A Picture Speaks A Thousand Words

My last post about the Berlin Wall was an important and poignant point in history. It was also filmed and widely reported in the media. I think that the fall of the Berlin Wall paved the way for recent media outlets reporting on anything and everything in world news. The massacre at Tiananmen Square was also another moment that was seen played out on TV.

At 2:00am on June 4th 1989, People's Liberation Army tanks and 300,000 soldiers moved into TiananmenSquare in Beijing to crush a large pro-democracy demonstration that had been going on for seven weeks. The tanks rolled over people that got in their way and soldiers opened fire on groups of protesters.

Hundreds of students and supporters were killed. Nobody but the Chinese authorities knows how many people really died, partly because the bodies were carried off the night of the massacre and buried in secret graves.

The massacre at Tiananmen Square didn't take place in Tiananmen Square but rather in the streets around it. Most of violence occurred on the Avenue of Eternal Peace on the southern side of the square. Reports that the square was washed in blood were unfounded and it appears no one actually died within Tiananmen Square itself. Crackdowns also occurred in more than 200 cities all over China.

The Chinese government death figure is 300. Other estimates range from 2,700 and up. Most of the dead were not university students but ordinary people. Among them were many bystanders, including a 17-year-old high school student, a 27-year-old chemistry teacher, and a 30-year-old computer company employee who had been married for only a month.

Never before had the People's Liberation Army turned its weapons on the Chinese people with the intention of murdering so many of them. Demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in 1976 and 1987 had been broken up with batons and tear gas not guns and tanks.