During May of 1989 Beijing students marched out to Tiananmen Square to protest against the Communist Party's regime. They advocated for democracy, free speech and free press. They marched in the name of Hu Yaobang, who had recently died. Yaobang was a former leader of the Communist Party of China who worked to introduce democratic reforms into Chinese government. Thousands of people joined the students in Tiananmen Square and by mid May the protests had grown to hundreds of thousands of people all marching for more open democratic government.
On June 4th the protests were brought to a halt. The Chinese government took notice and sent soldiers to storm the marching masses. The following chaos became known as the Tiananmen Massacres. Chinese soldiers arrested thousands of protestors, many fled but some fought back throwing stones and yelling insults. The aggression escalated as the soldiers fired rounds of bullets into the crowd killing hundreds of thousands of students and protestors.
Countries around the worlds took notice of the event. Gorbachev condemned the Chinese government for their actions. The US imposed trading sanctions on China for violating human rights. No change occurred in the Chinese government but the protests stood as the people's way of showing what they wanted to the rest of the world and their population.
This is tank man, he stood in front of a line of tanks carrying two shopping bags. He had to be dragged away by two government soldiers, shopping bags still in hand. His act of defiance became a symbol of the Tiananmen protests for all of China.
Sources:
https://www.history.com/topics/china/tiananmen-square
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-48445934
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/chinese-students-begin-protests-at-tiananmen-square
I think it's important to note that this event took place at a very tense time in terms of global relations and even interfered with Gorbachev's visit to China (he hoped to improve relations between the two nations). Students began a hunger strike two days before his arrival, knowing the welcoming ceremony would be held at Tiananmen Square and thinking the Chinese government would be forced to meet the their demands. The ceremony was held at the airport instead and soldiers were sent in days after Gorbachev's departure.
ReplyDeletehttps://foreignpolicy.com/2014/06/04/i-do-not-want-red-square-to-look-like-tiananmen-square/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests#Mikhail_Gorbachev_visit
Something interesting about the Tiananmen Massacre is that if you were to google Tiananmen Square in the United States, you would see a lot of information about protests by college students in the twentieth century, as well as the history of how the square was built. But if you Google Tiananmen Square in China, you would hear nothing about the historic protests, and nothing about how they were gunned down with tanks by the military. The history of how the square was built is all that will come up in the list of search results. China’s censorship of the internet deprives its citizens of information they need and these actions directly violate article twelve of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article twelve states that all human beings have the right to privacy, with the government beginning to crackdown on all things it considered “bourgeois liberalism” after the massacre occurred.
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