Word: tiananmen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...most holidays, Peking's Tiananmen Square is jammed with thousands of residents and visitors who traditionally promenade through the 100-acre open area and photograph one another in front of the surrounding monuments. But on New Year's Day, revelers arriving at the huge square found it virtually blocked off by hundreds of police standing at rigid attention. "What's happening?" asked one perplexed out-of-towner. "Any foreign dignitaries arriving?" That was hardly the cause for the show of force. Within hours, despite the police, the historic site was aswarm with protesting students, singing and chanting slogans...
...some 300 students collected on one side of the square. The assemblage was blatantly unlawful. The students had not only failed to comply with the recently imposed statute requiring them to register any demonstration five days in advance but also ignored a specific prohibition against holding such events in Tiananmen Square. As holiday strollers watched from behind police barricades, the students unfurled a dozen posters and banners calling for democracy and declaring support for the economic reforms introduced by Chinese Leader Deng Xiaoping. Seemingly unaware that their actions might instead serve to undermine Deng, they locked arms in a column...
Each fall for the past several years, Chinese students have flexed their political muscle in scattered protests. In September 1985 several hundred Peking students marched to Tiananmen Square, ostensibly to protest Japan's growing role in the Chinese economy, but also to attack corruption and nepotism among China's ruling elite. This autumn, when student restiveness started up again, it was at first dismissed as the annual student itch. Not until the movement spread early last month to Shanghai (pop. 12 million), with its 200,000 university students and history as a hotbed of radical movements, did the government take...
...their participation in the Cultural Revolution, like the epoch itself, seems to have been a historical aberration. More typically, China's young demonstrators have called for a quickened pace of reform. On April 5, 1976, students swelled the ranks of the 100,000 demonstrators who massed in Peking's Tiananmen Square to protest the removal by Maoist radicals of thousands of wreaths that had been placed at the Monument to the People's Heroes in memory of Premier Chou En-lai, who had died the previous January. The protesters obliquely attacked Mao and waved banners declaring support for Deng Xiaoping...
...hour parade was taken up by the armed forces-6,000 soldiers followed by tanks, artillery and missiles. The rest consisted of a series of giant tableaux of moving humanity, depicting China's achievements under Deng, interspersed with battalions of dancers and students, all waving pompoms that transformed Tiananmen Square into shifting patterns of bright color. One huge float, representing the Yangtze River hydraulic project, had water gushing over a model dam; in another, a 14-ft. robot bunked, waved a bouquet of flowers and blurted out, "Long live the motherland...