A group of 1989 dissidents allowed to pay their respects to Zhao Ziyang
Beijing (AsiaNews/SCMP) A group of six surviving dissidents from the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, including two who are disabled, were finally able to pay their respects to the late Zhao Ziyang, former leader of China's Communist Party. Mr Zhao died in a Beijing hospital on January 17 at the age of 85, after 15 years' house arrest for opposing the crackdown.
Pang Meiqing, left disabled from the waist down after a bullet sliced through his spinal cord, and Qi Zhiyong, who lost a leg, drove their three-wheeled motorcycles to Zhao's tightly guarded courtyard home in Beijing on Sunday and tearfully paid their final respects.
"He made huge sacrifices and a humanitarian choice. He paid a very high price," Mr Pang, 41, said yesterday. Police had prevented Mr Pang from leaving his home until after Zhao's funeral on January 29.
"He's a great man. He's a giant figure," said Mr Pang, who was forced to retire from a state enterprise that makes printing presses at the age of 32 due to a "long-term illness". He had joined the Tiananmen protesters and was rescuing the injured when he was shot.
Other mourners who went to Zhao's home on Sunday included AIDS activist Hu Jia and pro-democracy campaigner Li Hai, who was jailed for nine years for compiling a list of people jailed over the Tiananmen protests.
Mr Hu, who made the appointment with Zhao's family, said a bit of luck and swift action had enabled the group to enter Zhao's residence.
"The security apparatus has a place opposite the entrance to Zhao's residence," he said. "The police were talking to people and when they saw us, they started walking towards us. We pressed the doorbell of Zhao's residence and soldiers came out to let us in. It was only possible because we had made an appointment with the family."
"Zhao's family would love everybody who wants to mourn Zhao to come. But they cannot," he said. "They are also very repressed."
Two of Zhao's daughters-in-law received the mourners, who knelt, bowed and wept before a portrait of Zhao hanging in his study, which was turned into a mourning hall bedecked with flowers.
Mr Hu said the group stayed in the memorial hall for 35 minutes.
"If Chinese Communist Party [leaders] were all good men like you, China could be saved and there wouldn't be people like us who were crippled under despotic rule," Mr Qi said, leaning against crutches and choking with emotion.
Mr Qi was a bystander shot when troops moved into Tiananmen Square to crush the protests.
Earlier on Sunday, Zhang Xianling , whose 19-year-old son was shot and killed in the 1989 massacre, handed Zhao's family a copy of an open letter by a group of Tiananmen mothers. "Our hearts are bleeding," it read.
Nervous that the former leader's death might trigger protests, authorities tightened security in Beijing and permitted only a scaled-down funeral for Zhao who, as premier in the 1980s, launched market reforms that set the country on course to becoming an economic powerhouse.
Beijing has rejected calls for a reassessment, saying Zhao split the party and made "serious mistakes"" in handling the protests of June 1989.
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31/05/2016 18:51
