BBC Reports on the Tiananmen Mothers

March 8, 2005

In "China's Problem with Dissent," journalist Haoyu Zhang of BBC Chinese.com looks at what he describes as "China's continued intolerance of any form of political dissent." The article focuses on Ding Zilin, a retired university professor in her 70s, who leads the "Tiananmen Mothers." The group comprises Ding and a few other parents who lost sons and daughters during and after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. Since that time, the Tiananmen Mothers have been calling on the Chinese government to apologize.

The article notes that the government's response to their request has been to subject them to "imprisonment, house-arrest, phone-tapping, and constant surveillance." According to the report, Ms. Ding had just told the BBC "I can't even go and get groceries without them following me and harassing me; neither Deng Xiaoping nor Jiang Zemin treated me as badly as…" when the phone line went dead.