Word: tiananmen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...already the city of 10 million had begun to stir. Supporters of the students banged pots and pans to wake neighbors and send them into the streets with a mission: stop the trucks and armored personnel carriers heading toward Tiananmen, the vast square that has been the center stage of Chinese politics for more than three centuries. Because troops stationed in Beijing might not comply with orders out of sympathy with the hunger strikers, the forces were drawn from nearby provinces. Many of the soldiers were peasant boys who had spent the previous week in camps outside the city. Forbidden...
Then they lectured the soldiers. "We are people and you are people! Why do you have no feelings?" a demonstrator screamed. "You should think about what you are doing," another exhorted a truckful of soldiers. At the intersection of Gongzhufen, five miles west of Tiananmen, thousands flooded around a convoy of 50 trucks, bringing food, water and pleas for the soldiers. Urged a young woman: "The students are for the people. Please don't hurt the students...
...with respect for authority, last week's outpouring of discontent was nothing short of revolutionary. No major power in the postwar period has ever been so rudely shaken -- rocked, in fact, to its foundation -- by the dissent of its populace. Still, on the faces of the hunger strikers in Tiananmen Square and of their millions of supporters around the country, the message was clear: China had crossed a threshold into a new era, where the future was entirely and terrifyingly up for grabs...
...rapid economic reform, Zhao was well aware that his predecessor, Hu Yaobang, supported political reform and was sacked for not moving quickly enough to crush student demonstrations more than two years ago. (Hu's death on April 15 sparked the first demonstrations of the past tumultuous month.) But in Tiananmen, Zhao did not go out of his way to avoid Hu's mistake. His eyes welling with tears, he acknowledged the patriotism of the students. "I came too late, too late," a student quoted him as saying. "I should be criticized...
When it happened, suddenly a million or more marchers were streaming into Tiananmen, perhaps ten times as many as had been there the day before. It was the largest demonstration in modern Chinese history. People poured out of factories and hospitals, the Foreign Ministry and kindergartens. And not just in Beijing. By midweek the ferment had spread to at least a dozen other cities, with another hunger strike taking place in Shanghai. In some provincial cities, plans for a general strike were reported...