(New York) Des dissidents chinois du mouvement de Tiananmen à Pékin en 1989 ont ouvert vendredi à New York l’unique musée au monde du « souvenir » des « rêves démocratiques du peuple chinois », à deux jours du 34e anniversaire de la « répression brutale » de ce soulèvement.
« Les évènements de 1989 ont eu un impact sur la Chine mais aussi sur le monde entier. Au moment où l’on se rend compte de la menace que représente le régime [du président chinois] Xi Jinping on Civilization We Must Commemorate [le 4 juin] 1989,” Wang Dan, founder of this small New York memorial museum and who was one of the great figures of the student movement in Tiananmen Square, told the press.
In a tiny office space in an unattractive building in midtown Manhattan, photos, videos, press clippings, posters, letters and banners about the historic democratic uprising that Beijing bloodily suppressed, with at least 1,000 protesters, are on display. peaceful killed.
Human rights organizations claim that the victims number in the thousands.
“We must commemorate those who sacrificed their lives and remember the democratic dreams of the Chinese people at the time,” urged Wang Dan, who served years in prison in China before being welcomed in 1998 to the United States. and do a history thesis at Harvard.
But “even in the United States, we feel the pressure and threats from the Chinese regime,” he told AFP.
For this dissident, “the events of 1989 are linked to the past but also to the present and the future” and he demanded that we “remember the true face of the Chinese Communist Party” of 1989 and today .
Many Chinese opponents and American politicians spoke at an inauguration ceremony for the museum, the only permanent exhibition in the world on Tiananmen after the closure in 2021 of a museum in Hong Kong.
In fact, the artistic effervescence that accompanied each year in Hong Kong the commemoration of Tiananmen has almost disappeared under the yoke of the pro-Beijing authorities.
For more than 30 years, tens of thousands of people have gathered every June 4 in Victoria Park in Hong Kong – returned by London to Beijing in 1997 – for a candlelight vigil.
But since China imposed a national security law in 2020, local authorities have shut down such gatherings, criminalized most dissent and stifled the democratic movement.
” There’s a story ”
In New York, a group of Chinese students living in the United States joined a Friday night march through Manhattan between the new Tiananmen Museum and the Chinese Consulate General.
Some wore masks and sunglasses to avoid being recognized and endangering their families back in China, AFP found.
Yuge Shi considered it “very important” to be able to demonstrate. “You know, the Chinese government killed a huge number of people in 1989, and they don’t want people to remember that. That is why, every year, we must stand here and tell all the people of the world that there is a History,” he told AFP.
“Nearly 40 years have passed between the ‘White Papers’ protests [de fin 2022, NDLR] and those of Tiananmen Square, and yet we are still led by the same government whose nature has not changed one iota,” a protester told AFP. Shawn, for security reasons.
At the end of November 2022, a rare movement of hostility towards the regime of President Xi Jinping and his draconian “zero COVID-19” policy had shaken China. Many demonstrators then waved blank sheets of paper to symbolize censorship.
During this unprecedented mobilization since the pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989, the protesters demanded an end to the harsh health restrictions against COVID-19 and demanded more freedoms, a month after the reappointment of Xi Jinping at the head of the country.