Chinese Dissidents Still Have Questions to Answer

To the editors:

As the unidentified audience member in Erica Levy's article "Dissident Speaks at KSG" (News, May 5), I have a different view of the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident.

One of the panelists, Wang Dan, said that the student protestors were trying to better the country, and the government was more radical because it responded with violence.

But although more than 10,000 protestors amassed outside the party headquarters in Beijing in a recent demonstration, the government resolved the problem peacefully. Why? Because these people practiced restraint, and the government was eager to find a resolution. There are hard-liners in the government, but there are also more open-minded party leaders that were instrumental to this resolution.

Instead, by urging students and workers to persist in a hunger strike and by preventing the government from welcoming Soviet leader Gorbachev on Tiananmen Square, the leaders of the protest humiliated and alienated Chinese leaders. The movement turned a paternalistic government into an authoritarian regime.

Ironically, the pro-democracy protest succeeded in turning the people against the government and the government against the people. Was the escalation of tension between the government and the people a tactical mistake? If so, should the student movement accept part of the responsibility for the tragic outcome?

Wang Dan absolves the movement from such responsibility by saying the motivations of the student protestors made their actions patriotic. I honor his patriotic motivations, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Could his good intentions atone for the lives of soldiers assaulted, murdered and burned on the streets by mobs? Could Wang's motivations alone compensate for the downfall of government moderates after June 4, and heal the trauma in the minds left by the incident? Furthermore, did Wang's idealism represent the ambitions of students who were dying from the hunger strike or colleagues who dined with Western reporters and later abandoned the cause to enter into profitable businesses in the West?

These are some questions the leaders of the prodemocracy movement must answer honestly. LI CHEN '01   May 6, 1999