What Is The Tiananmen Square Massacre

The Tiananmen Square Massacre greatly impacted the way the rest of the world viewed the Chinese government. Imagine not having the freedom of speech that we do today, or living in a country that kills the innocent. In 1989, college students exercised their right to freedom of speech while protesting their communist leaders, and the leaders of Communist China put the demonstration down with military force resulting in possibly thousands killed. But, throughout the last 25 years China has grown and developed into a much different country than it was during the late 1980’s. Granted, the country still has a long way to go before it resembles the democracy present in the United States today, but it seems to be headed in the right direction.

The cultural revolution is a strange period in Chinese history laced with intense struggle and anguish. The cultural revolution mobilized the all of society to compete for all opposing factions that they belonged to (Ong, 2016). Mao mobilized the young people of society during a background of political turmoil, which helped Mao to mobilize the students in order to enforce his political legitimacy and ideas (Ong, 2016). Mao’s charismatic authority created his personality cult and most defiantly leant a helping hand in mobilizing the red guard movement (Ong, 2016) (Weber, 1946) (Andreas, 2007). No matter which faction of the red guard they belonged to, they all mobilized against their common enemy; the better off, upper class. (Ong, 2016). Multiple ideologies within the youth led red guard movement explain why the movement gained momentum and became incredibly powerful (Walder, 2009).

“As one of the Red Guards in the middle school, I was given power through Mao to torture and humiliate our teachers, headmaster or anyone we didn’t like. I didn’t know it was wrong. I thought I was doing the right thing to continue the revolution, to fight and win the class struggle”- Zhao, Lin Qing. As a teenager Zhao was a Red Guard in Guangzhou during the Cultural Revolution. When asked what her impression was a member of the Red Guards, Zhao answered with two words: “naïve and senseless”. She refused answering anything more about her experience. She said, “The memories are still too painful to recall.”

Bob Fu conveys clearly the inexorable control that Communist leaders in China have over their people. For example, after Fu and his friends participated in the Tiananmen Square protests, Fu was coerced, day in day out, to write a confession of his purported misdeeds against China and her people as a “counterrevolutionary” (79-82, 85, 87).

Even with her previous experiences at Beijing University and at Big Joy Farm, Wong still held some belief that the Chinese system wasn’t as bad as it was sometimes made out to be. This event proved to her that it was. “The enormity of the massacre hit home…Although it had been years since I was a Maoist, I still had harbored some small hope for China. Now even that was gone” (259). As a reporter Wong was able to view the progression of the protests in leading up to the massacre, and in viewing it understood that the Chinese people were much more independent than they had previously demonstrated over the past 50 years. She had continuously seen the Chinese people following what they were told between learning in school or with physical labor, yet this protest was one of the first large scale displays of the unacceptance of the regime by the people, and the government did not know what to do with it. But because of this, Wong was able to recognize that the people were not reliant on this way of life that they had previously been bound to, but truly could lead for themselves and take control. The massacre awakened Wong both to the reality that the government was not acting to benefit the people, and that the people were more than capable of acting for

The Tiananmen Square massacre happened on June 4, 1989. Chinese troops arrested and killed many pro-democratic protesters at the Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Young students were the majority of the protesters and they wanted the Chinese Communist Party to stop corruption. The protests started in May and continued into June, where they became more violent. When the troops opened fire on the protesters, some fought back. Grace’s description of the massacre was very accurate. She described it as very violent and the troops ran over protesters with tanks. Grace and her Mom went to the

Many factors such as, growing liberalization, economic disparities, and inflations. led to the protests. During Mao Ze Dong's leadership, the Chinese government collectivized industries and agriculture. After his death, his successor Deng Xiao Ping implemented the Gai Ge Kai Fang policy, de-collectivizing industries and agriculture. (Huenemann 2017) This policy also allowed citizens greater freedom. Some academics even received encouragement from the government to take an active political stance. (The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica) Following the privatization of agriculture and industries, China experienced great economic growth. Unfortunately, this also caused the rate of corruption, and economic disparities to surge. China also experienced price inflations as it

This memoir of Ma Bo’s sent shock waves throughout China when it was published and was even first banned by the Communist Government. This passionate story paints a clear picture for what the Great Chinese Cultural Revolution was really like. Many Chinese living today can attest to similar if not identical ordeals as expressed in Ma Bo’s story. The toils of being a young Red Guard in inner China were experienced by many if not millions. The horrors and atrocities were wide spread throughout the country, not just in Inner Mongolia. The experiences illustrated in Blood Red Sunset uniquely belong to Ma Bo’s entire generation of mislead Chinese. As expressed in the books dedication the Cultural Revolution

Just like everydays, I look up random things on the quora. There is a question suddenly popped up in my eyes: “Why do the Chinese still care about the Nanjing massacre so much?” The person who asked this question doesn’t understand why lots of chinese against APA hotel, only because the chief of APA hotel written a book that denial the Nanking Massacre happens.

The apex of Wong’s book is how she displays the emotional overtones in reciting her account of the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989. She tells of being holed up in a hotel across the street from the square and actually being able to see the violence between the protesting students and citizens, and the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army. When she describes bodies falling from gunshot wounds, people being squashed by tanks, and the bullets ricocheting off their hotel walls, it produces multiple senses of horror, sorrow, and absolute terror. She further hammers this point across by displaying two images taken from the scene (245). The first is of a PLA platoon leader who was beaten, set afire, disemboweled, and to add further insult, positioned so that he would serve as an example of what the proletariats were capable of. The second, was of PLA soldiers examining the destruction of Tiananmen Square after they seized the square. Smoke and debris from the protestors are widely prevalent, and the image was even used in a propaganda brochure for the government.

As in many preset-day governments, and the governments depicted in the books, China considerably restricts its citizen’s rights to speech and the press. In Legend, the people must be careful of what they say, as it could bring them serious consequences. For example, after Day is executed according the government, talk of him living spreads extremely quickly but only in the shadows, as it was dangerous if the government overheard; the person could be locked up or even worse. Earlier, when June spread news about the Arcadia bank, she sent out scouts, one per sector, to talk about giving Day plague medicine if he comes to the ten-second place. The spreading of this news shows how easy it is for the government to purposefully spread news, not simply restricting speech but surreptitiously and indirectly forcing it taking advantage of the people 's interest

This week in Democracy in troubled times, we spent most of our time watching a video called Tiananmen Square Declassified. This video was very unsettling. On June 4, 1989 there was a terrible riot in Chinas Tiananmen square. Students were huddling around soldiers, the Kernel in charge was trying to form an agreement for the students to leave, and if they did that their troops wouldn’t shoot.

On 18 May 1995, the police took Liu into custody for launching a petition campaign on the eve of the sixth anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, calling on the government to reassess the event and initiate political reform. He was held under residential surveillance in the suburbs of Beijing for 9 months. He was released in February 1996 but was arrested again on 8 October for writing an October Tenth Declaration, co-authored by him and another prominent dissident Wang Xizhe, mainly on the Taiwan issue that advocated a peaceful reunification in order to oppose the Chinese Communist Party's forceful threats against the island. He was ordered to serve three years of re-education through labor[10][60] "for disturbing public order" for that statement.[61]

He was also the leader of the Communist Party of China from 1981 to 1987. Hu Yaobang's rise to power was organized by Deng Xiaoping. In 1980 Hu became Party Secretary General, and was elected to the powerful Politburo Standing Committee (committee consisting of the top leadership of the CPC). In 1981, Hu became CPC Chairman, but helped abolish the position of Party chairman in 1982, as part of a larger attempt to distance China from Maoist politics (political theory derived from the teachings of the Chinese political leader Mao Zedong). By 1982, Hu was the second most powerful person in China, after

The Shanghai (Xinjiang) Riots and Tiananmen Square Massacre were a direct result from government corruption. The Shanghai (Xinjiang) riots developed around 1994. It began with about 10,000 “incidents” with 730,000 participants, it grew to 74,000 “incidents” with 3.8 million participants. There have been many casualties or as referred to by the government “incidents” by these riots, in 2000, there were 5,500 and in 2003 there were 58,000. These riots are due to overworked textile workers striking, villagers trying to keep their land from being taking over, but mostly because of poor victims of the transition to a market economy. This was directly a cause of government corruption due to unequal distribution of wealth and police abuse. A rioter stated “people can see who corrupt the government is while they barely have enough to eat.” However, this problem originated before those riots occurred. 5 years before that happened; a more famous incident took place, the Tiananmen Square Massacre. July 4th, 1989, thousands of students gathered outside Tiananmen Square to protest for a more democratic government. Chinese government sent officials