In the spring of 1989, students led demonstrations calling for democracy, free speech, and free press in China. The protestors initially marched through Beijing to Tiananmen Square following the death of Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party Leader who had introduced Democratic reform in China. The students mourned Yaobang's death by calling for a more open, democratic government and each day hundreds of more people would come out to the Tiananmen Square to protest.
There were many issues the students were protesting. One of the main issues was that there was not much political freedom with the Communist Party holding so much power and there were ongoing economic issues. Even though there had been some reforms that were instituted by the government in the 1980's, they were mostly unsuccessful. The poor and working-class still faced the challenges of lack of jobs and poverty.
As the movement grew, the Chinese government grew more uncomfortable with the situation. In fact, a welcome ceremony schedule for Prime Minister Gorbachev of the Soviet Union was held in the airport instead of Tiananmen Square. The Chinese Government eventually declared martial law on May 20 and 250,000 troops entered Beijing.
With the amount of protestors growing to over 1 million, the military had little success in stopping the protests and it was decided that more aggressive measures needed to take place. On June 4, Chinese soldiers and police stormed into Tiananmen Square and fired into the crowd. Some protestors tried to escape but others fought back. By the end of the day, there were hundreds to thousands killed and around 10,000 arrested.
The Chinese Government's response was widely denounced, particularly be Western governments and media. Leader worldwide condemned the military action and the United States Congress voted to impose economic sanction against China for violating human rights.
The protests led to a strengthened role for the Communist Party in domestic affairs. Many of the freedoms introduced during the 1980's were rescinded and the party re-established firm control over the media. Also, the protests led to increased spending on internal security and expanded the role of the People's Armed Police in suppressing urban protests.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests
https://www.history.com/topics/china/tiananmen-square
Reading your post it's very clear how much the Chinese government did not want it to look like things were out of control or were being run democratically. Personally, I think that any government is supposed to help, guide and protect its citizens. So the fact that they were shot down by their own government is disconcerting to me. It is especially disheartening considering that "tiananmen" means "gate of heavenly place"and that thousands were killed there. Not to mention the dozens of people who were later executed for participating in the demonstration.
ReplyDeleteSource:
https://www.cnn.com/2013/09/15/world/asia/tiananmen-square-fast-facts/index.html
It's also worth noting that the Chinese government, even to this day, has continued to censor information from their people, especially regarding this event. Many have commented somewhat ironically that June 4th is China's annual internet maintenance day. I read somewhere that the Chinese character 点, which by itself essentially means point/dot, is censored in China around June 4th due to its aesthetic similarity to a tank crushing a group of people.
ReplyDeleteThis blog was extremely informative. Clearly, the Chinese government is willing to go to extremes to oppress democracy and free speech among their people. Since this kind of "censorship" in Tiananmen square, oppression of freedom has only continued to grow. Now, censorship in Communist China has spread to the media, most notably the internet. While the Chinese Constitution allows for freedom of speech and press, government authorities are able to crack down on news sources by claiming they are spreading government information and secrets. This vague facilitation allows the government to overstep a lot of boundaries that we Americans would consider unconstitutional.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/media-censorship-china
Several people have written about their experiences at Tiananmen Square in a paper titled “The Tiananmen Papers”, it was published by two Chinese scholars, detailing speeches and notes of high ranking Chinese government officials. Shortly after the paper was published the Chinese state media was quick to label it as fabricated material... As a result of this mass censorship, many people in China use a VPN now.
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