Word: peng
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...time, via satellite TV transmission, hundreds of thousands of students and sympathizers filled Beijing's Tiananmen Square, demanding greater democratization and an end to nepotism and corruption. On Saturday, May 20, with the government and the Chinese capital paralyzed, the curtain rang down ominously on Act I: Premier Li Peng, a principal target of the demonstrators' wrath, and President Yang Shangkun imposed martial law; troops from the People's Liberation Army (P.L.A.) mustered to enter the city...
...last the curtain fell again, with the disturbing clang of a prison door closing. Li Peng appeared on television for the first time since martial law was declared, receiving -- as if to underscore his legitimacy -- a covey of newly arrived ambassadors. The Premier declared that the soldiers would move into Beijing as soon as the city's residents understood the need to restore order. From all available signs, Deng Xiaoping had cast his lot with the hard- line faction headed by Li. The losers were a more reformist group led by party chief Zhao Ziyang. Diplomatic sources said that Zhao...
...objectives are clear. One is a clean sweep of China's rampant corruption. The demand seems straightforward enough, but implied in it is an attack on what the protesters see as the abuse of power by top party officials. Virtually all of them have been accused of nepotism. Li Peng is viewed as a beneficiary of nepotism since he was an orphan raised by Zhou Enlai...
Much, however, depends on the Beijing regime. Revolutions are usually triggered by the intractability and violence of governments, and the declaration of martial law showed that Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng were prepared to crush the protests with military force. Violence can, and often does, achieve its aim of suppression. It can also galvanize an opposition and make compromise unthinkable...
...choice that faced China was between a serious erosion or even collapse of government authority and a massacre in Tiananmen Square. Deng and Li Peng would not risk anarchy, so they called in the military, but at least initially were hesitant to give it a free hand. That left it to the soldiers, their trucks blocked by mobs of pleading countrymen, to ponder another saying of Mao's: "Whoever suppresses the students will come to no good...