. They said police have also harassed their employers and warned not to give them promotions.

"I have a lot of spare time, so I often think about what happened," Zheng said recently, sitting in an armchair at home with his son in his lap. "Since 1995, I stopped participating in political activities. You might say I've been acting against my conscience. . . . I've been making some money, but my heart still feels the pressure from 1989."

Zheng, 36, a soft-spoken man with a long face, spent two years in prison for "assembling a crowd to disrupt traffic" in Tiananmen. He said he was consumed with anger when he was released. "I felt that if this murderous government wasn't overthrown and killed, I would never be mentally at peace," he recalled.

But then he made contact with old friends and found comfort in dissident politics, signing petitions, organizing a campaign on behalf of residents whose houses were being demolished and attending discussion forums on democratic reform.