On 26 April, an editorial in the Communist Party’s People’s Daily denounced the student demonstrations as a ‘premeditated and organised conspiracy and turmoil’. The demonstrations spread to hundreds of cities. They called for greater freedom of speech, economic freedoms and curbs on corruption. Two days after his death, on 17 April, several hundred students marched to Tiananmen Square and laid a wreath to him. In April 1989, popular Chinese reformist leader Hu Yaobang died. Even if he made a mistake, he didn’t deserve death.” “He just wanted to see the crowds,” said Tang, who has for years been placed under heavy surveillance for her efforts. He never expressed interest in the issues the students were demonstrating over – government corruption, democratic reforms, or freedoms. Tang is emphatic that her son, whom the police accused of being a “counter-revolutionary”, an imprisonable offence at the time, had nothing to do with the protests. After 11 years of constant trips to the police and the local court, Tang was given a photo by police of her son’s body, his face bruised and his nose covered in blood. The police never explained how Zhou died in their custody. As she recalls it, her father’s hair turned white overnight. “It was a sleepless night,” she told the Observer. Zhou’s sister, Guoyun, who was 20 at the time, remembers her parents sobbing in the next room. After two months, they received confirmation he had died. After a few days, the family learned he had been detained by police. Only rumors of his identity persist, and when Chinese leader Jiang Zermin was asked a year later if he know what had happened to the young man, he responded: “I think never killed.”Ĭheck out Iyer’s full piece on the “Unknown Rebel” here.Amid the chaos, Tang went looking for her son, talking to his former classmates and their relatives. The man was ultimately hustled to safety by fellow protesters and quite lost to the crowd. “Almost certainly he was seen in his moment of self-transcendence by more people than ever laid eyes on Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein and James Joyce combined,” essayist Pico Iyer wrote in TIME about Tank Man, the nameless individual who was pictured stopping a column of tanks on June 5, a day after the massacre. Tanks crushed her when troops took the square, TIME reported. The 30-foot statue swiftly made from Styrofoam and plaster became a symbolic monument to the pro-democracy movement, and was intended to be large enough to be difficult or at least embarrassing for authorities to take down. The military continued its onslaught and skirmishes lasted throughout the morning, “but by then the great, peaceful dream for democracy had become a horrible nightmare.” A doctor at the time said at least 500 were dead a radio announcer said 1,000.Ī few days before the raid on the square, “in a flash of exuberance” as TIME wrote at the time, the protesters erected a “Goddess of Democracy” that partially resembled the Statue of Liberty. In another instance, protesters covered an armored personnel carrier in banners and then set the vehicle ablaze, trapping the crew of eight or nine soldiers. In some cases, they responded with deadly violence: Demonstrators reportedly beat two soldiers to death who had been seen killing a civilian. The military overwhelmed the civilians and began firing into crowds, but some protesters held fast, throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails. In the early hours of June 4, 50 trucks and as many as 10,000 troops rumbled into the streets, TIME reported just days later. When the military opened fire, a lopsided battle ensued Gorbachev ended up having to go through the back door. The Chinese had scheduled a state banquet in the Great Hall of the People at the edge of the Square in May, as the protests raged. The protests presented an embarrassing pickle for the Chinese government during a visit from the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev, the first visit from a leader of China’s communist peer in 30 years. So for many members of the world’s largest online population, the facts about the bloody crackdown have been erased. Authorities have even gone as far as blocking combinations of the numbers 6, 4, 1989 that might obliquely reference the date of the protest, June 4, 1989. The ban is so total that not only is the search term “Tiananmen Square” censored, but so too are related words and phrases. More than a quarter century after the massacre, the Chinese government’s extensive censorship apparatus-which employs two million online censors - still rigorously blocks information about the protest.
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