Word: tiananmen
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...hardly knew it was my city," says film director Xu Jinglei, 33, born and bred in Beijing. Astonishing buildings are starting to appear: the iconic Bird's Nest Olympic stadium; Rem Koolhaas' cantilevered towers for broadcaster CCTV; the National Theater, a doorless silver dome perched on the corner of Tiananmen Square like a newly landed UFO. Numberless dilapidated eyesores thrown up by central planners in the 1950s and '60s have been swept away...
...unlike in '88, when Burma's version of the Tiananmen massacre got little international attention, this time the world is taking notice. On Aug. 30, President George W. Bush condemned the junta's actions against demonstrators, and White House aides have promised that Burma will be a "major topic of discussion" at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation annual summit in Sydney. First Lady Laura Bush, who has personally followed the situation in Burma for years and has met with many Burmese activists, phoned U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to press for more action from the international body. "One thing...
...question is whether these scattered demonstrations will lead to a replay of Burma's version of Tiananmen, when a nation confronted its brutal military rulers only to be crushed by an iron fist. Certainly, there are similarities between today's protest movement and that of 1988. Although the previous strikes are now glossed with a patina of democratic yearning, their initial motivation was also economic. Back then, the military regime demonetized the local currency, rendering millions of people's savings worthless. Small groups began marching over a six-month period, a stop-start effort that culminated in August 1988 with...
...Games are often referred to as China's coming-out party. For its rulers, the Olympics are a chance to show that their country is no longer a jittery backwater of a nation but a dynamic, confident giant. For many human-rights activists around the world, however--for whom Tiananmen is a word signifying more than a square in the middle of Beijing--China's Olympic dream is nothing to celebrate. So the one-year mark before the Games has seen an outpouring of protest as much as of pageantry. On the Great Wall, a massive banner that read...
...horrors of Munich in 1972 to the boycotts of the Games in Montreal, Moscow and Los Angeles--suggests that's a forlorn hope. "The Olympics are about human nature," says Bao Tong, a former adviser to Zhao Ziyang, the reformist Communist Party General Secretary at the time of the Tiananmen massacre in 1989. "You cannot separate the Olympics from human rights." You might suppose that the Chinese government would have thought of that before it entered its bid to host the games...