2026 年 3 月 24 日
（編按：支聯會案審訊被告之一鄒幸彤早前申請海外專家任證人被拒。她在約一年前以「在記憶與改寫記憶的抗爭……我們未完的故事」為主題，邀請海內外參與過六四運動、六四集會及支聯會活動的人士書寫證詞，有多人響應。《追光者》獲授權轉載證詞全文。）
林培瑞簡介：
今年82歲的林培瑞，精通英文、中文、法文和日文，1976年獲哈佛大學中國歷史博士。1972年，中國乒乓球代手表團訪美推動「乒乓外交」，林培瑞擔任美方的中文繙譯。1989年 「六四」期間，林培瑞擔任美國科學院中國辦事處主任，曾把參與天安門民運的中國知名科學家方勵之夫婦，帶入美國駐華大使館躲避。他也是《中國「六四」真相》（《天安門文件》）英文版的編輯之一，並曾將《零八憲章》譯成英文版。
To whom it may concern:
Note: This witness is offered by Prof Perry Link. He was Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University at the time, and during the academic year 1988-89 was serving as the Director of the Beijing Office of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China.
This report consists of two parts: 1) events I witnessed first-hand during June 3 to June 5, 1989, in Beijing; 2) my efforts to maintain and record memory of the events.
1. Events I witnessed first-hand June 3-5, 1989
On the evening of June 3 my wife and I and two American friends travelled by car from the Friendship Hotel, on the west side of Beijing to a Mongolian restaurant on the city’s east side. On the trip back from the restaurant, we saw military trucks, some filled with soldiers. We saw ordinary citizens approaching them to talk. Some were offering drinks and flowers to the soldiers. An odd pall hung over the city, but nothing that made me imagine that a massacre was imminent. When our driver let us off, he told me he would now be going down to the Square to “help.” Help? I was puzzled. He reached under his car seat and took out a blade, about eight or nine inches long. “Something might happen,” he said, “I need to be there.” I might have urged him more strongly to go home instead, but I still did not imagine that the odd atmosphere would turn lethal. I went to sleep in a normal manner.
My wife wakened me the next morning. “The massacre we were afraid of has happened.” I got onto my bicycle without breakfast. The Friendship Hotel is adjacent to the campus of People’s University, and I pedaled to the university’s front gate, which was wide open. Students had set up a makeshift broadcasting stand and were using it to allow witnesses from different parts of the city to tell what they had seen. A group of maybe 50 or 60 people had gathered to listen. Witnesses came from Muxidi, Xidan, Liubukou, Tiananmen, elsewhere. Some screamed their words, out of control with pain. Others spat their rage though clenched their teeth. They told of rolling tanks, rampant fire, murder. I saw no wounds myself, but did see bloody clothing stacked on the backs of two bicycles. I traded looks with people in the crowd of listeners who had gathered. Old, young, male, female—none of that mattered. All bore the same shocked, vulnerable expression. It was not indignation, but something prior to that, something that preceded even the thought how could this be? I saw a few young black men—perhaps African students at the university. Same stunned look. Some farmers approached, pushing their carts of vegetables from the suburbs to market in the city. They stopped to listen and soon wore the same stunned look. It occurred to me later that jolting people of such varied backgrounds to a least-common-denominator level of human response and finding the response to be so elementally similar is perhaps all the evidence one might need to establish the universality of human rights.
After nearly an hour at the gate of People’s University, I decided to go visit Chinese friends who lived nearby. For each I had the same two questions: How do you understand what has happened? And: Is there anything I can do to help?
Around noon I arrived at the eleventh floor of the building where Fang Lizhi and Li Shuxian lived. I pressed the doorbell and Li Shuxian answered. Before I asked anything she was spitting out words: “They’re mad! Really! They’ve gone crazy!” The couple had been hearing from friends all morning that they were on arrest lists and should flee if they could. One warning was especially credible because it came, disguised in a hometown accent, from a friend high enough in the regime to know whereof he spoke. (They did not tell me this at the time; I learned it from reading Fang’s autobiography later.) When I arrived, Fang was sitting at his desk and seemed remarkably composed, given all that was swirling around him. He said he was not inclined to leave. This was his home. He had done nothing wrong. It is a basic human right that a person who has done nothing wrong may stay in his home. “I’m staying.”
Li Shuxian accompanied me back to the door. I told her that if she and Fang found anything that I could do to help, I was ready. She said, “Thank you. You can see Fang’s decision. But if there is anything, I will call and invite your children for tea.” She meant my children Monica and Nathan, aged 8 and 4. I bicycled back to the Friendship Hotel.
About 4:00 p.m. the telephone rang. It was Li Shuxian inviting Monica and Nathan to tea. I looked for my office car and driver and couldn’t find them. (Remembering the knife and the will to “help” from the night before, I worried for our driver.) I walked to the front of the Friendship Hotel and found—what luck!—that there was one taxi there and it was available. I engaged it and we headed to the Fangs’ building. They were waiting outside, their son Fang Zhe with them, the three carrying only small “airline bags.” I offered to bring them to the nearby Shangri-la Hotel, registered for a room in my own name and told the three Fangs I would return the next day.
The next day I spent some time trying to find our car and driver. I did, and the driver was all right and ready to help. With him I went to the Shangri-la and, while he waited, went to the Fangs’ room. They had not left it all night, so I went to get some snacks to eat while we studied what to do. The television in the room was showing CNN, on which we could images of tanks rolling in Tiananmen Square and talking heads not knowing quite what to say. Fang had a long-standing luncheon date for that day, June 5, with T.D. Lee (Li Zhengdao), winner of the 1957 Nobel Prize in physics. Fang thought he should honor the appointment if possible—but didn’t know if it would be possible. Li Shuxian, worried for his safety, was opposed to that idea. She wanted to call her students at Peking University to see what was happening there. She was able to get through, and as she spoke her expression grew increasingly tense and distressed. Fang Lizhi, Fang Zhe, and I could hear only her side of the conversation, so had to wait until she was finished to hear what the students had said.
They had told her that the army was about to move on the campus. (In fact this did not happen, but the fear was sincere.) They were stock-piling weapons—bricks, stone slabs, whatever they had—and were going to pinming ‘fight to the end’. They hoped that Professors Li and Fang would protect their lives and carry on. The emotion of this phone call is what pushed Li Shuxian practically to insist, and Fang Lizhi to agree, that we head for the U.S. embassy. Fang gave up the idea of looking for T.D. Lee. For me, practical worries began popping to mind. We had our office car, but might we be tailed? Blocked? The trip across the city, which should have taken forty minutes at most, took about two hours. Major roads were blocked where protesters had dragged Beijing’s articulated buses across them and set the buses afire. By now the fires were out but the burned blue-grey shells of the buses, like enormous dead caterpillars, prevented any vehicle larger than a motorcycle from getting by. Winding through small streets and alleyways, we reached the embassy about noon. We were not blocked, followed, or hampered by defective tail lights. Why? Probably, as with our passage from the Horleys’ to the Shangri-la in February, because the authorities had given no specific marching orders. Without those, nothing. At the embassy gate, the regular guard was not there. Instead two young PLA soldiers stood nearby. They were armed with machine guns but oddly lackadaisical in attitude. They seemed almost bored as they let us in without even asking questions.
Inside, two high-ranking U.S. diplomats, Raymond Burghardt and McKinney Russell, joined us. Fang Lizhi began by asking the Americans if the meeting could be kept secret. He was worried that the regime, if it knew, would use the fact to spread a story that the Tiananmen demonstrations had all been a U.S. plot of which Fang Lizhi was an architect. Burghardt explained that no, we cannot keep your presence secret. Our Chinese staff in the embassy, who are supplied by the government, have already observed your presence, and the room we are in now is not “secure.” This very conversation cannot be regarded as secret. Soon, as if to punctuate the point, we heard machine-gun fire nearby. McKinney Russell walked to a window and looked outside. PLA trucks were passing by outside while soldiers riding in their beds fired guns into the air. Russell speculated that the purpose was to frighten foreigners into departing China. Many lived in the neighborhood, which was the diplomatic district. Russell may have been right, because that night the Beijing airport was overrun with foreigners seeking to leave on flights almost regardless of their destinations. My wife and two children were among them, so later could describe the scene to me in detail.
As for the Fangs, the two diplomats explained that U.S. “political asylum” would not be possible. This category of protection can be granted only after a person has arrived in the U.S. and demonstrates a likelihood of persecution if he or she returns to the home country. In an embassy, one can ask for “temporary refuge” if one is in physical danger that is both “immediate” and “grave.” Fang and Li would qualify by those criteria, but there could be no promises or estimates about how long they would have to stay and of course no control of how the Chinese government would characterize the Fangs in their publicity. (Another reason for the diplomats’ reluctance—which they did not mention to the Fangs but I learned about later—is that they were fearful that if it became known that the U.S. embassy was receiving refugees, they might be flooded with thousands of them.) In sum, the costs to the image of the democracy movement weighed heavily on Fang, and the personal danger to Fang weighed heavily on Li. The American diplomats suggested that the Fangs apply for U.S. visas, which could be processed quickly. No one answered the question of how they would get from the embassy to an airport, but the Fangs did fill out forms and handed over their Chinese passports.
The long afternoon of discussion was interrupted by our chance viewing on CNN of the famous scene of the courageous young man who stood in front of a row of tanks. We saw it in real time. I did not appreciate that the images would become iconic. Amazing!, I thought, but then turned back to the visa applications. The volley of gunfire into the air an hour earlier had also been amazing.
Around 4:00 p.m., when everything to say seemed to have been said, Fang turned to me, eyebrows lifted high as if to suggest, “I guess there’s no choice,” and said, “We’d better go.” Press reports said that the Fangs were “turned away” at the embassy. I wouldn’t put it quite that way. The American diplomats did raise warnings about the risks involved in staying, but my sense was that they would have allowed the Fangs to stay if the Fangs had said that was their choice. I can’t read Li Shuxian’s mind, but my guess is that she would have chosen to stay. But she deferred to Fang, and we left.
Where would the Fangs go? My friend Jay Mathews—who was generally aware of the Fangs’ plight—was going to Shanghai to cover events there, but he had a room, number 400, in the Jianguo Hotel, in the diplomatic quarter. He told me we could use that room if necessary, and when we left the embassy I mentioned to the American diplomats that we likely would be doing this. We went to the Jianguo and ate dinner in its Cantonese restaurant, where a number of admiring strangers recognized Fang and congratulated him. Then we then went to room 400, where I left the Fangs before and I headed back across the city to my family.
The next morning I called the Jianguo, room 400. No answer. I called several times. No answer. I worried. Three days later I received a call from a Western journalist. “Professor Link, we have a report that Fang Lizhi is in the U.S. embassy; can you confirm?” Of course I could not confirm. By then the Fangs were, in fact, in the embassy, but I did not know the fact. It would be thirteen months before I saw them again, at the Newark NJ airport, and heard from them what had happened after I left them that night.
Around 11:00, Ray Burghardt telephoned to apprise them that he and McKinney Russell would like to come see them—that very night. When the two arrived they said that they were inviting the Fang family to return to the embassy “as the personal guests of President Bush.” They could stay as long as they liked.
What caused this abrupt change in the American posture? Neither the Fangs nor I witnessed this part of the story, but we learned it later from other sources, most notably James Mann’s book About Face. Late afternoon in Beijing is early morning in Washington, so when the Fangs and I were heading for the Jianguo Hotel on January 6, the day was just dawning for the China policy people in Washington. They were shocked when they heard the news that their embassy in Beijing had turned away Fang Lizhi. This was China’s no. 1 dissident and a man already well known in the West. Disaster! After some hurried consultation a phone call ordering a reversal of policy went out late in the morning (late in the evening Beijing time). Washington’s pressing concern was not to protect a courageous human being or to express political support for Chinese free-thinking. It was American politics: what if something bad happened to Fang? What would voters think of an administration that put a famous Chinese dissident in jeopardy?
From Fang’s autobiography, which he wrote during the time he was in refuge in the U.S. embassy, I learned that the dramatic “personal invitation of the president” meant that “matters had clearly escalated.” He agreed to leave the hotel and go to the embassy. Li Shuxian felt relieved. Fang asked Burghardt and Russell if this, the second of their two entries in the embassy that day, could this time be kept secret. He thought the diplomats had agreed to this, but the next day the White House confirmed their location to the press.
The Fangs were delivered to an underground apartment in the U.S. ambassador’s residence. The windows were covered and they were instructed not to make noise that would be audible outside. Despite the diplomatic rule that a host country may not intrude into an embassy, the Americans wanted to keep the Fangs’ location secret. The ambassador, James Lilley, brought them meals. Only he and a few staff knew exactly where they were. To Fang Zhe, who was just shy of his 21st birthday and now found himself suddenly separated from his friends, books, and hobbies, these living conditions were intolerable. He left after four days and went back to live in the Fang apartment. He later found a girlfriend, married, and eventually moved to Arizona.
Fang had a personal computer in the underground apartment and was able to write and even to do some research. Working from memory, he wrote a charming biography of his life up to that point, at age 53. He also wrote a piece for Bob Silvers at The New York Review of Books called “The Chinese Amnesia.” Silvers had used the U.S. State Department’s diplomatic pouch to make the request and asked me to translate the result. Fang’s theme startled me. He predicted that the spectacular June Fourth massacre, which was probably, thanks to modern electronic media, the most widely-witnessed atrocity in human history, in China would some day be …forgotten? How could that be? Fang’s analysis was that demands for liberalization had risen in the 1956 Hundred Flowers movement, in the 1979 Democracy Wall movement, and again in 1989—and each time the protesters began anew. No group knew the history of protest in its own country or about the progress that predecessors had made. This was, Fang argued, because the CCP has a program for erasing memory of protest, and it works. They are now applying it again, and it will likely work again. A quarter century after 1989, Fang had been proven largely right. Many young Chinese by then had only vague notions that something happened in 1989, and what they “knew” was a highly distorted government-sponsored version of events.
2. My efforts to maintain and record memory of the events.
In observance of the thirty-fifth anniversary of the 1989 massacre, I wrote the following:
“Why We Remember June Fourth”
Some people ask, “Why must you remember June Fourth?” Thirty-five years have passed. It is history. Get over it. Move on.
A simple question, but there are many answers. No single answer is adequate, and all of the answers together still leave the question hanging in mid-air, needing more reason.
We remember June Fourth because Jiang Jielian [son of Ding Zilin, founder of the Tiananmen Mothers] was 17 at the time. He is still 17. He will always be 17. People who die do not age.
We remember June Fourth because the lost souls that haunted Liu Xiaobo until he died will haunt us, too, until we do.
We remember June Fourth because the glint of bonfires on bayonets is something one does not forget, even if one did not see it personally.
We remember June Fourth because it taught us the essential nature of the Communist Party of China when all of the clothes, every shred, falls away. No book, film, or museum could be clearer.
We remember June Fourth because of the ordinary workers who died then. We cannot remember most of their names because we do not know most of their names. We never did. But we remember them as people, and we remember that we never knew their names.
We remember June Fourth because the worst of China is there—but the best of China is there, too.
We remember June Fourth because it was a massacre—not just a crackdown, or an “incident,” an event, a shijian, a fengbo; not a counterrevolutionary riot, not a faint memory, and not, as a child in China might think today, a blank. It was a massacre.
We remember June Fourth because, as Fang Lizhi noted with his characteristic wit, it is the only case he has heard of in which a nation invaded itself.
We remember June Fourth because Xi Jinping’s fat smile is a mask.
We remember June Fourth because we want to know what the soldiers who did the killing remember. They were brainwashed on the outskirts of the city before they carried out their deadly orders. So they were victims, too. We do not know what their thoughts were. But we remember that we want to know.
We remember June Fourth because Ding Zilin is still alive. She is 87 years old. When she goes out, plainclothes police follow to provide security. Security for her? No, security for the state. That’s right, a regime with 100 trillion yuan in GDP and two million soldiers needs protection from an 87-year-old lady. Protection from her ideas. This is worth remembering.
We remember June Fourth in order to support others who remember. We remember alone. But we remember together, too.
We remember June Fourth because remembering it makes us better people. Remembering is in our personal interests. When politicians talk about “interests” they usually mean material interests. But moral interests are just as important–no, more important. More important than owning a yacht.
We remember June Fourth because it was an historic turning point for one-fifth of the world. A turning point in a frightening direction. We hope it won’t be so much of a turning point as to throw the whole world into a ditch. But we don’t know. We’ll have to see.
We remember June Fourth because, if we didn’t remember it, it could not be in our heads any other way. Could we possibly have imagined it? No.
We remember June Fourth because there are people who dearly want us to remember. It comforts them to know that we remember.
We remember June Fourth because there are also people who desperately want us not to remember. They want us to forget because forgetting helps to preserve their political power. How foul! We would oppose that power even if remembering massacres were the only way to do it.
We remember June Fourth in order to remind ourselves of the way the Chinese Communist Party lies to itself and to others. It says that the Chinese people have long since made their “correct judgment on the 1989 counterrevolutionary riot at Tiananmen Square.” But each year, on June Fourth, plainclothes police block people from entering the Square. Why? If the Chinese people all believe what the government says that they believe, then why not let them all into the square to denounce the counterrevolutionaries? The presence of the police shows that the regime does not believe its own lies.
We remember June Fourth because shocks to the human brain last a long time. We would not be able to forget even if we tried.
没有评论:
发表评论
注意：只有此博客的成员才能发布评论。