June 20, 2016
A man stood before a line of tanks near Tiananmen Square in Beijing in June 1989. Liquor bottles with labels riffing on that protest began circulating on WeChat in May.
Jeff Widener/Associated Press
BEIJING — The Chinese police have detained three more people in a widening investigation into the creation and distribution of liquor bottles that bore the image of a lone man blocking a line of tanks, a reference to a figure of resistance to the deadly 1989 military crackdown on the Tiananmen democracy movement, according to a friend of the detainees and the wife of one.
Images of the bottles with a label showing an altered “Tank Man,” this time sitting on the ground apparently looking at a computer, began circulating on WeChat in May, shortly before the 27th anniversary of the June 4 killings, according to a friend of the detainees. The three — a poet, a freelance advertising designer and a former driver — all lived in the southwestern city of Chengdu.
The friend, who communicated by online message, asked not to be named for fear that he also would be detained.
The liquor was called “Eight Liquor Six Four,” a play on the Chinese name for the crackdown, based on the date’s numbers: 89.6.4. (In Mandarin, the word for “liquor,” “jiu,” is a homophone for “nine.”)
The inscription on the label was also laced with meaning. It said the liquor was from “Beijing,” was “64 percent volume” and had “aged for 27 years.” It also said, “never forget, never give up.”
Some people bought the commemorative liquor in May, but it had not spread widely before the police made their first arrest, according to the friend.
The first person taken into custody was a worker named Fu Hailu, who was formally detained on May 29 on suspicion of “inciting subversion of state power,” according to friends and human rights groups.
“They did this to remember the pain of the people,” said the friend of the detainees, who was also in Chengdu.
“This wasn’t a commercial thing,” the friend wrote. “The liquor was made by a small distillery in Sichuan, and they sold it at cost.’’
“Chinese people have the tradition of using liquor to commemorate the souls of the dead,” he wrote, a reference to the practice of leaving offerings at shrines or graves. “The blood of those who died on 6.4 was a start for the Chinese people’s search for freedom, although it failed.”
Gao Yan, the wife of the detained freelance advertiser, Luo Fuyu, said in a telephone interview that the police came on Thursday to the nail salon where she works and took her away for questioning about her husband. She said she had not seen him for several days. “He was very busy and hadn’t been home,” she said.
The police handed her a detention notice, saying Mr. Luo was in custody as of Wednesday on suspicion of “inciting subversion of state power.”
“I don’t know what he did,” Ms. Gao said, adding that the police refused to tell her, although “they said it wasn’t robbery, arson or pickpocketing.”
Ms. Gao said that as word of her husband’s detention spread, his friends contacted her to say it had to do with the liquor.
The detentions demonstrate the government’s enduring sensitivity to any commemoration of the 1989 killings. Beijing declared the demonstrations a “counterrevolutionary rebellion” and did not apologize for the bloodshed, which left hundreds, possibly thousands dead.
Also detained was Ma Qing, a poet who friends said shared images of the bottles online, on charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” and Zhang Junyong, who has no current fixed employment but has worked as a driver and in a tourism company. Mr. Zhang was also detained for “inciting subversion,” the friends said.
Although the center of the demonstrations and the subsequent military crackdown was Beijing, protests broke out and were suppressed in Chengdu and other cities as well.
A woman who answered the telephone at the Chengdu City Detention Center said the center could not confirm Mr. Luo was being held there, as was said in the detention notice, a copy of which was seen by The New York Times.
“We don’t accept information requests by telephone, fax or email; there are too many people here,” said the woman, who would not give her name. “You have to come here to the big hall with your ID card to get information.”
