On the night of June 3-4,
1989, troops of China’s People’s Liberation Army
moved into Beijing to crush the pro-democracy demonstrations
that began in April of that year. In parks, streets,
subway stations, and even hospitals and homes, innocent ordinary
Chinese men and women were murdered by their government.
The number killed remains
unknown, although estimates range from several hundred to
several thousand. The government of the People’s
Republic of China insists that the demonstrators were counter-revolutionary
criminals. Tens of thousands were imprisoned in the political
crackdown that followed.
A few years afterward, Ding Zilin,
the mother of a murdered student, began to investigate the
massacre. Eventually, she and other victims’ relatives
formed the Tiananmen Mothers. They have gathered information
about nearly 200 victims of China’s Communist regime.
This map, which is based on their work, shows the places
where most of these victims were killed or the hospitals
to which their bodies were taken. Several known victims remain
unaccounted for.
Despite their efforts, Ding Zilin
and the Tiananmen Mothers are unable to
mourn their relatives freely. For their work, they
have been subject to surveillance and harassment, as speaking
publicly about the protest movement of 1989 and its violent
suppression is still prohibited. Despite this prohibition,
Jiang Qisheng, a scientist and a participant in the demonstrations,
called on his fellow citizens in 2004 to honor the victims
on the 15th anniversary of the massacre. After giving an
interview on Radio Free Asia, he was arrested and served
four years in prison. That same year, Shi Tao, was jailed
for ten years for making public a Chinese government directive
to the media warning not to cover efforts to commemorate
the victims of Tiananmen.
The Chinese Communist Party has many, many
millions of anonymous victims. With the twentieth
anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre drawing near,
this map has been created to honor the memory of all of the
victims of Chinese Communism by assisting those who wish
to pause during a visit to Beijing to remember the victims
of Tiananmen. It is inspired by the efforts of the Tiananmen
Mothers and Gunter Demnig, a German artist has placed over
10,000 plaques outside the places from which German Jews
were deported to concentration camps. As Demnig has said, "To
carve the name of a single person on a single marker is to
say...'This was someone just like you or me. Not just an
anonymous victim of history.'"
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The list of known victims, arranged by the street and hospital
locations on the map, can be read here.
The Chinese-language version of this list
can be found at the web site of the Tiananmen Mothers, here.
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MAPS PRODUCED BY ELLEN BORK,
TIAN JIAN, AND PHILIP CHALK
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