Tiananmen at 30 Draws Bipartisan Leadership

This June, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) hosted a vigil and rally on Capitol Hill commemorating the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. We awarded our Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom to the Tiananmen Mothers — parents of students killed during the 1989 protests, who continue to openly demand justice despite being routinely put under house arrest, jailed, and forbidden to publicly mourn the loss of their sons and daughters. The announcement of the award was broadcast to another Tiananmen vigil in Hong Kong attended by over 180,000 people.

Speakers included Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Co-Chair of the Victims of Communism Congressional Caucus Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), Chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA), Member of the Commission Rep. Any Levin (D-MI), Chinese human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng, Chinese democracy activist and former political prisoner Wei Jingsheng, President of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and VOC Advisory Council Member Dr. Katrina Lantos Swett, President of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers Reggie Littlejohn, and Uyghur human rights activist Rushan Abbas.

The June 4 rally was co-hosted by 24 human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, China Aid, Freedom House, Human Rights Watch, the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights, and the World Uyghur Congress.

That same day, VOC Executive Director Marion Smith also published two op-eds, one in The Wall Street Journal, highlighting the Tiananmen Mothers as an archetypical target of the Chinese Communist Party’s brutal oppression and historical revisionism, and another in The Hill challenging policymakers to hold the Chinese regime accountable for Tiananmen and ongoing human rights abuses today.

Later that week, Marion Smith spoke on a panel VOC co-hosted with the Hoover Institution exploring the legacy of Tiananmen Square and prospects for reform in China. The other panelists were Chinese democracy advocate and former political prisoner Wei Jingsheng, Hoover fellow Michael Auslin, student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement Wang Dan, and Claremont McKenna College Professor Minxin Pei.