For Pelosi, it’s personal: US House Speaker meets Tiananmen survivors, blasts China’s ‘moral injustices’
- Nancy Pelosi’s long-standing advocacy of human rights in China includes a commemorative trip to the square in 1991
- The US must remember the protesters, she says, ‘because China still shamefully tries to hide the history of the atrocity it inflicted on its own people’
US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met more than 30 survivors of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on Tuesday in Washington, one of a number of events in the US capital commemorating the 30-year anniversary of the Chinese government’s brutal repression of pro-democracy protests.
Several of those protests’ former student leaders, who had travelled to Washington from around the country, were hosted by Pelosi – the United States’ most powerful Democrat – in her offices and included prominent human rights campaigners Wang Dan, Zhou Fengsuo and Wang Juntao.
“It was a profound honour to meet with the courageous, inspiring veterans of Tiananmen today,” Pelosi, for decades a supporter of calls for improved liberties and human rights in China, told the South China Morning Post in a statement.
It fell on America to remember their heroism, said Pelosi, “because China still shamefully tries to hide the history of the atrocity it inflicted on its own people 30 years ago”.
Zhou, a student leader of the protests and once No 5 on Beijing’s most wanted list, said he was grateful for the meeting, calling it “a special moment in history”.
