Word: hungered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Behind the street theater, though, a profound seriousness pervaded Tiananmen, born of the knowledge that people were prepared to die for democracy. Construction workers and medical volunteers erected a makeshift clinic, using scaffolding and canvas, as doctors and nurses ministered to the hunger strikers, some of whom had sworn off water as well as food and were wilting rapidly in the warm weather. The strikers were given glucose solutions, intravenously or orally. When the weather turned foul on Wednesday night, they were moved inside buses that had been brought to Tiananmen Square by the Chinese Red Cross...
...sick to hospitals. Such efficiency was another sign of the students' organizational abilities: while central Beijing ground to a standstill because of the crowds that thronged to the square, the demonstrators, using packing string and their own bodies, cordoned off lanes so the ambulances could always get through. Many hunger strikers made the trip out; almost as many came back to resume their fast once they felt well enough...
...achievement almost proved short-lived. As the number of demonstrators in the square dwindled to nearly none, the students decided to employ one of civil disobedience's most sacred weapons, the hunger strike. With a large contingent of foreign press on hand for the Gorbachev visit, the decision seemed a brilliant public relations ploy. But the choice of tactics also harked back to the sensibility of a much earlier...
...demands may be amorphous, but there can be no doubt about the passion, as evidenced by the willingness of ordinary people to obstruct tanks and of hunger strikers to court death. If anything, the absence of an ideology with specific long-range aims indicates just how powerful is the public revulsion at the party and the entire status quo. The immediate reasons for the discontent -- the government's condescending treatment of the student demonstrators and its general repressiveness -- are clear. But the anger also stems from the less political aspects of everyday life. Economically and socially, China is experiencing many...
...heart of the Tiananmen spectacle were some troubling questions: What exactly did the hunger strikers and their supporters want? Did they even know...