Chinese Pen Club Editor Accused of Revising June Fourth for the CCP; Ouyang Jing’s Text Criticized by Wu Zolai, Wang Dan and Zhou Fengsuo
From June 11 to 12, Ouyang Jing, an editor of the Independent Chinese Pen Club website, sparked public controversy with his text about June Fourth. Wu Zuilai reposted a passage by Ouyang Jing about June Fourth on platform X, calling it "perhaps an excellent piece of CCP external propaganda." Wang Dan then said that such a person "wandering in the Chinese Pen Club founded by Liu Xiaobo, and also a website editor for the club," was unbelievable. Zhou Fengsuo also named the club president Ma Jian, demanding an explanation of why the Chinese Pen Club allowed such a person to serve as a formal website editor.
The problem with Ouyang Jing's passage is not that it is harshly written, nor that its viewpoint is conservative, nor that it is a typical historical dispute. It inverts the structure of responsibility for June Fourth. He bundles the 1989 student hunger strike, mass support, traffic paralysis, barricades, vehicle burnings, exhausted soldiers, confused officers, and military orders into a picture of a "nation on the brink of madness." The most crucial element, however, is omitted: the CCP mobilizing martial law troops into the capital, using heavily armed forces against unarmed students and citizens under its own rule, employing machine‑gun fire, tank crushing, and the national army to execute the Party leader's will.
The evil of June Fourth lies precisely here. It was not a routine suppression, not police dispersing a demonstration, not merely arresting a few leaders. The CCP sent the army into Beijing, brought the war machine onto Chang'an Avenue, pointed guns and tracks at civilians, students, workers, and passersby. Those people were not foreign enemies, not armed rebels, not combatants on a battlefield, but the very people the regime claims daily to represent, serve, and lead. Once the Party feels the people block its path, the people instantly become obstacles to be shot at and crushed.
Viewed solely from the brutal reality of state violence, June Fourth is even more explicit and naked than many dictators' massacres. The famines, purges, and forced‑labor systems of Mao Zedong and Stalin killed more people on a larger scale, but the terror of June Fourth lies in its exposing the essence of the regime to the whole world: on the capital’s streets, organized troops, tanks, armored vehicles, live ammunition, firing directly at its own citizens. It did not rely on starvation to slowly kill, nor on secret police snatching people away at night, nor on concentration camps isolating people out of sight. It openly told every Chinese on the streets of Beijing: when the Communist Party seeks to preserve its power, the people become the target.
This is precisely why the CCP has spent more than thirty years desperately blocking the memory of June Fourth. It fears not that a piece of history is mentioned, but that Chinese people will once again see that image: the so‑called people’s army obeying the Party actually means the Party can order the army to kill the people. The so‑called stability above all actually means the Party’s power trumps human life. The so‑called quelling of unrest actually means packaging massacre as governance, dragging corpses out of history, and covering bloodstains with cement.
The most disgusting aspect of Ouyang Jing’s passage is that it plugs into the CCP’s language system. It frames the student hunger strike as “self‑harm forcing the Party to yield,” the civilian resistance as “mixed with thugs,” the blood on Chang'an Avenue as traffic paralysis and on‑site chaos, and the fatigue and confusion of the martial‑law soldiers as a moral dilemma. When a regime deploys troops to massacre civilians, it does not focus on the shooters but on whether the shot victims have dirtied the square. This is not a question of historical judgment; it is a question of whose heart is more corrupt.
In a follow‑up post, Wu Zuilai further pointed the problem at the internal governance of the Chinese Pen Club. He called Ouyang Jing a “three‑no person”: no traceable file, no recommendation letter, no regulatory constraints. Wu said he asked Ma Jian whether he had seen Ouyang Jing’s background material and was told no; several directors were also unaware. He also alleged that Ma Jian directly ordered Yang Zili to grant Ouyang Jing editorial publishing rights, allowing his personal works to go straight to the homepage. These statements currently constitute Wu Zuilai’s public accusations; the club’s president Ma Jian and related personnel have not yet provided a full public explanation of these specific allegations.
Public records show that the 11th Board of the Independent Chinese Pen Club adopted a resolution at its second meeting in February 2025 to establish a Network Media Committee, whose members include Wu Zuilai, Yang Zili, Zhang Yu, Wu Lebao, and Ouyang Jing. The Independent Chinese Pen Club has long identified itself with Chinese‑language free writing, freedom of speech, and anti‑persecution, its history tightly linked to Liu Xiaobo, exiled writers, dissidents, and the memory of June Fourth. An editor position at such an institution’s website is certainly not an ordinary backend account. Whoever can publish can shape the organization’s public memory; whoever can publish consistently can gradually rewrite readers’ understanding of the CCP’s tyranny.
This incident cannot be viewed in isolation. Recently, narratives such as “go back and see,” “the country is different now,” “stop being anti‑Communist,” “June Fourth isn’t that simple” have been repeatedly emerging in overseas Chinese circles. They sometimes sound like pink slogans, sometimes appear gentle, like reconciliation, reflection, maturity, or political fatigue. Yet the endpoint of this rhetoric is clear: to get exiles to abandon enemy‑friend judgments, to have victims and perpetrators sit together and each receive a slap, to turn June Fourth from massacre into conflict, and to recast the CCP from murderer to a “party forced to maintain stability.”
The CCP’s dismantling of overseas dissent groups does not rely solely on harassment, intimidation, surveillance, or threats to families back home. It also relies on language. It gets people to dilute guilt with “complexity,” to mask massacre with “order,” to erase differences between shooters and the shot with “both sides share responsibility.” Once this language infiltrates dissent organizations, media platforms, and editorial systems, the issue becomes more than a single author publishing a rotten article; it becomes the CCP’s historical revisionist project reaching into the overseas Chinese anti‑CCP camp’s door.
If overseas Chinese dissent groups cannot even guard their content entry points, the consequences are worse than external attacks. External attacks are at least visible—account bans, harassment, cyber attacks, threats to families—so everyone knows where the enemy is. Internal breaches are far dirtier; they come cloaked in the guise of friends, authors, editors, volunteers, and technicians, turning anti‑CCP groups into channels that whitewash the CCP, turning platforms commemorating June Fourth into places that dissolve June Fourth’s culpability. The Party loves this cheap deal: no need to breach servers or imprison people, just find a few who can write “calm analyses,” and pour the dirty water bucket by bucket into historical memory.
June Fourth is not a vague case, nor material for practicing “multi‑angle narratives.” The CCP sent troops into the capital, fired live ammunition, rolled tanks onto the streets, and civilians and students died—that is the core fact of June Fourth. Anyone who departs from this core fact to discuss on‑site chaos, exhausted soldiers, or excited students is shifting the lens for the murderers. Whoever lets such a person control the website editorial rights of a free‑writing institution must explain: was it negligence, or complicity; a procedural breakdown, or a complete lack of procedure.