Tiananmen 25 years on: The day I drove famed hunger strikers to safety

[webfact]

Tiananmen 25 years on: The day I drove famed hunger strikers to safety
By Jaime A. FlorCruz, CNN

Beijing, China (CNN) -- Twenty-five years ago, when tanks and automatic rifles silenced massive political demonstrations in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, I was TIME magazine's correspondent in China.

For me, memories of the crackdown start in the early evening of June 3, and end with a mad dash at the wheel of a Toyota sedan, driving through checkpoints to a safe house with hunger strikers, Liu Xiaobo and Hou Dejian.

Liu, one of China's prominent intellectuals and writers, was imprisoned four times after the Tiananmen crackdown, and in 2010 was awarded the Nobel Peace prize.

Full story: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/04/world/asia/china-tiananmen-florcruz/index.html


-- CNN 2014-06-04

[MILT]

China has come along way?

[Scott]

A troll post has been removed.

[Chris Lawrence]

One coment I heard was that the army didn't know how to disburse a crowd using water cannons.

[Fookhaht]

My most interesting link to date, below. Two NatGeo photographers who were there, with 4-5 of their best photos along with commentary of their experience.

My family informally adopted a Chinese student who came to get his master's degree in the USA in my home city. Six years previously, he was one of those students. He missed the bullet, but got a 5-month jail term in a crowded cell that wasn't big enough for all 50 prisoners to lay down at once at night, so they had to sleep in shifts. Conditions were draconian as he tells it. Interestingly, his parents both worked in the government that put him there.

Anyway, enjoy....

"Tiananmen Square Still Haunts Photographer Brothers After 25 Years

Two well-known photojournalists, identical twins, were witness to the hopeful protest and its violent aftermath"

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/06/140603-tiananmen-square-massacre-anniversary-china-opposition-turnley/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=link_fb20140604news-tianan&utm_campaign=Content&sf3157429=1

Edited June 5, 2014 by Fookhaht

[Fookhaht]

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One coment I heard was that the army didn't know how to disburse a crowd using water cannons.

So when in doubt, use bullets, right? Shudder.

[beautifulthailand99]

From Eyewitness in China: The events in Tiananmen Square, May-June 1989
by Steve Jolly (Now a Socialist Party Councillor in Melbourne, Australia)

"They just opened up fire, and bodies dropped. Bodies just dropped, time and time again. People would get up again and they would go forward, with red flags sometimes, sometimes with bricks, sometimes just shouting. They would go down again. They would get up again. The troops were shooting everybody.

I saw a three-year old with a bayonet through the chest. I saw a pregnant woman, who had been bayoneted to death in the stomach, and the embryonic baby was lying on the ground beside her. It was absolutely barbaric what they were doing.

I must say one thing. There was this half-hour convoy of an offensive army moving forward, fighting through the barricades against the students and workers. But they had formed up in the mid-afternoon in working class [districts]. And, as soon as they started moving - and they all kept together because none of the soldiers wanted to be isolated in the back - at the end of this half-hour convoy, there came thousands of workers, unarmed, including women workers, some of them on bicycles. And this mass of thousands of workers following the troops could not fight them, but they sang the Internationale. The troops at the back just didn't know what to do. Occasionally they would shoot, and everybody would drop, and you didn't know how many were killed because the people each time got up again, and the dead would stay lying among them on the ground. It was almost like waves on the beach just coming in, time and time again, just singing the Internationale.

As the night got deeper, the people got more bitter, they started shouting "fascists, fascists" at the soldiers. Anyone who has the gall to say that the movement was counter-revolutionary just had to be there for five minutes."

The full book is online here: http://socialistworld.net/pubs/tiananmen/00.html

[Chris Lawrence]

<script type='text/javascript'>window.mod_pagespeed_start = Number(new Date());</script>

One coment I heard was that the army didn't know how to disburse a crowd using water cannons.

So when in doubt, use bullets, right? Shudder.

An interview with Oz embassy staff that were there on the telly. Strange but that's what they said.