Monday, June 05, 2006
Tiananmen Square: the slideshow
If you have not already seen it via Instapundit, take a look at this startling slideshow of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of May and June, 1989. Frankly, I had forgotten how dramatic and violent the "June 4 Incident" was. After scrolling through the slides I checked the Wikipedia entry. The Chinese slaughtered even more people than I had remembered:
After the protestors defied government calls to disperse, a split emerged within the Communist Party on how to respond to the protestors. Out of the party turmoil, a hardline faction emerged and the decision was made to quell the protests, rather than to heed their demands.
On May 20 the government declared martial law and on the night of June 3 and the early morning of June 4, army tanks and infantry were sent into Tian'anmen Square to crush the protest and disperse the protestors. Estimates of civilian deaths vary: 23 (C.C.P.), 400-800 (Central Intelligence Agency), 2600 (Chinese Red Cross). Injuries are generally held to have numbered from 7,000 to 10,000.
I am no hawk on China -- I view it as an immovable object, not an irresistable force -- but it is important to remember how brutal that day was.
2 Comments:
By 
, at
Tue Jun 06, 08:25:00 AM:
No comments yet? I guess most of your readers were deep into Barney the Dinosaur at the time, and didn't even notice. Although it seems unimaginable now, back then I was basking in the glories of socialist utopia as a member of a kibbutz in Israel. Wasn't really basking actually. The encounter led me to understand the utter bankruptcy of socialist ideology, even in its most benign, microcosmic manifestations, such as the kibbutz. My "comrades" even included a young Anglosaxon bloke who cheered the crackdown, said it was nobody's business besides the Chinese. When the attempt to similarly restore the USSR to pre-Gorbachov norms failed, the lad attempted to find consolation in the lastest Springsteen albulm, Nebraska, if I recall. For my own part, I quietly wept in a gesture of private grief known until now only to my wife. They didn't die in vain. Their sacrifice will one day be redeemed.
By , at
Tue Jun 06, 09:20:00 PM:
I'd like to offer couple more references in addition to PBS Frontline's "The Tank Man", where it reported the fact students were allowed to leave peacefully once the troops arrived, and Chinese government did investigate this, and release casualty figure of 240 some dead (incidentally in-line with our own NSA intel estimate.)
An article by Gregory Clark on pack journalism:
http://mparent7777.livejournal.com/7702519.html
"the so-called massacre was in fact a mini civil war as irate Beijing citizens sought to stop initially unarmed soldiers sent to remove students who had been demonstrating freely in the square for weeks. When the soldiers finally reached the square there was no massacre."
An article by Columbia Journal Review on passive journalism:
http://archives.cjr.org/year/98/5/tiananmen.asp
"as far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square.
...
Hundreds of people, most of them workers and passersby, did die that night, but in a different place and under different circumstances."
[Just for reference, throwing molotov cocktail at riot police is a crime in US.]
