Twenty-six years ago, on June 9, 1989, an estimated 15,000 people took part in the Chinese freedom rally in New York. The daylong program denounced the Chinese Communist regime’s slaughter of democratic student activists at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and other parts of China on June 4, 1989.
The protest march began from New York’s Chinatown and continued to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza across from the United Nations headquarters.
Joining the march from the U.N. to the Chinese Consulate on the Upper West Side near 44th Street was a delegation of 25 Ukrainian students, carrying several blue-and-yellow Ukrainian national flags and posters reading “Freedom for China – Freedom for Ukraine” and “Ukrainian Students Support Chinese Democracy.”
Numerous onlookers, some leaning out of office windows, applauded the Ukrainian marchers who were the only non-Chinese national group marching in solidarity with the Chinese American community.
Many of the participants approached the Ukrainian students, thanking them for their support. As one Chinese student emphatically stated, “We’re all in the fight for freedom. Communism is dead – let’s bury it together.”
The Ukrainian student delegation was organized by the New York branch of the Ukrainian Students’ Association of Mykola Mikhnovsky (known by its Ukrainian acronym TUSM), in response to an invitation by the rally organizers.
As The Weekly’s editorial stated: “China’s leaders saw the freedom-hungry people as a threat to their absolute power and sent in troops and tanks to brutally rout the protesters from Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The Beijing massacre, directed against a democratic and patriotic movement composed primarily of students – which resulted in the deaths of hundreds, perhaps thousands – has elicited expressions of outrage around the globe.”
The editorial noted hundreds of arrests by the Communist party in China, and how the news media in China was asking people to turn in others. China’s propaganda machine went into motion and spun the pro-democracy protest as an attempted coup, and denied the Beijing massacre even happened.
The editorial concluded: “Around the world, people and governments are speaking out in support of the murdered Chinese rights activists. We add our voice to those protests. But at the same, time, we are hopeful because, though the symbol of the democratic movement in China, the ‘Goddess of Democracy,’ was smashed to bits in Tiananmen Square, we know that the spirit behind it is far from eradicated.”
In Canada, on June 10, 1989, Ukrainian community activists joined thousands of Chinese demonstrators on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, in an outpouring of outrage against the Communist regime’s repression of the pro-democracy movement in China. Waving Ukrainian blue-and-yellow flags, with banners that read “Ukrainians support Chinese students” and “Down with Communism,” the Ukrainian Canadians joined the crowd in venting their revulsion at the mass slaughter of students in Beijing at Tiananmen Square.
Similar demonstrations were held worldwide, including in Toronto, Winnipeg, London and Washington.
Source: “Ukrainian students support Chinese,” “Democracy in China,” The Ukrainian Weekly, June 18, 1989; (“Canadian Ukrainian support democratic activists in China” by Andrij Hluchowecky, The Ukrainian Weekly, June 25, 1989.)