you're watching datable the news from berlin coming up the almost forgotten hero of the chinaman square incident in our day deputy documentary the man who defied beijing that's coming up next there's more news on our web site if they got to be dot com you can also follow us on instagram and twitter the handle there is at d. w. news for now though i'm asking how for me and the team here in berlin thanks for watching . and you hear me now i guess we can hear you and i love to dance gentlemen sunflower bring you uncle i'm not. surprised himself with what is possible who is magical really what moves and want. to talk to people along the way maurice and critics alike joining us from apple's lifestyle.

people came from everywhere to tell us they are killing students down there and afterwards we will finish this quit was called and my beyond me. you know be found to avoid a bloodbath i destroyed a rifle a semiautomatic guns and i smashed it to bits. you know. i know that i was lucky to survive the spring events in beijing while

others died in the massacre. of the world mazes and voyage and since then i feel a sense of responsibility. with this because not only are they dead but the government won't face up to what happened in tiananmen square for. these images of the last that we filmed of you shall bow a discreet meeting as always to avoid police surveillance an hour of conversation in a beijing suburb the same year that the city hosted the olympic games. you shall bow in 2008 was the most eminent of the chinese dissidents one of the heroes of

tiananmen square it was he who stood up to the beijing regime he who protected the students. this is the story of the man who defied beijing a few weeks after this meeting his life would be changed once more the chinese regime would make him disappear for good. for the con man with whom we shared tea was not content in the year 2008 to recount his memories of the beijing spring time in great secrecy with hundreds of intellectuals he drew up the charter 8 which demanded the democratization of china a text that was to make him once again the regime's enemy number one a text that would earn him universal recognition. in 2010 when he won the nobel peace prize you shall bow was languishing in a chinese prison. in oslo the prize was officially awarded to an empty chair thank you. it is time to

let this chair this silence nobel prize speak. we crossed several continents to find those closest to him his fellow travelers and the places that marked his journey. a journey through recent chinese history a journey of courage and trace a journey that beijing does all it can to eradicate from mom memory. it was in beijing in the middle of the eighty's that you shall make his 1st public appearance. the 1980 s. were a period of incredible freedom for the chinese as they turned the page on maoism.

the country began to open up to the world and saw what a modern world had to offer. on the campus of the prestigious normal university in the capital you shall bore was a young chinese man doing literally research. his colleagues knew about his frank nature but for his american translator perry link it was a convention in 1906 that the young intellectual 1st became more strident. there was a conference in beijing to celebrate the 10 years of the new period so cog and his literature to show that we improved so much and small to do when it was a good idea and a good conference but it was a war was one of the young participants there and that's the 1st place in which he . sort of through fire bomb or you tube and i remember one of my colleagues was at

that conference when he returned he told me a dark horse has appeared. on and then you answer imitating his typical stammering about a code he described shall bow provided critique such as both contemporary chinese literature and old culture are nothing but a pile of garbage or to you later people have now seen god do new have made him quite well known to most and in 197088 doing 89 you shall be was a star on earth you shall go a true verdict when you lose your job or went to speak at university they far to attend you couldn't get into the amphitheaters trade dollar going to. sell war what you hire they sell at the start my thinking was very simple i hope to

be capable of becoming an authentic person someone worthy over there somewhere they don't but inside a political system like the one in china if you're an intellectual you're going to have to express your own ideas you have to write essays and conflict with the government is just inevitable often. by 986 you shall both have become a star if the chinese intellectuals seen a young man with notoriously radical opinions unafraid to challenge official doc trains and establishment. he was born in 1955 in chiang children in the cold industrial northeast of china on the borders of russia north korea and mongolia. new show bruce father was a professor of literature and an ardent communist but that didn't protect his time . aus cultural revolution in 1966.

the great talisman as mao was no wanted to clean the table with his red guards and they did so often violently. teachers including you shall both father had become the enemies of the people now closed all the schools in the country. you shall vote was only 11 years old and suddenly found himself with little to do he was too young to be a red guard like his elder brothers. so he spent his time devouring books. to this day until the while i was still young i read a great many books especially french literature for example zola as. they were

walking fop zola's role as an open intellectual in france had a profound influence on intellectuals in china. and he didn't just write literary works but also of society and its happenings. up in the 100 still today zola's influences felt among china's intellectual scene. for the. 1976 with the death of mao the cultural revolution came to an end a year later the chinese universities reopened their doors you shall bow enrolled in chiang children university eager to gain all the knowledge and learning that had been denied him. 25 years old and with a freshly earns degree he left his home for the capital.

if i am i have. now how. i was treated was in the air in the late eighties the aging the countryside where you shall bow had grown up looks nothing like this in the center of the capital the new international library was a magnet for us a place where they formulated their hopes and dreams for the future my you shall both finished his doctrines thesis on the aesthetic and freedom of humankind and free gympie championed among chinese intellectuals he was 33 and eager to discover the west his literature had not reached his leave my in the summer of 1988 the same year the 1st american fast food outlets came to beijing you shall both left china.

that. he moved on to us live but this early contact with the west soon turned sour he was bored to death and angry with the sign ologists whom he called usurpers . in the autumn of 1908 he wound up in new york andrew mason the deacon of chinese studies at the prestigious university of columbia offered him a post that as visiting lecturer i don't think the university at that level or. got much less the u.s. government or anybody had any plans for this guy was just that somebody asked me to invite him and he was curious and wanted to come over to move all the many young chinese intellectuals who are living in new york in early 1989 including the young and i way way now world renowned for his contemporary art.

but also the courage. who had come to new york some months earlier and agreed to put up you shall be. in my are part of every night in new york have so many chinese distant. so we always could see each other you also had that all you my ranting apartment living room. this small community of chinese intellectual ex-pats lived in the queens district of new york. you show was fascinated by the city's bookshops museums and galleries. in march he visited the metropolitan museum of ops one of the most important museums in the world situated close to central park. he

himself has written about going to the metropolitan museum of new york seeing these wonderful huge paintings and starting to really feel almost in an existential sense that human life is incomplete including western life we still have to measure china against these international standards but my 2nd task is i have to have a critical attitude toward the standard itself the west is not a model it's a bag of it's own problems. well you shall bow was in new york who yaobang the former secretary general of the chinese communist party died of a heart attack in beijing on the 15th of april 989. bang had been the architect of china's re-emergence in the eighty's he had been forced to resign 2 years earlier pushed out by the more conservative and. months of the

regime. universities were suddenly inundated with kostas put up in homage to the father of reform. small groups of students gathered and some of them converged on tianna main square towards the end of the day. 2 days later on the evening of the 17th of april was a new assembly was organized on the square this time there were nearly $3000.00 students and they presented an initial list of to moms the these range from the reinstatement of bangs vision of democracy and the fight against corruption to the end of censorship was that i was was was was was was that was 7 that was that was 7 was. in new york you shall bow for at the events from the apartments of hooping the eldest of

a small group of exiles chinese dissidents. right tyson wheatley you shall bow very soon understood that this was the start of a great movement towards democracy and so we decided on a joint publication of both open letters and declarations of our points of view i gave my guitar and that time things were very different from today that was the internet most people in china did not even have a telephone so we had to fax our declarations to beijing on the our friends in beijing took them and posted them all over the city including the university on the famous triangle of democracy or junket we were told that our text had raised a lot of interest and then the call going to her. her on the 22nd of april cheering who yelled banks official funeral the students once more descended on tiananmen square i was. the party

leaders gathered in the great hall of the people started to worry. so you'll sit in the chair you shot in the meantime lou shall bow became a leader in the eyes of chinese intellectuals. he knew that if he didn't soon return to china he would exclude himself since then lose that status. so you want his political ambitions motivated this decision to fall for this it's an easy shot or you if you all come back maybe that time is the most emotional moment that maybe can change had. saw. him say ok you can buy started your but i think the now. me and the hopi we're both neither the war or if we're both which hand there may be tensions. even though the chinese regime had sharpened their term on the 27th of april $989.00 tens of thousands of students set out from their campus to march on

tiananmen square. you shall both literally plunged into the movement which had begun 10 days earlier and continued to grow he spent several days and even nights in indiana minsk at beijing's heart close to the seat of chinese power. the literary critic embraced his role as a political activist where he was part of a huge historic change but it was a movement initiated and conducted by inexperience students and the professor felt compelled to offer a structure sharp criticism and guidance. it was one of the most important advisor to the 1989 student movement and we were looking for guidance we were looking for teachers and keys. took the

past. month piano and square the students had begun a hunger strike eclipsing the historic visit by soviet leader mikhail gorbachev. half. the leadership of the chinese communist party was torn between partisans of the strong arm and those who favored negotiation. the decision fell to the aged leader deng xiaoping he declared martial law and mobilize the army . the reformist leader of the party recognize the danger was near he went to the square to plead with the students what is in the despite the tears of the general secretary of the party the hardliners won the square was to be emptied and divided.

you shall both saw that danger was imminent and with 3 others started a hunger strike to demands nonviolence both from the students and also from the army which was already stationed around the city. to them but the whole generation really wanted to show that we were turning our backs on the communist party through the marxist leninist parties in power and especially the chinese communist party and proclaiming their power grows out of the barrel of a gun and that they backed violent struggle the mark of nonviolence was for us a way of expressing a total breakdown from party ideology and swats engineer. during the evening of the 3rd of june 1990 the people. liberation army advance through the

city the massacre began at each pockets of resistance. half an hour people in the streets were riddled with bullets glass half. they were shot down in the universities. tiananmen square in the heart of beijing was the army's final goal it was to be completely empty by morning. the students were divided into 2 camps some still peace the more radical members wanted to stay and dead down the i'll make. it a song. i asked the students who were on the monument to come down and i collected a few friends to help me we had to avoid violence i wanted to talk to the students about avoiding violence towards your own town were crucial will also see you try

and you take things and their. kids all responsibility he will go he will carry a white flag or walk to the soldiers or shooting. to go she that's that's who he is. he believes his own responsibility. after we negotiated with the army we returned to the middle of the square thought to ask the students to draw back. in the end the last scene that i remember just before dawn the students had all gradually left the square towards the southeast through the opening left by the army.

when the 4th of june dole and tiananmen square was a devastated battlefield but according to witnesses an even greater calamity was avoided thanks to professor liu and his comrades. although it went down in history as the tiananmen square massacre the killing happened all over the city also in neighborhoods where students took refuge. shelters rang out for several more days on the streets of beijing. families searched for their loved ones today the figures the still impossible to know several hundreds of thousands died. the next day the 5th of june 1809 tanks patrolled tiananmen square and a lone figure became the symbol of the chinese people's resistance to

a dictatorship with blood on its hands. the regime was searching for leaders of the movement as did one teenager says my television. many fled to prove. you shall both had no intention of following. through i was arrested on june 6th 2 days after the massacre. after the way arrested me as i arrived. home on my bicycle

. i was halfway there when i saw a mini bus suddenly arriving several men sprang out of it. they're both shallow they ditched my bike. they blindfolded me they ganged to me. then they threw me into their car. while he was in the reeducation camps he had lots of free time. his 1st experience of prison allowed him time to think about his past experiences and to reflect on the future of china and to some he also took advantage of that time to read some remarkable works. it's well known that for many political prisoners prison experience is really like a new university in the sense that was leo shabbos ok so you also say yeah.

but his 1st prison sentence also marked a turning point in you shall both personal life while he was still a student he had married. in 1902 the couple had a son aged 6 in 1909. after 6 months in jail his wife filed for divorce. would never again see his son who later left with his mother to live in the united states. how did you go it was a reasonable choice with a child to be brought up we go hard as for me looking back i said to myself that i wasn't up to the challenge. of the show would you go the world with my personal choices made things quite difficult for them and i still break their forgiveness. or they go beyond our community and his friends noted the changes in his personality that they to show the emotion. all scars of the 4th of june you know we

all do me included he was full of remorse and seemed haunted by the ghosts of the victims of chan and square man do a number of ala it's a serious the true the good of the cause so for the dead to trying to do them historical justice i thought it was best to stay here to keep the ghosts company. that was the main reason that i stayed in china through true to. the end you shall bow was released from prison in 1991 china was changing around him aging leader danger shopping who had had the students shows retired after having launched reforms with the slogan to get rich is glorious. jenkins and me and a generation of leaders from shanghai decided that china should shake up the economy major projects rang up everywhere in the country opened up to foreign business. you shall bow was no longer the bleeding heart intellectual of the

eighty's he had lost his post at the university and he no longer had the right to publish in china. with his friend the poet t.-o. he knew he looked for a new role among beijing's intellectuals. will mean he has our specialty at that time with new shop boys petitions we love petitions he wants he never stopped writing political petitions which were often more or less about the tiananmen square massacre and at that time there were no computers everything had to be sent by fax you another you may get all the time so there are often not all that many signatures on the petition. obviously i never knew exactly how many hundreds but many are not there were not enough to stop us from being systematically arrested the following day though genes are coming you are about to get so out of. so you shall both found himself

implicated in a host of disputes in the ninety's his activism won him several periods of detention or reeducation while. in 1995 he was arrested while preparing a new petition to recognize the tiananmen square massacre another 6 months deprivation of freedom. in 1906 he was sent to a reeducation camp for 3 years in the north of china. it was in the canteen of the camp that he married you shot an artist and poets who shared his idea of freedom. while he was serving his sentence the chinese regime gave him a proposition president clinton was to visit beijing you shall bow and his wife could leave china immediately with the american president. joe biden has 998 we want to see him in president if you actually thought the authorities told

him he could leave. or replied well i'm not going to if you had sentenced me to 8 or 10 years in prison yeah maybe i would have chosen to leave but on this case they only gave me 3 years now will be out next year i mean able so i choose to stay knowledgeable. half you shall bow was released in 1909 later in 2001 the international olympic committee approved beijing's bid to host the 2000 dates a lympics games past. china was about to belong to the w t o the big cities discovered well for this race for development strengths and getting shelled those convictions. in july 2001 he created the chinese branch of the most important international association of writers the pen club which.

freedom of speech all over the world. at that time life was much better than it had been on the mountain don't you or even during the 80s. but what about social progress the overall system heigho a man's life is not just about money and it. was then a fashionable young intellectual just as you shall board being in the 80s he made the risky decision to join the pen club. you shall bow also hope to make the pen club a platform to help us study and apply democracy to our lives it was all for example our management committee had 11 members and met on the internet once a month to debate many questions we not much of a fling involved with this writer's club them he also wanted to show the new literature resulting from the tiananmen square massacre and he wanted to promote

a new group of writers without any chance for tweets he saw them in the footsteps of soldiers need some one of those ex soviet union writers under the yoke of the communist party who resisted from within the shadows. he thought it was the same thing that you had to keep fighting show the reality soley by the testimony he thought that this witness literature was fundamentally how the way to go to see young. buescher paid the price for his activism government agents in plain clothes but not exactly in conspicuous now camped outside his home his telephone was tapped his internet connection was filtered. in his beijing apartments he was now living under house arrest. you know those are on completely controlled my telephone my computer etc. they follow me all the time.

and nowadays it's not like it was in the ninety's in the ninety's when they followed genes they hid themselves so that we didn't see them that if you turned around suddenly you could catch them trying to hide. but today they do it openly good they want you to know that you're being followed your the you know sometimes even though they are right beside me you could almost have a conversation with them they are valid. i am the 8th of august 2008 beijing seemed stronger than ever i the city had become the center of the world i beijing that's the beautiful protests the end lympics would be the crowning glory lesson was sure i. was.

you shall bow to what advantage he could from the olympics that he met foreign journalists and more and more regularly he organized discreet meetings on the streets of the old city the university professors and even officials more or less close to the party can be found that. the usual bull had a new project based on the model of charter 77 drafted by vote snuffed out the last president of czechoslovakia. or do it also with result holland to anybody and on the whole i remember that at that time we always met in a restaurant to talk it had to be a friend's restaurant because we couldn't discuss anything on the internet or on the phone or you so we always invited friends to join us and that restaurant would hobble you if i remember correctly we must have made a good dozen times to have dinner. we invite

a different people each time one time it would be academics the next it would be writers and then lawyers to ya sure if they all came to discuss charter 8 with us paul and then he might have. 2 weeks of intense and secret debates among the intellectuals they drafted the new challenge to 19 spanning from the independence of justice to freedom of speech and religion. is a professor of economy at beijing university he took part in these intense debates but felt. taxed wasn't radical enough. personally i'm not so for you agree with his points but at the time i think everybody should have some compromise and then agree on that because this version is very peaceful that's no. very strong words for the u.s.

no mashonee subversion of the government or anything like that so i don't think the people who signed this would have the very serious results. text received 303 sigma shiz officials who manages of state tend to prizes university heads it was an unexpected success the chance it was to be published on the 10th of december 2008 international human rights day but the old thirty's cold wind of the plans he shall bow and several other signatories like you were arrested 48 tallis before publication when you couldn't if you wrote an article by your own fireside it didn't worry them. but if several 100 people met together to sign it that terrified them. to go up when with charter 8 leo szabo showed that he was not just an intellectual dissident he showed that he was also capable of organizing a movement to. and mustering opposition forces and including inside the hartleys

assistant fired on the young. jodie hatchet. arrested on the 8th of december you show was arbitrarily detained for several months before his trial in december 2009 before intermediary court number one in beijing. the trial was held on camera. the dissidents friends were kept at a distance by police who had cordoned off the courthouse. i think it was just 2 days later on the 25th of december 2009 you shall bow was sentenced to 11 years in prison for subversion of state power. the date was not chosen by chance beijing hopes that on christmas day foreign media and diplomats would be less likely to gather at the tribunals. alone in front of his judges you

shall bow read along declaration freedom of expression is not a crime he said. he repeated what he had said in tiananmen square i have no enemies his principle of nonviolence. 2 weeks later in the port of oslo the letter reached the nobel prize committee it was signed by the us of harvard it suggested that the nobel prize should be awarded to the imprisons chinese dissident. intellectuals from all over the world joined in this a pail on the 8th of october 2010 the norwegian nobel committee announced its choice . you shall bow didn't know that he had won the nobel prize. he remained in his

cell in the north of china while the foreign media crowded around the residence of his wife you shot in beijing. many of his friends wrote and new wave of optimism. i think one party dictatorship would be ended within 10 years i'm very optimistic about the hard. part of that i want to believe that this optimism didn't last long. the gates closes yet again in just a few hours you shah was under house arrest heard if you don't look so your heart by they are going through the night here but on the day of the nobel prize presentation it was midday in beijing to talk to you and i came knocking at my door . for 2 policemen rushed at me and put a black sack over my head so you tell me you're a tortured man several ways. that lasted 8 or 9 hours until dark and i fell into a coma he would do. now they took me to the hospital because i think the higher ups

had not given an order to kill me just to make sure i was tortured or not someone. in this video by the chinese penitentiary administration we can see visiting. that is how she told him about the nobel prize that is how she learned that he was ill gravely ill with liver cancer the propaganda video was supposed to demonstrate that he was being well cared for he was shown being examined by several doctors even while his health deteriorated. faced with international pressure the regime allowed foreign doctors to visit his bedside but it was all a sham and it was too late you shall bow died on the 13th of july 2017 after 9 years of prison. without. of

course the international community preferred to keep its eyes closed doors and i told all the countries are mainly concerned with maintaining good trade relations with china and sure i mean to fund the whole world dreamed of one thing making money dealing with the chinese market centers there was no interest in democracy or even human rights issues this year and so mandela the whole world mobilized to. censor you shall call it was a sordid murder in front of the whole world who says yeah it was a death before the eyes of the entire world and nobody cared right engine so. the chinese regime organized a well orchestrated funeral. the whole of you shall both family was summoned by the authorities. official propaganda tried to control both the image and the legacy of the nobel prize winner. the regime ordered that his ashes should be scattered at sea to avoid having

a place to memorialize the few shall bow. in china you shall bows name is censored when internet users began referring to an empty chair the term was also a sense that. in 2008 the last time we met him you shall bow knew what lay ahead a few weeks later he would disappear imprisoned until he died he left us these last words to understand his freedom. awards. i think that i made the right choices. of course the consequences are important for me but in any case that's how we live in china there is a price to pay for from here if you don't choose. my sort of life

a life that most people consider to be too hard and too risky then you won't pay the price that i pay for it all for but if you're one who thinks you still have to pay a price a certain price and i would say of course for example you'll be obliged to lie you have to follow the dominant ideology to obtain and maintain a good income a good job. were impossible then to be concerned about the deaths of the 4th of june impossible to make the slightest criticism of the government from impossible in fact to express the tiniest authentic opinion. and all that for won't save for a materially comfortable life. well i prefer to pay the high price of danger rather than become someone who lives alone i rather than become someone who disowns his own conscience. for for their food which is it is beyond that.

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