Tinananmen Square
31 years ago in June, Chinese students began a public protest to get the Communist Chinese government to lighten up. Hua Guofeng had just died and was succeeded by Deng Xiaoping, but no loosening of party rulership was forthcoming. There had been protest prior to this in 1976, which were not publicly spoken about, but this episode of young people asking for some leniency was covered by ABC’s and BBC’s correspondents in Beijing.
Most of these are brief videos. The ABC video with Sam Donaldson shows only the start of the nighttime massacre. The start of the broadcast from Tiananmen Square was daytime hours over there. Some students had made a mockup of the Statue of Liberty out of cardboard, and were carting that around, but I could not find a video of it. They had Xeroxes and cameras and were determined to get their message out.
A sobering part of this is that the Communist Party decides what is and is not allowed to be real, and has demanded that companies like Microsoft block access by its inhabitants to images and videos of what happened back then. Fortunately, we in the Western world still have that and the younger crowd are shocked when they see it. Xi Jinping’s spoken philosophy for building “a new and prosperous China” is that you can choose politics, or you can choose money.
What you watch is your choice. Some are short, some are about an hour long, but they all drive the same message home. If you were alive back then, you may remember some of the scenes shown on the videos.
Tiananmen Square survivors’ online conference blocked by Zoom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNEW1Uh0lz0
Daytime footage of mass protest in Tiananmen Square, w/footage of man with shopping bags in front of a line of tanks. He was whisked away by other people and vanished from sight. While there has been great curiosity regarding who he was, his identity has never been revealed, for a good reason: he would have been publicly executed by Deng’s government for what he did.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/video/june-1989-tiananmen-square-massacre-47773209
Sam Donaldson reports, with correspondent reporter, on Chinese Army’s night-time massacre at Tiananmen Square
The real horror: the Red Chinese army firing on Chinese citizens at night.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mePptwTzn0&feature=emb_rel_pause
46 minutes of the Tiananmen Square rebellion and subsequent massacre, with the man with shopping bags included, and interviews with survivors of the massacre.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHMZmthg-Vk
Frontline’s 2006 program about the massacre at Tiananmen Square, and the wimpy responses by Microsoft’s corporate heads as to why they agreed to block access to it by mainland Chinese citizens. It’s about an hour long, but no commercials are included.
I was in PME when this happened. My instructor and classmates said I was racist when I wouldn’t agree that Tiananmen Square would be a new awakening and lead the Chinese to a Declaration of Independence. I told them Crosby, Stills, and Nash wouldn’t be singing a song about it.
I came home from work and turned on the TV to get the news. This rebellion was going on. The man with shopping bags was videotaped by a British journalist from a hotel room overlooking that street. That image has stuck with me for all this time.
It was when the Chinese Army rolled in later, in the darkness, and started shooting that I realized it wasn’t happening the way the students and others had hoped it would happen.
Deng XiaoPeng was just as ruthless as his predecessors in how people were treated.
“My instructor and classmates said I was racist”….
Man, 1989, they were waaaaaaaaaay ahead of their time.
“Counter-revolutionary riot”?
Damn the CCP, every single one of them.
The spapos showing up to screech on ad nauseum on how the Chinese are not Communist in 5.4.3.2.. And to point out that the Communist Chinese Government was just exerting its right to suppress rioting and that all of the T Square riots were Trump’s fault.
Watched a lot of this live in real time on a satellite back haul feed. Some pigs are more equal than other pigs.
You always find some way to cheer me up, KoB. 🙂
You have to wonder how stupid they were in their thought processes. Idealism is great, but when you don’t temper it with realism, it is just being deluded. China even then had over a billion people. The government there could murder 10 million and still not hit one percent less in population. Life has no value to the government other than what they can contribute to better the politburo members.
They are just as bad now as they were back then.
Ironically, Tiananmen Square was known as 天 安 门
(Gate of Heavenly Peace).
Sadly, the younger Left has forgotten this or was never educated about it. Kinda like removing statues.
I would also posit that many moderates on both side of the aisle are still pissed about this as they were back then.
And yet, to this day, idiots deny the clear evidence of communist thugs being communist thugs.
We could have -destroyed- that odious regime rather more easily then. But it’s US sycophants and toadies rose to defend it, as they do now, in some weird mixture of ignorance of them and hate of us.