China 'pays compensation for boy killed in 1989 protests'

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

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

Officials in Chengdu, the capital of China’s southern Sichuan province, agreed to pay Tang Deying 70,000 yuan (€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.

Huang says Zhou was detained by police in Chengdu as part of a nationwide crackdown ordered to suppress demonstrations that began in May 1989 in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and spread to other parts of China.

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 over the past 17 years.

Ding Zilin, a Beijing-based activist whose son was also killed during the protests, said she had never heard of Tang or her son’s case.

Ding has compiled a list of 186 Tiananmen victims and campaigned for the past two decades to have the government acknowledge that they were killed and to compensate families for the deaths.

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

“To my knowledge, there has not yet been a case where a Tiananmen victim or their families received any kind of hardship assistance,” Ding 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,” she said.

Hiu Xiaobo, a former professor at Beijing Normal University who spent 20 months in jail for joining the 1989 protests, called the payment “hush money” and said it was far too small an amount.

“Families of people who die in mine disasters in China get around 200,000 yuan (€19,700),” Liu said. ”But here is the case of a 15-year-old child brutally beaten to death by police and his family gets less than half that. I don’t think it’s right.”

Last year, the US State Department called on China to account for those killed in the 1989 incident, to release some 250 people still in prison for Tiananmen-related activities and to re-examine its official verdict on the protests.

Beijing rejected the appeal, and said the matter was an ”internal affair.”