Socialist Action (US)

The monthly paper of Socialist Action, San Francisco, 1983–2010

Three months after massacre, resistance continues in China

Socialist Action, Vol. 7, No. 9, September 1989 · scan p. 1 · Jim Henle · about 534 words

Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 1 →

Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: expect misread words, and now and then a caption or a line from a neighbouring story. For anything you quote, read the scan.

Scan page 1

the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to lift an injunction that had forbidden the group to block clinics. OR is planning a "rescue" (read clinic blockade) by veterans and police in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 10 and 11.

NOW activists in Boston have already held two huge planning meetings for the Nov. 12 mobilization and have public biweekly planning meetings scheduled. They are launching a campus campaign involving massive numbers of college students. Over 20 colleges will be leafleted at class registrations this month.

Regional building actions

NOW expects to have every bus in the Boston area reserved for transporting people to Washington, and they are also chartering trains and planes. Molly Yard will be in Boston the weekend of Oct. 12 to build the mobilization.

Chicago area NOW chapters are calling a public planning meeting in September and anticipate organizing bus centers throughout Illinois. Ohio NOW chapters in Cincinnati and Cleveland are already reserving buses for Nov. 12.

California NOW is building Nov. 12 by holding two regional actions—a march and rally in San Francisco on Oct. 15 and a rally in Los Angeles on Oct. 22. These are only a few highlights of the thousands of activities planned for making Nov. 12 an action of historical significance.

Socialist Action urges all of our readers to get involved. Call the NOW chapter in your area to offer your help.—the editors Two months after the June 4 massacre in Tiananmen Square, Chinese Public Security Minister Wang Fang stated, "Various domestic forces hostile to government will not resign themselves to defeat, and they will look further for new opportunities to attack us." This was a telling admission that the movement born in Tiananmen Square has not been crushed by government repression.

The Chinese Communist Party has successfully maintained a surface calm. The official press spews out reams of denunciations of the democracy movement as "a rebel clique and a large number of the dregs of society" inspired by capitalist ideas and organizations to "overthrow the State and the Party."

Signs are posted in Beijing with the message of normalization: "Happily, happily we go to work. Safely, safely we come home."

Some, however, are not making it home. Arrests are conservatively estimated at 10,000 or more, with 20 or more suspects jammed into prison cells built for six. There are reports of torture and beatings as well. Several workers have been executed.

These methods are not surprising in a regime where the death penalty is meted out for bicycle thievery and where—by the government's own figures—in 1987 alone there were 30,000 illegal detentions and 202 cases in which officers raped, beat to death, or seriously injured prisoners.

Movement not halted

What is surprising is that the repression does not seem to be halting the movement. Many of the "most wanted" students remain at large. Student activists fleeing the repression in Beijing have spread the truth of the events of June 4 across the country.

There are reports of work slowdowns (dai gong) in Beijing. Chen Ji, an official at the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, says (continued on page 18)

----- pull-quotes -----

LEGAL FUNDED ABORIN

Marxism and Feminism See pp. 9 - 12

← Contents of Vol. 7, No. 9, September 1989

Something wrong on this page? Tell us →