Chinese speaks out
1989 1989-09Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 19 →
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The following are excerpts from remarks by Chinese dissident Lin Hsi-Ling to a European rally in solidarity with the Chinese workers and students held in Paris on June 7, 1989.
Lin Hsi-Ling was a participant in the Youth Brigade of the Red Army during the victorious 1949 revolution. At the age of 21, during the period of the "Hundred Flowers," she was arrested and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
At the time of her arrest in 1958, she denounced the party and state bureaucracy. A brochure published shortly after her arrest quotes her as saying: "The party and the state have become a bureaucratic apparatus that governs the people without democracy. ... It is necessary to fundamentally change the superstructure of the state by means of a total transformation involving the full mobilization and upheaval of the masses."
Over 30 years after she made these remarks, the Chinese workers and students rose up against bureaucratic rule to demand genuine socialist democracy. Lin HsiLing's comments below came three days after the massacre at Tiananmen Square.
I am happy to be here among you. You [rally organizers] were the first to join us in front of the Chinese Embassy.
At the root of the recent events in China is the discontent of the students and workers with the ruling bureaucracy. Corruption is unbearable. The great bulk of the workers receive extremely low wages, while the state functionaries are paid very high wages in addition to their hidden privileges. The root cause of the current revolution is not unlike that of the 1949 revolution: It is a revolution against the oppressive sectors of society.
The current Chinese leaders are attempting to open the road to capitalism. There is no democracy, no freedom. Some people in France say, "It is not yet capitalism." For my part, I think there is too much capitalism! What the workers and students are doing in China is what you did in 1789—the revolution.
The demonstrations were peaceful. The brutal response by the government is what compells us to make a revolution. Shame to the Chinese government, which is not only an enemy of the Chinese people but of people throughout the world! We hope that you will aid us in the struggle against this regime. Long live internationalism!