People of 1989: Chen Ziming (陈子明)

Born in January, 1952, Chen Ziming grew up with the Cultural Revolution and the era of reform and openness after that. Right after middle school, he joined the wave of "send-down" students and spent 6 years in the rural area of Inner Mongolia. In 1974, he was fortunate enough to become a student in the Beijing College of Chemical Engineering. Yet, he was soon reported for having written politically incorrect material in his private letters. He was expelled from the school and sent to a reforming labor camp as a counter-revolutionary.

In April, 1976, Chen Ziming happened to be in Beijing and joined in the spontaneous mass movement later known as the April Fifth Movement. He became one of the few visible leaders and participated in the negotiations with authorities. In the ensuing crackdown, he escaped capture only because he was already back in the labor camp. Later, when the verdict of that movement was overturned, he was hailed as a national hero and promised a brighter future.

However, Chen Ziming soon participated in the Democratic Wall movement, advocating democracy and freedom. He founded the popular undergrand journal Beijing Spring. Later in 1980, he became one of the candidates in the first-ever election campaign in colleges and was elected a people's representative in his district.

In the 1980s, Chen Ziming took advantage of the freer environment and founded the Beijing Social and Economic Sciences Research Institute -- the very first private think tank in the Communist China. He grew the Institute to possess its own publishing, remote education, journals, and opinion-polling operations and research efforts. Through the Institute, he also gathered and supported many young intellectuals who had participated in the democratic movements and thus had difficulties with authorities.


Chen Ziming paid close attention as soon as the 1989 student movement broke out. He made donations for the budding Beijing Students Autonomous Federation and also helped students choose their slogans in the early demonstrations. But because of his background, he kept a low profile.

After the hunger strike, Chen Ziming and Wang Juntao set up a temporary meeting place at Jimen Hotel with the resources from their Institute to facilitate communication and coordination among the many factions of intellectuals. Wang Juntao and others from the Institute would then get involved with the efforts to go-between government officials and students and later organizing the Capital Joint Conference to lead the movement directly. But Chen Ziming continued to stay behind the scenes.


After the crackdown and an unsuccessful escape, Chen Ziming and Wang Juntao were designated by the government as the "black hands" behind the movement. They each received a 13 year sentence, the harshest of any leaders of the movement. While serving his time, Chen Ziming was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.  He refused the government offer of going abroad as an exile and chose to serve out his sentence in China instead.

After his release in 2002, Chen Ziming spent his time writing and participating in limited social activities, including co-signing the Charter 08. In more recent years, he was allowed to limited travel abroad as well as seeking medical treatment in Boston.

Chen Ziming died of cancer in Beijing on October 21, 2014.



People of 1989

People of 1989: Liu Di (刘迪)

The name Liu Di (刘迪) did not appear in many historical records or literature of the 1989 student moment. That was probably how he liked it.

Born in 1950 in Beijing, Liu Di belonged to a slightly older generation to the students at Tiananmen. He first became famous for participating in the April Fifth Movement in 1976 and landed himself in the most wanted list back then. He was captured and put in jail later that year and served 10 months until the verdict of that movement was overturned by the government.

Along with his fellow "April Fifth Heroes" Chen Ziming and Wang Juntao, Liu Di quickly got himself involved in the 1978 Democracy Wall and then 1980 election campaign in Beijing. His home in the city often served as the publishing house of the underground journal Beijing Spring and gathering place of various dissidents. Later, Liu Di helped Chen Ziming in the founding of their influential and independent think tank.

During the 1989 student movement, Liu Di was one of many older intellectuals who volunteered to assist and advice student leaders from behind the scenes. He was one of the organizers of the Capital Joint Conference which tried but failed to gain leadership to the movement as it was falling apart after the end of hunger strike.

After the massacre, Liu Di was arrested on July 10, 1989 and spent 9 months in jail. During the 1990s, he was active in raising international awareness of the human rights conditions of political prisoners in China. For the past decades, he was consistently denied of jobs or rights to travel abroad and had to survive by his wife's wage and his parents' help. But he never hesitated to help others who are in political trouble.

Liu Di died of cancer on October 19, 2011. He was 61 years old.

People of 1989

Historical Events: April Fifth Movement

The year 1976 was a pivotal year in the history of modern China. The decade-old Cultural Revolution had not yet officially ended but largely faded away. Within that year, top leaders of the first-generation communist revolutionaries, including Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, would pass away. A devastating earthquake would shake a large city and cause hundreds of thousands deaths. Mao Zedong's own death in the fall was followed by the ouster of his closest allies in a palace coup that would eventually pave the way for the resurrection of Deng Xiaoping.

The harbinger of things to come for that year occurred days after the new year's day. On January 8, the beloved premier Zhou Enlai succumbed to cancer. Fearing for growing dissent, the government downplayed the memorial activities that winter. People, who had come to see Zhou Enlai as a kinder and gentler alternative to Chairman Mao Zedong himself, were left unsatisfied.

April 4, 1976 was the Qingming festival, the Chinese equivalent of memorial day. Spontaneously, Beijing residents came to Tiananmen Square in thousands to lay wreathes and flowers at the base of the Monument to People's Heroes. Banners, posters, and poems were dedicated to the late premier who had died three months ago. Many of them expressed anger and dissatisfaction to the governing regime.

The next day, April 5, people returned to the Square and found all their dedications cleaned away. Angry crowd grew into a massive protest. Tens of thousands of them milled around the Square in bursts of demonstrations. In a couple of occasions, they threatened to storm the Great Hall of People but did not actually carry it out. While a few of their representatives were engaged in a fruitless negotiation with the authorities, mobs overturned a few government vehicles in the Square and set a small building on fire.

That night, tens of thousands police and workers militia armed with clubs and belts rushed into the Square and forcefully cleared the scene. Numerous injuries, but no deaths, were reported. In the ensuring aftermath, the authorities stripped Deng Xiaoping, who had briefly returned to power under Zhou Enlai's protection, all his titles and blamed him as the conspirator behind the movement. Activists identified from the crowd were jailed for "counter-revolutionary" crimes. It was not until more than two years later, after Deng Xiaoping regained power again, that the verdict of the event was overturned. The jailed activists were then hailed as heroes.

Chen Ziming was one of those young activists on the scene but he escaped capture by chance. He was in Beijing at the time during a furlough from his forced stay in a labor camp, where he was sent after expressing dissenting opinions in personal correspondences. He returned to the labor camp after the movement was suppressed. Even though his pictures were showcased in newspapers in the ensuring manhunt, nobody bothered to check those who had already been detained.

Wang Juntao was not as lucky. He was only seventeen years old and in high school at the time. But he led his class into the Square to join the movement and posted two of his own poems. He was put in jail for more than a year. Later, as a national hero, Wang Juntao was anointed as a potential future leader and received much of public fame. But he quickly abandoned them by plunging into even more dissident activities.

The still younger Shen Tong also experienced this movement first hand when his father took him to the Square to read the poems. He was too young, however, to actually comprehend what was going on.

The April Fifth Movement, although brief, laid a solid ground for the expression the public sentiment supporting the reform ideas of Deng Xiaoping. It would only take the death of Mao Zedong half a year later to open the door.

How the Other Tiananmen Incident was Overturned

Before June 4, 1989, there was the "Tiananmen Incident" of April 5, 1976, also known as the April Fifth Movement. During that time, thousands of Beijing residents gathered at Tiananmen Square to commemorate the late Premier Zhou Enlai, who had passed away a few months ago. The spontaneous display of emotion was met by brutality of the government, who used clubs and heavy boots to disperse the crowd and later persecuted the active participants they had identified.

Wang Juntao was only 15 years old at the time. He was sent to jail for having organized his high school class to the Square and posted three poems he had written. Chen Ziming escaped arrest by returning to his forced-labor farm, where he was already serving a sentence for expressing dissident opinions in private letters.

The verdict of that "Tiananmen Incident" was overturned in 1978 after Deng Xiaoping regained his power. A recent article in China Newsweek recalled the moments when the "Incident" became the April Fifth Movement. Wang Juntao and Chen Ziming, along with other young leaders, were then hailed as national heroes.

Xujun Eberlein at Inside-Out China added her own experiences and observations of these events.