Tiananmen Square Protests 1989

shall do a quick one before i get back to what i was doing. i.e. playing with worms.

Tiananmen Square Protests 1989
(my all-time favourite eg even though i never got the chance to use it)

• better known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre
• Tiananmen Square is in CHINA! (ki students like t-lympho aren't very good at geography)

what?

• series of demonstrations by students, intellectuals & labour activists
• they were critical of the ruling Chinese communist party
• and called for a full-fledged democracy in China

consequences

• there was a military crackdown on the protesters - the military was told to get rid of everyone from the square by 5 am the next morning, and "use violence if necessary".
• indiscriminate firing by soldiers
• students were beaten with heavy sticks

made famous

the tank man

• made famous by the western media
• refers to the young unarmed man standing at the centre of a street, halting the tanks' progress to the military crackdown.

* watch "The Theatre of Massacre" and be amazed.

of significance

1. death tollS
   government - 200 to 300
   new york times - 300 to 400
   chinese student association - 2000 to 3000
   


2. history was deleted inside mainland china
   - strong government censorship:
   ~ media forbidden to report anything related to the subject.
   ~ china gov worked with various internet search engines (google, yahoo) to censor sites
   - this part of history literally disappeared from china
   - in 2006, an American program showed 4 students (Peking Uni, where most of the original student activists were from) the picture of the Tank Man - and none of them could identfy what was happening.

questions/uses of example

• what is history? how is history written?
• objectivity in history - is it tainted by bias?
• ethics of inquiry

sources

• frontline - the tank man & tiananmen massacre
  watch the videos here, they are really good!
• wiki - tiananmen square protests 1989

arial is totally getting on my nerves. lol.

\ \ / / bam.