China pays €6,900 to mother of boy beaten to death by police

THE Chinese authorities have paid compensation to the mother of a 15-year-old boy who was beaten to death by police amid the crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 1989, an activist said yesterday.

The payment, apparently the first of its kind, did not appear to signal that China planned to compensate the hundreds, possibly thousands, of people killed when military police were ordered to crush a swell of protests in the summer of 1989.

Officials in the city of Chengdu agreed to pay Tang Deying 70,000 yuan (around €6,900) in “hardship assistance” for the death of her son Zhou Guocong while he was in police custody on June 6, 1989, said activist Huang Qi.

Mr Huang says the teenager was detained as part of a nationwide crackdown to suppress demonstrations that began in May 1989 in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

China says the government response to the protests — since officially classified as a counter-revolutionary riot — was justified because it laid the basis for the country’s rapid economic development.

Ding Zilin, an activist whose son was also killed during the protests, said she had never heard of Ms Tang or her son’s case. Ms Ding has compiled a list of 186 Tiananmen victims and campaigned to have the government acknowledge they were killed and to compensate the families.

“We did not have his name on our list,” she said.

“This is a first but I must point out that hardship assistance does not amount to compensation. Compensation would signify that the government admitted it had wrongly killed someone but I don’t see such an admission in this case.”