Zheng Receives Human Rights Award on Tiananmen Anniversary

Fang Zheng, who was among the peaceful protesters overrun by army tanks during the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, spoke at VOC's annual commemoration vigil in June.

A picture is worth a thousand words — but what if it is the wrong picture?

The iconic image of “tank man” standing down armored vehicles in Tiananmen Square — long seared into public memories of June 1989 — serves the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) just fine: tidy images numb the memory of blood and gore unleashed during Beijing’s vicious crackdown on peaceful protesters. The truth is, not all tanks stopped.

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) highlighted this on June 4, during our annual Tiananmen vigil at our Memorial statue in Washington, D.C., by honoring the hero Fang Zheng who was among the students cruelly overrun by army tanks during the protests of 1989.

After he pushed a young female student to safety, a tank crushed both Zheng’s legs, and he lost consciousness. He recovered after both of his legs were amputated, only to have Chinese authorities deny him a passport in an attempt to silence him about what happened.

To counter CCP’s Orwellian whitewashing of history, dozens of survivors attended to light candles and hear Zheng testify to an atrocity the Chinese government still denies ever happened.

The next day, VOC held a panel discussion on Capitol Hill called “Exploring the Contested History of Tiananmen Square” moderated by VOC research fellow Peter Mattis, featuring Robert Suetinger, former Director of the State Department’s Bureau for East Asia and the Pacific; award-winning journalist Natalie Liu; and Dr. Janli Yang of Initiatives for China.

Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ), co-chair of our bipartisan Congressional Caucus, also gave remarks in which he announced he was introducing a bill requiring intelligence agencies to report regularly on Confucius Institutes, the shadowy propaganda units Beijing has set up on US campuses by the hundreds to burnish China’s image abroad. We then presented our human rights award to Zheng for his bravery.