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Tiananmen figure
calls for meet with Want Want boss
Staff Writer, with CNA
An exiled student leader of the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square
in Beijing said yesterday he wanted to meet with a wealthy Taiwanese
entrepreneur to settle a dispute over whether the Tiananmen Incident in 1989 was
a massacre.
Wang Dan (¤ý¤¦), who now lives in Taiwan, said on his Facebook page that he hoped
to challenge the views of Tsai Eng-meng (½²l©ú), chairman of Want Want Group ¡X
which owns many major media outlets, including the China Times, a Taipei-based
Chinese-language daily.
Wang called for a boycott of the China Times last month after Tsai appeared to
have denied in an interview with the Washington Post that the 1989 crackdown in
Beijing constituted a massacre.
According to the US newspaper, Tsai said he was struck at the time by footage of
a lone man standing in front of a People¡¦s Liberation Army tank and said that
the man was not killed showed that reports of a massacre were not true.
¡§I realized that not that many people could really have died,¡¨ Tsai was quoted
as saying, which elicited criticism from Wang and hundreds of other netizens.
¡§I am furious about Tsai¡¦s comments on the Tiananmen protest, which are
misleading,¡¨ Wang said on Jan. 23, two days after the Post interview was
published.
In response, Tsai said in an open letter posted on Wang¡¦s Facebook page on
Tuesday that his remarks had been distorted and taken out of context by the
Washington Post, and asked Wang to check the recording of the interview with
Post reporter Andrew Higgins.
¡§Do you think I would ever make such a thoughtless ¡¥simple¡¦ remark during an
interview with international media?¡¨ asked Tsai, who was also cited in the
article as saying that the unification of China and Taiwan was inevitable and
something he really hoped he could see.
In his letter Tsai offered to apologize if anything he said in the full body of
the interview was disrespectful to ¡§mainland compatriots who suffered during the
Tiananmen Incident¡¨ or hurt his Taiwanese compatriots.
Acknowledging Tsai¡¦s comment, Wang said he would reserve judgement until after
finding out if the Washington Post report did indeed take Tsai¡¦s comments out of
context.
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