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Ms. SHENG Xue has been awarded as the first recipient of Crow Poetry Awards by the North American Crow Poetry Society with $1000 US dollars on November 28, 2016. 

North American Crow Poetry Society was established on January 16, 2015 and was the successor to the On the Sea Poetry Society founded in the 1980s by a group of young and critical-minded poets in Shanghai. When the tumultuous political changes in China compelled them to scatter, the group remained inactive for some years.  Subsequently, some of its members now living in North America decided to revive the group and renamed it the North American Crow Poetry Society.

Mr. JIANG Nan, president of the organization who traveled from Denver, Colorado, U.S.A. to Mississauga in Ontario, Canada to present the award, explained that the adoption of the word “crow” was because it is a species of birds in the natural world with a strong will to survive and not afraid of facing death, a sense of gratitude, and an independent spirit. The hope was that since poets are also seekers of freedom and lovers of truth; unafraid of persecution and grateful to those who show them kindness. Poets also should have courage to resist the grace of tyranny and would maintain their spirit in spite of their lonely struggles.

The decision to award the first poetry prize to Ms. SHENG was based on her long writing career.  Since the 1980s, she has adopted a variety of styles in her poetry work, focusing on many topics and displaying spirits both critical and humane. In response to the various major events and the sufferings of vulnerable segments of society, her writings are particularly poignant and moving.

On behalf of the North American Crow Poetry Society, Mr. JIANG expressed its sincere wish that Ms. SHENG will continue her creative writing for her avid readers.

The Society will presents to a winning poet the Crow Poetry Awards annually.     

The Society is currently working on a collection of poems titled “The Lonely Hundred”, to be published in June, 2017.

 

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s waiting for a Canadian student’s VISA. I used to stay in Beijing, very close to Tiananmen Square, then. It was just 5-6 minutes’ walk. I was working for a publication house, and was generally attracted to social movements. In those days, I nourished great hopes that China would soon embrace democracy as was happening around the world then.”

Toronto-based, Sheng Xue or Reimonna Sheng is the pen name of Zang Xihong, a Chinese-Canadian journalist and writer, and human rights activist. Sheng Xue grew up in Beijing and moved to Canada soon after the Tiananmen Square protest on June 3, 1989. She is a member of PEN Canada, and also a member of The Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC). She is the Canadian correspondent of Radio Free Asia, and the North American correspondent of Deutsche Welle (Voice of Germany).

Sheng Xue was about 27 when the massacre at Tiananmen Square took place; on the 27th anniversary of the tragedy, she recalls in an interview;

“On that day, around dinner time, I saw troops marching from east to west toward Tiananmen Square. I was curious to see if they were marching to the square where students had gathered in large numbers, and moved in that direction along with people who had gathered around. But we were blocked till midnight. Troops could be seen marching; it looked like there was some kind of a war going on. And until 4 in the morning, groups of people who had gathered at the south-east corner of the Square raised slogans, and I was mummy to a group.

“By around 6-7 in the morning, Tiananmen Square had turned into a battlefield. Tanks, with their barrels raised high, lined the streets, and soldiers with their fingers on the triggers of their rifles, stood menacingly, staring at the pedestrians. For a moment, there was volcanic silence, then the tanks charged at the crowd. People were screaming, and in trying to escape the onslaught, they fell over each other. Tanks then closed in, and retreated a few steps, and before people could steady themselves, soldiers fired on the crowd. Two youngsters got shot in their legs and fell. I rushed toward them, and saw fist-sized wounds in their legs. They were rushed to the hospital.

“And there I stood among the wreckage where the battle had ended minutes before.”

She was a dissident always:

“While I was in China, I was one among the millions who never believed in the Chinese Communist Party. For me, the feeling was something personal, something that had been there in me throughout my existence because of what my family had gone through after the communists had gained power in China. My grandfather was a government official before 1949. Once the communists took over, my grandparents and four of my uncles and aunties left China and went to Taiwan. My father and mother too never trusted the communists.

“Twenty days after I reached Canada, I participated in a pro-democracy demonstration there, jointly organised by various overseas organizations. I haven’t looked back since. Today, I’m one of the most active activists.”

She did try to go back:

“I tried to re-enter China in 1996, on the day of the Moon Festival, to be together with my mother. I was arrested while at the customs counter in the airport, and was interrogated for 24 hours. They didn’t allow me to rest or to sleep, and even accompanied me to the rest room. I was calm throughout, but when they told me I was an unwelcome foreigner, I cried, because I’m for my people, for my homeland. Had I considered myself to be a foreigner, I wouldn’t have bothered about China, would I have? They then asked me to sign an apology letter and promise that I would never again participate in democracy movements, or talk of human rights, etc. I declined to do so. They then decided to send me back to Canada.”

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Q & A

There’s always been confusion in the world media about the number of people who died at Tiananmen Square on June 3, 1989. How many died on that day?

It must be over 1,000 (dead). It was a great tragedy. The world still doesn’t know how many were actually killed or injured, and persecuted. In the last 27 years, nobody has been able to verify how many had actually died. The number will always remain a mystery as even the families of those who had died are scared to reveal the truth. Many of the parents of those killed on that day too have passed away. It would be a shame if the world is still unable to find out the truth.

Do you believe the CCP has learned any lessons from the incident at Tiananmen Square?

Since the massacre, democracy has taken root and flourished in many parts of the world. Many dictatorial regimes have yielded space to democratic movements. But in China, where over a 1,000 died on that day, there hasn’t been any change politically. This is a very sad situation.

Today, most people in China believe they have a chance to become rich. It’s a jungle out there. Everyone is an opportunist, scanning their surroundings for resources and opportunities. Inside China, the situation is very dangerous. People trust only money. The environment is being degraded, there’s pollution everywhere. It is a huge crisis.

What kind of a life is it when you have money, but no rights, democracy, good environment, or safe food? If you have money but nothing else, what’s that money worth?

But the tragedy is that the Chinese people don’t realize that they are passing through a crisis. The whole world will have to pay the price!

It is 68 years since India gained independence and started functioning as a democracy. And in the last two decades or so, many nations have taken the path of democracy. Do you think there will be some kind of a democratic transformation in China? Are the Chinese people in any way aware what a democratic transformation can do for them?

Of course, yes! Standing up for freedom and human rights is the basic nature of most human beings, and the Chinese aren’t different. Of late, more and more Chinese people have started to hear, learn and feel what democracy, human rights and freedom are all about. More and more people are coming out into the open seeking their rights, and freedom. This gives hope that one day China will become a democratic country. The social media is doing much here.

What does development mean to China? Do human rights play any part in its concept of development?

Any further development will be tough in China. Not because the CCP is huge and evil, but because it’s in power by brainwashing the people. Most of the Chinese are now incapable of thinking or acting independently. Sometimes I think the very nature of the people there has changed. And in such a scenario, it’ll take some time for people to regain normalcy and think like human beings again. It could hence take some time for the country to turn truly democratic. It’s not about the political system, but about history and culture, as well as about a people regaining the lost ground as human beings.

Is the current generation in China aware about what happened in Tiananmen Square? What do they know about the incidents in 1989? 

The new generation has Internet, the social media, and hence it’s a hundred times easier for them to know the truth. But it’s tough at the same time, because the Chinese regime controls everything, censors the content. The government feeds the young a sufficiently huge amount of false information. Hence, the new generation is sadly confused, and divided.

Why were the activists not able to take the democracy movement forward in China after the incident? Does it still exist? If so, in what form?

The Chinese Communist Party is an evil force. They took many lives. The situation is getting worse. They are continuing to kill dissidents to stay in power.

During the Tiananmen movement, most of the students had delusions about the communists. They only wanted the Communist Party to curb corruption and jail the corrupt. Those students hadn’t realized that they could not hope for democracy under a one-party dictatorship.

Moreover, at that time, none in the top rung of the CCP dared to come out in support of the students and people to overthrow the tyrants. And though many believed Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party General Secretary, supported the students, he did not have enough courage to assume responsibility. And the students had no idea how far they could push the democratic movement. They, however, did not expect the CCP to use machine guns and tanks to crush the movement.

After the Tiananmen incident, the CCP unleashed such harsh repression on the people that the movement was crushed to its very core. And the repression is continuing to date.

In the meanwhile, the Communist Party opened its doors to economic reforms, and the people embraced the fruits of the so-called development with both the arms, without realizing that the path that the communists had opened would lead them to a savage jungle where human values and freedom would have no place. The majority of the Chinese people have been desperate for survival since then.

Written by Varghese Koshy and Venus Upadhayaya.

Varghese Koshy is a senior journalist with around four decades of experience with various Indian newspapers. Venus Upadhayaya is a young journalist writing on issues of democracy, human rights, participatory governance, and Asian geo-politics.

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FDC's New Website will be Launched Soon

 

The Federation fro a Democratic China (FDC), of which the headquarters is currently based in Canada, soon will launch its new website.

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Chinese security officials have detained several people since a mysterious letter appeared online on March 4 demanding the resignation of President Xi Jinping, above.                         Credit            Damir Sagolj/Reuters                    

BEIJING —  Chinese security officers appear to have detained several people in their investigation of a mysterious, fiery letter posted online this month that strongly criticized President Xi Jinping and demanded that he resign.

Four of those detained work for Wujie News, or Watching, the state-run website that posted the letter on March 4, the first day of an annual political conclave in Beijing, according to a person tracking the inquiry who asked not to be identified. They are the two top editors and two technicians.

In addition, Wen Yunchao, a Chinese activist living inNew York, said in a telephone interview that his parents and younger brother in southern China had been missing since Tuesday, after police officers and officials warned his parents that Mr. Wen should tell them what he knew about the letter. Mr. Wen said he had nothing to do with distributing the letter on the Internet, and so refused to bow to the demands.

Another person detained by the police was Jia Jia, 35, a freelance writer who recently finished a stint as a visiting scholar at Sun Yat-sen University in the southern city of Guangzhou. Mr. Jia, a friend of Mr. Wen, was detained on March 15 as he prepared to board a flight to Hong Kong, which he was accustomed to visiting.

Mr. Jia’s family members and friends say he had nothing to do with the letter. On Friday night, a post appeared on Mr. Jia’s WeChat social media account that implied he had been freed. “Thank you, everyone,” it said.

Mr. Jia is also a friend of Ouyang Hongliang, editor in chief of Wujie. People with knowledge of the situation have said Mr. Jia called Mr. Ouyang to ask him to take the letter off Wujie after he noticed it circulating online. Mr. Ouyang is one of the website employees who have been detained.

The website began operations in September, and its main investor is the Communist Party committee of the western region of Xinjiang. Other investors include Caixun, which owns the financial magazine Caijing, and Alibaba, the e-commerce giant.

Wujie was started to report on news of Mr. Xi’s economic plan of “One Belt, One Road,” aimed at helping China increase investment and trade across Asia and Europe, said Qiao Mu, a journalism professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University.

The future of Wujie and its 100 employees is uncertain. It suspended publishing articles after the letter appeared, but it again began posting news on Friday, although only articles written by the main state news organizations.

The widening investigation by security officers suggests that they have so far been unable to pinpoint the origins of the letter but are under pressure to do so.

The letter, signed by “Loyal Communist Party Members,” was sent by email to people with ties to China around the time it appeared on Wujie, shortly after 12:01 a.m. on March 4. Bill Bishop, the editor of Sinocism, a China newsletter, said he received it in his Gmail inbox at 10:37 p.m. on March 3 in the Washington, D.C., area, where he lives. “Strange,” he said.

On Twitter, Mr. Wen, the activist, urged President Obama to ask Mr. Xi to release his parents and brother. “He kidnapped them on March 22,” Mr. Wen wrote. Mr. Xi is expected to visit the United States next week for a summit meeting on nuclear security.

Mr. Wen said in the interview that his sister-in-law had told him that his parents and his younger brother, Wen Yun’ao, a driver for a local government, were all missing. Mr. Wen said his sister-in-law had given no details of when or how his parents disappeared but had said Wen Yun’ao, her husband, was taken away by officials.

Starting this month, Mr. Wen said, the police and officials repeatedly visited his father, Wen Shaogan, 71, and mother, Qiu Xiaohua, 64, at their home in Jiexi County, Guangdong Province, and told them that Mr. Wen had to admit to helping spread the letter.

“At the start, they said they wanted to know if I had anything to do with the open letter calling for Xi Jinping to resign,” Mr. Wen said. “But on the 17th, they said directly that they knew I hadn’t written the letter but believed I had something to do with spreading it. They promised that if I told them who wrote the letter and passed it on to me, and how I spread it around, then I would not be held culpable and it would not be held against my family. Otherwise, they said, my younger brother might lose his job.”

Mr. Wen, a vocal critic of the Chinese government who is also known by the pen name Bei Feng, said he had passed on a message to the officials through his parents that he had nothing to do with writing or distributing the letter.

“I told them very clearly that I could not admit to something that had nothing to do with me,” Mr. Wen said. “I told them very clearly that I didn’t write the letter and had not helped anyone to distribute it, and I had not issued the letter on any websites.”

Two police officers reached by phone in Jiexi County on Friday refused to answer questions about Mr. Wen’s family or to pass on a number for a press officer.

“Engaging in this form of collective punishment, which we thought was only something done in feudal dynasties, is absolutely egregious for a country that claims it’s adhering to the rule of law and respecting human rights,” said William Nee, a China researcher at Amnesty International.

“We demand that the authorities immediately release Wen Yunchao’s family members, who had nothing to do with this,” he said. “And they should release any other people who are in detention related to this letter.”

    

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