Houston Community News >> Ad on Tiananmen Killings Takes China By Surprise

6/5/2007 BEIJING- Chinese authorities were investigating yesterday how an advertisement saluting mothers of students killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown found its way into a newspaper in southwest China.

The massacre is still taboo and the government has rejected public calls to overturn the verdict that the student-led demonstrations were “counter-revolutionary”, or subversive. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed when the army crushed the pro-democracy protests on June 4, 1989.

“It’s under investigation,” a staff member at the editor-in-chief’s office of the Chengdu Evening News in Sichuan province said by telephone. She declined further comment.
The advertisement, appearing in the lower right corner of page 14 on Monday, read: “Paying tribute to the strong-(willed) mothers of June 4 victims.”

Authorities were questioning newspaper staff to try to find out who placed the advertisement in the classified section and if any staff member collaborated by turning a blind eye to it, sources with knowledge of the incident said.

One source who requested anonymity said the authorities had identified the person who placed the ad as a local activist.
Wang Yi, who teaches law at Chengdu University in Sichuan’s provincial capital, said the authorities had no legal basis to prosecute that person.

Few readers would have noticed the politically sensitive ad because the font was small. But many Chengdu residents received cell phone text messages alerting them to it, Wang said.

Newspaper advertisements need to be vetted in China and it was unclear how the ad slipped past censors.
It was also unclear if there has been any sackings or demotions.

“This is a serious political incident,” Wang, the academic, said, adding that staff are likely to be punished. Two sources said the authorities were considering suspending publication for a week. “It would not be a very good decision ... things would get worse,” Wang said.

The 32-page tabloid boasts a circulation of 200,000. It was founded in 1956 and served for decades as the mouthpiece of the Chengdu city government. It became a metropolitan daily in 2001.

In 1991, the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, published a poem which if read diagonally contained a crypted call for then premier Li Peng to step down.

Li was reviled because he declared martial law in Beijing during the 1989 pro-democracy protests. He is known as the “Butcher of Beijing” for his role in the crackdown.

The Communist Party’s then chief, Zhao Ziyang, was toppled for opposing the crackdown.

China’s Foreign Ministry indicated that the government had no interest in an open reckoning of the period.
“We have already made a clear conclusion of the political turmoil in the late 1980s,” ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said.

(Contributed by Reuters)