Word: tiananmen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...tense early-morning hours of June 4, hope died and fear was born. Thousands of combat troops stormed Tiananmen Square, transforming the Woodstock-like encampment of young students calling for democracy into the bloodiest killing ground in Communist China's history. The images of defiance and devastation, the voices of determination and despair, shook the world. Here, protesters attacked troops with poles and rocks. There, a student lurched, his dazed face soaked with blood. Everywhere, the bodies fell, how many is still not known, while fires blazed, signaling the dawn of China's uncertain new world...
...grip on power late last week, the contradictions -- and the questions -- remained. For the time being, the old men seemed to be in control again. But for how long? If the Chinese were being cowed into submission, a long- standing compact between them and their government had been broken. Tiananmen Square and Beijing might belong to the P.L.A., but the struggle for control of China is far from over...
...days after the Tiananmen massacre, government organs pressed a surreal drive to mislead the country about what had happened. Most of the victims of what they described as a battle against "counterrevolutionary insurgents" were soldiers, claimed a government spokesman, who placed among the dead a few hundred troops and only 23 students. Hours later, those figures were revised again and turned into impossibly good news by a man in military uniform on state television. Said the officer: "Not one person died in the square." Late last week state radio was even claiming that no soldiers opened fire in Tiananmen...
...truth was different, and Beijing knew it. An estimated 5,000 citizens died in only a few hours between Saturday night and Sunday morning after units of the P.L.A.'s 27th Army launched their brutal assault to oust pro-democracy students from Tiananmen; the exact number of victims may never be known...
...were Li and a host of top leaders and party elders, as well as representatives of all key factions in the military, including those who had been considered loyal to party moderates. Present too were President Yang Shangkun, 82, a former army general and the reputed mastermind of the Tiananmen attack, and Qiao Shi, 64, the state security chief who may become General Secretary of the Communist Party. Conspicuously missing was the incumbent in that post, the moderate Zhao Ziyang, whose whereabouts have remained unknown since late last month, when he held sympathetic talks with student representatives in Tiananmen...