Mind "control"

While surfing the Duck, I ran across this op/ed piece by Wang Dan, a statement of grim determination from one of China’s premier patriots of freedom.

I was immediately reminded of an article in Time I read just a couple days ago which focused also upon Wang and his entrepreneurially inclined cousin.

Time’s ultimate assessment was not good—people in China are forgetting those incomprehensible days when the PRC murdered the budding intellectual flower of their youth.

Fortunately, folks have not forgotten at home, in China or overseas.

The PRC was particularly irked and reacted

… angrily to a pending US Congressional resolution that condemns the crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen protests and demands Beijing release from jail a leading democracy campaigner. "There are a handful of people in the United States Congress that cannot stand what happens in China and they are using all kinds of pretexts to defame China," foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao (劉建超) said. "They are not happy to see the improvements in China-US relations and they take pains to set up obstacles to the relationship.

"They will never win the hearts of the people and are bound to fail," he said.

The resolution, co-sponsored by senior Republican legislator Christopher Cox and Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was to come to a vote yesterday.

This person and his wife may be the campaigner in question. Others are unaccounted for as well.

Jiang Yanyong, the military doctor who exposed China's SARS cover-up last year, and his wife have disappeared on the eve of the 15th anniversary of the army crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, their daughter said yesterday.

The British Broadcasting Corporation yesterday reported that Liu Xiabao, a vocal critic of the Communist regime, had also disappeared, and could have been spirited out of Beijing. Other activists have been reported as missing.

Jiang, a hero to many Chinese for blowing the whistle on the government cover-up of an outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome flu-like virus, upset the authorities after he wrote a letter to the country's top leaders in February asking for a reappraisal of the student-led pro-democracy protests.

As I said, folks in China have not forgotten and have taken steps to insure at least some people remember the ‘inevitability of the incident.’

China has ordered officials to watch a new documentary on the Tiananmen Square demonstrations to persuade younger cadres that the 1989 army crackdown could not be avoided, government sources said yesterday.

The four-hour documentary has been shown to people holding ranks of ministry department director or higher since March in order to change the minds of a new generation of government officials who may disagree with the government line on the massacre.

Wang should buck up and stand a wee bit taller because he has put the fear of democracy into the minds of officialdom and the spark of liberty into the hearts of a billion.

Update:

China censors CNN over Tiananmen

I never realized one might 'smell' fear especially from so far away.

Wang, ... thanks, again.