384 Journal of the Spanish Institute for Strategic Studies N. 3 / 2014 taking into account the human rights situation in the most-populated country in the world. The main activist group made up of the victims’ relatives was the Tiananmen Mothers group – formed to demand an investigation of the events of the 4 June 1989, The group was led by Ding Zilin until, in 2014 aged 79, she passed the baton on to You Weijie, 61, whose husband died from a gunshot wound on that tragic morning. “I’m guessing that I will become a target for the authorities. But it was totally wrong of the government to suppress the democratic movement with violence... I want everyone, the Tiananmen Mothers, the local police, the state security police, and myself, to sit down and discuss the human rights situation in China”8, she declared on the 18 April 2014 to the American propaganda station Radio Free Asia. The Chinese government, in response to international sanctions and the intense pressure from states and NGOs, published its first White Paper on Human Rights in China in 1991. The text interpreted Chinese legislation from a governmental point of view, which gives priority to subsistence and economic development as a precondition to be able to fully enjoy human rights. According to the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, Chinese policy in this field is reactive and not proactive; but despite the fact that the publication of the White Paper came more as a response to external pressures, its importance can be seen in the fact that “for the first time human rights was viewed as something all human beings share in common”9. This innovative idea was a significant step forward in normalising dialogue between China and her Western partners on human rights. Today, 25 years after Tiananmen, a large number of Chinese dissidents in exile are those who were involved in the protests that ended in such a bloody manner – including student leaders such as Wang Dan Chai Ling or Wu’erkaixi. “They have joined older dissidents from previous mutinies in one of the largest political diasporas in history, comparable to that of the French Huguenots in the seventeenth century, Russians after 1919, Germans after 1933, or Hungarians and Czechs in the 1950s and 1960s”10. Also living in the USA are Yu Dongyue, who was imprisoned for 17 years for throwing red paint on the portrait of Mao that presides over the entrance to the Forbidden City from the largest square in the world, and Yang Jianli, who returned to China in 2002 on a friend’s passport and was detained when trying to board a 8 http://www.rfa.org/english/women/tiananmen-04182014105018.html Consulted: 17/05/2014 9 See https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/publications/archive/dialogue/1_03/articles/515.html Consulted: 17/05/2014 10 BURUMA, Ian, Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing, Barcelona, Península, 2001, p. 31
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