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Beijing is believed to be behind court bid to secure account of life inside Communist HQ
In the early hours of 4 June 1989, Li Rui, a veteran of the Chinese Communist party (CCP), was standing on the balcony of his apartment on Chang’an Boulevard in central Beijing. He could see tanks rolling towards Tiananmen Square.
For weeks, up to a million protesters had been gathering peacefully in Beijing’s plaza, demanding political reform. But they failed. Instead, as Li observed from his unique vantage point, troops opened fire, killing an estimated several thousands of civilians. It was the worst massacre in recent Chinese history. “Soldiers firing randomly with their machine guns, sometimes shooting the ground and sometimes shooting toward the sky,” Li wrote in his diary. A “black weekend”.
The first-hand account of an event that the Chinese government has systematically tried to distort and erase from the historical record is one of thousands of observations noted in Li’s diaries, which he kept meticulously between 1938 and 2018. Few people, especially not of Li’s stature, have kept such detailed records of this tumultuous era in Chinese history. Now those diaries are the subject of a hotly disputed lawsuit, the trial of which begins on Monday.
Personal effects are personal. If a country is going to burn or otherwise get rid of history others have a right to keep it from that country. Historical artifacts deserve to be preserved. Sometimes that means building protection around them (statue of David during wwii) other times that means leaving the country until it becomes more friendly to the truth.
The wife as stated in the article is likely a front for the CCP who are obsessed with removing any “harmful” history from peoples consciousness.
Oh ya, I love history and definitely agree that it should be preserved. I also believe in national self sovereignty. There’s no guarantee they’re going to burn the book or that she’s a front for the CPP (although it’s definitely likely), she could just want her husband’s physical diary back, hence not caring if they’re copied over first. That’s perfectly plausible and normal in my eyes. In that vein, I don’t think the British Museum should have all the records and artifacts they’ve stolen. And those places don’t tend to give them back once the victim country is stable, either.
On the other hand, I don’t think Isis, for example, deserved to have control over their historical sites when they were actively hostile to them, and if China was going to rip out pages or something, then that’s obviously bad, too. But in this case, at least the history would still be preserved first from the copying the daughter is doing. That’s why it’s kinda complicated in my eyes. I just wish I knew what the wife or the CPP was going to do with it.