Word: pasts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Leveling their AK-47 assault rifles, the soldiers began firing away at the mobs. The gas tanks of commandeered buses exploded. Huge streams of people fled in terror past blazing trees along Changan Avenue -- the Avenue of Eternal Peace. As helmeted soldiers mounted automatic machine guns on tripods facing the square, policemen with truncheons chased people from the sidewalks and the ornate marble bridges leading to the Forbidden City...
...troops brought to the capital from all over China during the past few weeks are said to be loyal not to some central command but to various factions in the leadership. Thus while numerous units remained behind barricades, others, like the 27th Army, wreaked destruction in the city. Reports of heavy fire inside the Forbidden City, where police and P.L.A. units are routinely billeted, led to speculation that the rival units were shooting it out with one another. Furthermore, said a Western academic in Beijing, "there was very clearly a battle between two different army units on the road...
...bloody assault by Deng's armed troops ended all that, and also the Goddess of Democracy, which was crushed by a tank once the troops gained control of the square. Even so, the events of the past seven weeks immunized vast numbers of people against the traditional propaganda bromides and convinced them that the government was not invulnerable: it was only an agency of brutal power. If the student campaign failed, it at least succeeded in forging a historic new link between China's intellectual community and its masses. As an observer said earlier in the week, "It will...
...thousands of years spanned by Chinese history, unspeakable atrocities have occurred. Millions have suffered from the machinations of cloistered emperors, empresses and eunuchs; whole cities have been slaughtered by marauding invaders and warlords. Until Sunday, that all seemed safely in the past. No one quite expected it to happen again. The shock will ease with the passage of weeks. The tremors will be felt for years...
...than Bush's hypercautious hedging, ready or not. Ever since Gorbachev promised last December to slash Soviet forces in Europe, he had been bombarding an awed Europe with proposal after proposal to refashion the Continent's military balance, his way, while the U.S. stood idly by. And for the past two months, the U.S. and Britain had brawled with West Germany over whether and when to modernize NATO's few remaining short-range nuclear missiles in West Germany or trade them away. More broadly, the dynamic changes sweeping the European Continent cried out for American leadership in reshaping NATO...