Ding Zilin

When Ding Zilin heard that her only son, Jiang Jielian, had been killed by government troops on a Beijing street on the night of June 3, 1989, she immediately knew what every other devastated parent knew that night: You are supposed to shut up about it. Your son was part of a “counterrevolutionary riot.” The stability of Communist Party rule was at stake. Your son is dead but he, not those who killed him, was at fault. By speaking out, you risk further punishment.

The suppression of the 1989 protests in Beijing caused hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries, but the families of those killed or hurt remained uniformly silent. Everyone knew that there were other victims, but who would be the first to speak? A modern Chinese proverb says, “The bird that sticks its neck out gets its head blown off.” The government had begun its strategy of intimidating people into silence while waiting, months and then years, for memory to fade.

But during the 1990s Ding Zilin began to defy all this. She sought out other bereaved parents and built a network called Tiananmen Mothers that, besides providing mutual support, calls for the release of those still jailed for the 1989 protests and a public hearing on what happened. Last year Ding produced a list of 186 people who were killed, and published (in Hong Kong) a 417-page book telling many of the stories of their grief-stricken families.

How could she dare to do this, or get away with it? It helped that she began with good political credentials. A professor of philosophy at People’s University in Beijing, originally a Party training school, Ding was well within the system until her son’s death jolted her out of it; the government could not easily brand her a dissident. It helped, too, that she got early support from other parents who had lost loved ones to the massacre, and that by the late 1990s the Tiananmen Mothers were attracting some international attention. Yet the most important factor, especially at first, was simple courage.

Ding, now 70, and her Tiananmen Mothers have been credited with bringing sorely needed comfort to the families of the victims of 1989. But potentially their contribution to China could be much broader. Many have noticed a “values crisis” in China today. Moneymaking has come to dominate public life. Corruption, fraud and cynicism have spun out of control and honesty is often viewed as a form of naiveté. China needs a voice that sinks a stake in the ground and says: No. Truth matters. Responsibility matters. This society needs values. What better than a mother’s love?