Word: yaobang
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Premier left quickly, but Zhao stayed on. A proponent of 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...
...miles from the university belt in northwestern Beijing to Tiananmen Square in the city's center. It was the latest and by far the largest in a series of protests that began when students gathered on April 16 to mourn the death of former Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang, whose tolerance of demonstrations two years ago precipitated his downfall. The marchers, divided into well-organized ranks according to their school, chanted and waved red and white banners. When they tired of singing the Internationale and the national anthem, the students launched into homemade ditties. To the tune...
Night after night, arriving on bicycles or on foot, they converged on Beijing's gigantic Tiananmen Square. Gathering ostensibly to mourn the ousted Communist Party chief Hu Yaobang, who had died the previous weekend at 73, the throngs of university students actually had a much more provocative, and important, goal in mind: a demand for greater democratization in the world's most populous country. Implicit in the spreading protest campaign was a call for a shake-up in China's Communist leadership, including the retirement of Deng Xiaoping, 84, after a decade in power. In a scene never witnessed...
...time of Premier Zhou's death, the people liked him, but they thought of him as a good dictator. The people were still Marxists then." By contrast, continues Fang, who welcomes the transition, the people no longer speak of Marxism, and when | they venerate a man like Hu Yaobang, they are paying homage to him not as a benign dictator but as a symbol of reform...
...unrest was perhaps the most violent since demonstrations began April 15, when the death of reformist leader Hu Yaobang stirred antigovernment sentiments and an organized protest campaign by university students...