In Remembrance of Tiananmen Square Massacre - 20 Years later

[Dean]

In 1989, the Chinese military crushed dissent and effectively silenced its population of students and workers who demand change. 20 Years later, the Chinese state-capitalist regime maintains its iron-fisted control over its population. AlJazeera has a a number of very good articles & videos on the topic (http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2009/06/20096310359317864.html).

"Heads bowed, eyes down, here comes the enemy: the "Peoples' Army" that murdered the people." -Chumbawamba.

When you kill workers, you're an enemy of the working class - period.

[Shin Honyong]

Amen.

I still can't believe the media portrays it as a "student uprising" and seem to forget that the blunt of the violence were against the workers.

[Random Precision]

Here is an article from Socialist Worker (US) in commemoration of the Tiananmen Square events:

Twenty years after Tiananmen Square

Dennis Kosuth tells the story of the revolt that shook China's rulers.

June 4, 2009

The Chinese national anthem, like for most countries, is militaristic, jingoistic and--unless one is a fan of marching--difficult to listen to.

Unlike most others, however, it begins with the line "Arise, all who refuse to be slaves" and calls on the people to "stand up." The lyrics were a product of the nationalist revolution of 1949, in which, following the defeat of the Japanese colonialists four years earlier, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was victorious in a civil war over the Nationalist Party.

In October 1949, Mao Zedong, leader of the CCP, addressed tens of thousands in Tiananmen Square, announcing the creation of a "People's Republic" free from imperialist occupation. Meaning "Gate of Heavenly Peace," Tiananmen is the entrance to the Forbidden City, the part of Beijing from which many emperors--figuratively and physically sealed off from the population--ruled China.

Four decades later, over the course of several weeks, hundreds of thousands would again "stand up" and occupy Tiananmen, supported by millions of people around the city and the country.

This was the Tiananmen Square rebellion, and its participants were "standing up" not to colonialism and occupation, but to economic crisis, corruption and autocracy--against a government that claimed to stand for socialism, but in reality ruled with an iron fist over an exploitative and oppressive system.

This regime eventually struck back against the Tiananmen uprising, crushing a revolt that threatened to shake its rule.

***

WHAT HAPPENED over the course of those spring weeks in 1989? How did the conflict come to the point where so much blood was shed?

From the beginning, the system established by Mao's CCP was a state capitalist command economy, not socialism. The party and state bureaucracy made all the important decisions about society, with the aim of accomplishing national economic development along the lines of the Russian model established under Joseph Stalin's totalitarian rule.

By the 1970s, the ruling faction of the Chinese government, led by Deng Xiaoping, steered the country toward "socialism with Chinese characteristics." This meant unleashing free-market forces in the countryside, where 80 percent of the Chinese population lived, and developing industry in multiple coastal cities through foreign investment, and the use of Western technology and management techniques.

In order to further this economic strategy, the government had to educate a homegrown army of technicians, engineers and managers by expanding access to education. As part of this move, it was important to relax the political control of the CCP to some extent. Greater latitude to think and debate freely, especially within educational institutions, was a necessary precondition to economic reform.

Economic reforms did lead to 10 percent growth for almost every year during the 1980s, but there were still sharp ups and downs as the economy lurched forward. By 1988, the country was deep in an economic crisis, with inflation spiraling out of control.

While China's first efforts were modeled on Stalin's multiple five-year-plans, and Deng later incorporated free-market forces into his restructuring policies, both strategies had the common denominator of setting priorities based on the need to compete in an international capitalist economy.

This economic competition with the outside world was the whip that drove China to advance its economy at any cost necessary. Like Stalin's Russia, the rhetoric of socialism was merely a tool to motivate workers to produce more.

By the end of the 1980s, increased political freedom resulted in people feeling they could finally air their discontent. The ruling class, already divided as a result of internal battles over how to carry out its program, was unable to alleviate the economic crisis. On the contrary, while workers suffered from price inflation and mass layoffs, officials and businessmen were seen to be living better than ever. This was the tinder for the revolt.

***

Hu Yaobang, the former general secretary of the CCP, died on April 15, 1989. Two years prior, he had been driven from his position in the party in disgrace because he was seen as challenging corruption.

In an obvious reference to then-84-year-old Deng, posters appeared around Beijing declaring: "The wrong man has died...Those who should die still live...Those who should live have died."

The first protest march on April 17 to Tiananmen Square only numbered in the hundreds, but the chants were indicative of the mood: "Long live Hu Yaobang. Long live democracy. Long live freedom. Down with corruption. Down with bureaucracy." As protests continued, Hu Yaobang became less a focus, and dissatisfaction with the status quo sharpened.

At its heart, the Tiananmen struggle was for bourgeois democratic rights--like those in a country like the U.S., where people have the freedom to vote and protest, even though a small minority holds political power in the interest of the rich. But compared to the CCP dictatorship, such democratic rights would have been a step forward.

The Tiananmen movement was being led by students and intellectuals, and had sympathizers among a small minority of the ruling class. Its demands found resonance within society at large, especially among the quickly growing urban working class.

As with any struggle, there were a variety of political ideas within the pro-democracy movement. A significant number of students identified with Western culture and economic systems. With Deng declaring, "to get rich is glorious," it isn't surprising that some people would take those words seriously, and want some idealized version of capitalist society.

Because of the temporary classless position of students--with the potential to become workers, bureaucrats or businessmen--many saw sense in appealing to a section of China's rulers to give them some political power, in exchange for their support.

Some sections of the students wanted to keep their struggle pure, separate from the rest of society. Others were aware that the movement had struck a chord with a significant section of society, giving it a power it never would have had otherwise.

Regardless of whether students were conscious of it, however, the mass character of the struggle--and the potential it represented--stirred fear among China's rulers, who prepared a bloody response.

Hu's official state funeral was to take place on April 22, across the street from Tiananmen Square. The night before, tens of thousands of students from universities and colleges across the city began pouring into the streets. The march grew to 100,000 and stretched more than two miles.

Nothing like it has been seen in China since the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s. Every Beijing institution was represented, including students from other cities.

Unperturbed by the presence of police and soldiers, the students refused to clear the square. As the octogenarians who ran the country were walked, wheeled and carried into Hu's service, chants of "Long live democracy, down with autocracy" could be heard echoing across the square.

From the party's perspective, this insolence could not go unanswered. The People's Daily editorial carried Deng's line characterizing the demonstrations as "planned conspiracy and turmoil, its essence is once and for all to negate the leadership of the Communist Party of China and the socialist system."

Instead of being intimidated, however, students were enraged. Meeting on the night of April 26, the Provisional Beijing Students' Union called for a mass march the next day. Thousands gathered on campuses across Beijing, broke through police lines and came together in a procession of 150,000. The government's ultimatum had been met with open defiance.

While hardliners in the CCP wanted to squash the movement through fear, General Secretary Zhao Ziyang sought a different approach, trying to placate the students. In his speech, he implicitly undercut Deng's editorial assertion and stated that there was "no great turmoil."

The old guard, of course, saw such conciliation as weakness. While the divisions had existed in China's ruling class previously, they were now clear for all to see.

The debate over how to deal with the protesters fell along similar lines to the argument about how to move forward with China's economic development. This was reflected, too, among the students, who held a variety of opinions as to the direction and speed that reforms should take.

The Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev--who was presiding over his own policies, called perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), to reform state capitalism in the USSR--was due to arrive in Beijing on May 15. This would be the first visit from a Russian head of state since the split between the USSR and China in the early 1960s. The world lens would be focused on Beijing.

Meanwhile, students had embarked on a hunger strike to revitalize the movement, which had been waning in strength after Zhao's intervention.

The hunger strike was a success at raising the level of sympathy for the students' cause. On its fourth day, when 600 people were taken to the hospital, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the square to show their solidarity. British journalist Michael Fathers described the scene:


The following day, the students staged their biggest demonstration yet. At their encouragement, more than a million people took to the streets... Sympathy demonstrations broke out in at least 24 cities across the country...

Schoolchildren thrust tiny fists into the air, led by their teachers in chants of "long live democracy, down with corruption." Workers arrived from Beijing Brewery, the Capital Iron and Steel Works and the Beijing Jeep Corporation. "Get up and stand up for your rights," chanted a group of teenagers, carrying a black-and-white banner bearing the image of Bob Marley...

Of all the slogans, placards and flags on view in and around Tiananmen Square, the most worrying for the leadership was surely the long red banner carried by short-haired men in uniforms. "The People's Liberation Army," it announced in gold letters.

***

This was the apex of the struggle, with demonstrations held in cities across the country. It was clear to the ruling bureaucracy that it had to act soon if the status quo was going to be maintained.

The army began its invasion of Beijing early on May 20, but the citizens of Beijing rose up to protect the students. As Fathers wrote:


The people's army had been outmaneuvered by the people. Without orders to open fire, troops sat disconsolately on the back of canvas-covered trucks, cradling their AK-47 rifles. Around them swarmed not only students in headbands, but workers, old women, middle-aged cadres, all of them chanting "Go home" and "The people's army should love the people."

This outpouring of support materialized because ordinary people supported the students against the government. While the workers didn't necessarily share all the political positions of the students, they were fed up with the system for their own reasons, and when the government ordered the invasion, they knew whose side they were on.

The Beijing Autonomous Union had been founded only weeks before by workers who wanted to do something around inflation and corruption, and saw their official state-run union as passive at best, and obstructionist at worst. As one of their posters summarized:


We have calculated carefully, based on Marx's Capital, the rate of exploitation of workers. We discovered that the "servants of the people" swallow all the surplus value produced by the people's blood and sweat...There are only two classes: the rulers and the ruled...The political campaigns of the past 40 years amount to a political method for suppressing the people...History's final accounting has yet to be completed.

Many students felt they had a friend in Zhao Ziyang, and that Deng's overall project of modernizing China was a step in the right direction. Most workers, on the other hand, were less enthusiastic about Deng's reforms, because they were the gears upon which China's economic development turned. The workers who took part in the struggle wanted independent organizations to defend their class interests.

But on the whole, the working class was unorganized. Its leadership in the struggle wasn't an option, so that role fell to students and intellectuals.

On May 30, the "Goddess of Democracy," a 30-foot plaster version of the Statue of Liberty, was erected in Tiananmen. But the number of students in the square was diminishing rapidly, and the arrival of the statue did little to bring in more support.

The Army moved in with a final assault on June 4, using tanks and live ammunition. The resistance, while heroic in its attempts to stop the advancing army, was ultimately futile.

It's difficult to say how many died, since the victor wanted to downplay the bloodshed in its version of history. Needless to say, the brunt of the violence was borne by the common citizens of the city, who had only buses, barricades and their bodies with which to confront the armed soldiers.

Much ink condemning the Chinese government was spilled in the Western media after the fact, and the image of one lone individual stopping the advance of a line of tanks was played and replayed.

But once the blood and broken bodies had been swept from the streets, the Western powers from which the condemnations came were all too eager to get back to business as usual with China.

Sadly, some organizations on the left today--like the Party for Socialism and Liberation, for example--continue to this day to make excuses for the CCP's slaughter at Tiananmen, on the bizarre reasoning that the Chinese government remained a defender of the working class.

This kind of twisted thinking has to be rejected outright if politics for true working class liberation, in China or anywhere else, are going to be put forward. Socialism is the polar opposite of the barbaric regime that crushed the Tiananmen Square revolt.

Anyone who believes in justice will look forward to the day when the Chinese working class, one of the largest in the world, will lead the struggle not only for its own emancipation, but the freedom of every oppressed group in China. When they do, they will be following in the tradition of the students and workers who gathered in Tiananmen in the spring of 1989.

http://socialistworker.org/2009/06/04/twenty-years-after-tiananmen

[PRC-UTE]

Here's a pretty good article about the price paid by the working class and their struggles to organise:


Tiananmen Square: Workers bore brunt of repression

On 20th anniversary of massacre, few remember the key role state employees played in supporting students – and the price some paid for organizing.

By Peter Ford (http://www.csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/encryptmail.pl?ID=D0E5F4E5F2A0C6EFF2E4&url=/2009/0604/p06s14-woap.html) | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor from the June 4, 2009 edition
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Beijing - Twenty years after Chinese troops dispersed pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square with murderous gunfire, some 50 protesters still languish in jail. Most of the prisoners were workers at the time. None of them was a student.
While the world remembers the six weeks of mass rallies in Beijing's central square as a cry for freedom by idealistic students, the workers and other ordinary Chinese citizens who bore the brunt of the repression remain largely forgotten.
Yet the severity of the punishment meted out to workers was no coincidence. And some historians see in the brutal crackdown on June 4, 1989, not only an end to hopes for democracy, but also a warning to those likely to suffer from free-market economic reform not to make trouble.
"The ones who made the big sacrifice in 1989 were not the students or the intellectuals, but the workers and other citizens," argues Wang Hui, one of the last students to leave the square as the tanks moved in. Now a history professor at Beijing's Tsinghua University, he adds, "The government's big worry was social unrest, and the autonomous trade union was their top target."
Supporting the students
Workers made up a very small minority of the Tiananmen protesters, and played very little role in setting their agenda.
"We just supported the students. They led the protests and gave workers something to follow," recalls Han Dongfang, a railroad worker who was spokesman for the short-lived Autonomous Workers' Federation that sprang up in Tiananmen Square and rallied trade union activists in cities around the country.
But the support that workers and ordinary citizens gave the students – offering them food, water, money, and goodwill – "was very important," says Professor Wang, who is today a leader of the "New Left" intellectual movement in China. "If it had just been groups of students protesting, as had happened before, they would have immediately disappeared. But 1989 was different. There was massive social mobilization."
Feeling the pinch of market reform
By 1989, the negative aspects of the free-market reforms that had been launched a decade earlier were beginning to make themselves felt.
Inflation, running at close to 30 percent a year, was making life harder for almost everybody, and the new social order was creating unprecedented, and often unwelcome, inequality.
"The sense of insecurity and inequality had become very strong, and that was the driving force for all of society to support the students," says Wang.
Among those most uncertain of their future, he adds, were the hundreds of millions of employees at state-owned enterprises. "They realized they were at risk of losing their jobs and being sacrificed for the new reforms."
Mr. Han, who fled the country after the crackdown but remains active in union issues through the China Labour Bulletin that he founded in Hong Kong, recalls more mundane grievances.
"As an ordinary worker, I was confused," he remembers. "We were no longer equally poor. We supported the reforms because they brought wage bonuses, but we were opposed because managers had more power to decide who got them. When we saw our bonus, we were happy, but when we saw others getting bigger bonuses because they got on better with the manager, we were unhappy."
Even during the tumultuous six weeks of the Tiananmen movement, however, few workers had the courage to organize themselves into unions independent of the ruling Communist party, Han points out. "Organized counterrevolutionary activity was punishable by death," he recalls. "That was the crystal-clear reality."
The Autonomous Workers' Federation lasted only two weeks before the crackdown, when its leaders were imprisoned or fled.
Punish the workers' movement
Weak as it was, the workers' movement was singled out for punishment.
Many workers were charged with "counterrevolutionary assault," "counterrevolutionary sabotage," or "hooliganism," according to a list of current June 4 prisoners compiled by Human Rights in China, a US-based watchdog group.
That, says Han, partly reflects the fact that workers, not students, were the most aggressive in resisting the military takeover of the square on the night of June 3, burning buses and tanks.
But, he adds, it also shows that "the government wanted to punish workers harder to create more fear. Their biggest fear was that workers would come up with more unhappiness, so they wanted to smash it [dissent] before it even appeared."
The dual policy of pushing economic reform and crushing dissent – later evoked by supreme leader Deng Xiaoping in the slogan "seize with both hands, make both hands tougher" – worked, says Wang.
Price reforms that had failed before the Tiananmen massacre were pushed through that September.
"Because of the repression there was no room for protest, and that was the beginning of marketization," he says.
Reform, backed by a big stick
Though it was uncertain at the time exactly what direction economic policy would take after the crackdown, "it was clear that the reform policy would continue … and the big stick was clear," remembers Han. Eventually, 60 million workers in state-owned enterprises would lose their jobs with minimal compensation, and the "iron rice bowl" system of social security and healthcare would be dismantled.
Nonetheless, labor organizer Han sees a silver lining in all this.
"The heavier the exploitation, the greater the fight back," he says. "Today, workers are much braver to take organized action to defend their interests. In 1989, hundreds of thousands were not willing to take the risk."
Today, he adds, if people have concrete grievances, "nearly everyone is ready to strike."

[Andrei Kuznetsov]

A comrade of mine did a really good Maoist look at the 20th anniversary of the Tienanmen Massacre, which can be found here:

June 4: Remembering the Rebels of Tiananmen (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/06/04/june-4-remembering-the-rebels-of-tiananmen/)



By Mike Ely
June 4, 1989 – the regime in China suppressed a powerful movement of rebellion, using the Peoples Liberation Army against the students and workers gathered in the heart of Beijing. It revealed, in shocking ways, how different this government of Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng were from the revolutionary days of Mao’s China. This army, born in revolution, had become an instrument against people. This party, born as a vanguard of liberation, had become a Confucian clique of new oppressors. This society, which had once been a beacon of revolution, was now a magnet for foreign capital.


Singing the Internationale as their own anthem of defiance, demanding the right to recall entrenched government leaders, speaking in passionate tones of rebellion, the rebels of Tiananmen faced a pitiless government unable to hear or respond. Many paid with their lives under the treads of the government’s tanks — as the occupation of the square was broken up by force in the depth of the night. Many were killed, the numbers are unknown. Many were imprisoned, the numbers are unknown. Many had careers ruined, the numbers are unknown. And millions felt their voices and hopes silenced — temporarily, for a mere blink of history’s eye, for a passage that will inevitably pass.


Without a true peoples army, the people had nothing — despite the justice of their demands, despite the passion of their voices and the power of their numbers. It is a bitter moment we will never forget.


One of the perverse features of modern politics is the attempt of western capitalists to present themselves as defenders of democracy and people’s rights, and their portrayal of revolutionary communists as dictators and oppressors. They have attempted to impose this narrative on the public view of the 1989 events — when, in fact, the very opposite is true…. when in fact the U.S. then supported the brutal government of Deng in every way that mattered. The U.S. claimed the rebellion, while they came waving dollars to exploit China’s people.


I first gathered these photographs online in 1999, and offer them again on this new anniversary.


Even today, the rulers of China try to suppress the memory of this great uprising and their own bloody crimes. They “harmonize” the Chinese internet to suppress mention of Four-Six-Eight-Nine. But in the world today silence cannot be imposed easily — humanity moves restlessly, and new generations step forward bravely.


Revolutionaries all over the world remember and honor the brave rebels of Tiananmen this day, and hold out great hope for the growing struggles of China’s brutally oppressed people.


It is right to rebel against reactionaries!
http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/06/04/june-4-remembering-the-rebels-of-tiananmen/

[CHEtheLIBERATOR]

I hate both sides in this protest.The student protestors were fighting for western style influence in china and the main ideology they all followed was bourgeoise liberalism.Even though I oppose there thought and purpose I must say they were courageous in there especially the man they call "tank Man" or "the unknown rebel",he's amazing.I also hate the overly authoritarian government and their response,their actions have marked a bad name in history for communist ideology

[Andrei Kuznetsov]

The student protests in 1989 were hardly a uniform movement. There was indeed a major "pro-democracy"/pro-Western trend (like those who threw paint at Mao's portrait and those who erected the Goddess of Democracy), but as my Chinese & Japanese History professor pointed out, most of the students were not calling for an overthrow of the government (except for some openly pro-capitalist and even openly Maoist elements!), but more or less against Deng's drastic privatization reforms and an end to Party corruption.

Although there was probably some spies & provocateurs type stuff going on, we must remember 2 things:

1) The Chinese people lacked a genuinely revolutionary party that could lead them on the Communist road against both revisionism and open capitalism,
and
2) The rebellion was a natural reaction to the new capitalist order that China had taken and the corrupt nature of the CCP as it has been since Mao Zedong's death.

and indeed, in the nightmare that China is today, I think we need even more unleashing of resistance by the masses, in hopes that people will seek out revolutionary ideology that can raise the red banner in China once more.

[JimmyJazz]

But the support that workers and ordinary citizens gave the students – offering them food, water, money, and goodwill – "was very important," says Professor Wang, who is today a leader of the "New Left" intellectual movement in China. "If it had just been groups of students protesting, as had happened before, they would have immediately disappeared. But 1989 was different. There was massive social mobilization."

Interesting reading the quotes from Wang Hui. The New Left (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_New_Left) he's a part of is an unambiguously socialist group (it's also "postmodernist", which from what I can tell just means they don't think importing Western ideas will solve China's problems).

[Vanguard1917]

Article explaining how, contrary to the popular Western account, it was protesting workers in the suburbs of Beijing, not students in Tiananmen Square, who were the main victims of the Chinese state's violence.


----------

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/assets/library/090604tiananmen--124404567112855900.jpg
By focusing on the student protests in Tiananmen Square Western liberals ignore the bigger tragedy perpetrated by the Communist Party of China

By Brendan O'Neill (http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/author,288,brendan-oneill)

FIRST POSTED JUNE 3, 2009

We all know that China's communist rulers have distorted and denied the truth about what happened 20 years ago in Tiananmen Square. But they aren't the only ones. In an equally disturbing betrayal of history, Western human rights activists and liberal commentators have also spun the story of Tiananmen, creating a fairytale version of events that bears little relation to what happened in those bloody days of June 1989.

Twenty years on, the Communist Party of China (CPC) continues to play down or deny the seriousness of the protests and massacre. It insultingly refers to the events as the "4 June Incident". It claims that "only" 241 people died, including soldiers, when experts put the figure at between 800 and 1,500. It denies Chinese citizens access to information about the events: search for "Tiananmen Square massacre" on the internet in China and you'll be told: "This page cannot be found."

Western human rights groups have not indulged in such denialism, but they have employed much mythmaking of their own, airbrushing from history what they consider to be inconvenient facts and creating a neat but terribly skewed morality tale about June 1989.

The main victims were workers in Beijing suburbs - now forgotten by the West thanks to the images propagated by groups like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, most Westerners think the Tiananmen Square Massacre involved Chinese soldiers shooting pro-democracy students in the central square of Beijing. The most famous image from the protests - that of a student standing in front of tanks - strengthens the idea that was a simple Students vs Soldiers story. This is unforgivably inaccurate.

It is of course true that in May and June 1989 many students set up camp in Tiananmen, where they demanded democratic and economic reforms, and that some of them suffered when the CPC launched its military clampdown on 3 and 4 June. Yet there were uprisings across Beijing, and in other parts of China, and the main victims of the state violence - now largely forgotten thanks to Western human rights activism - were not students in the square, but ordinary workers miles away in the suburbs of Beijing.

The Chinese authorities sent their tanks to crush a workers' rebellion. In their fascinating book Black Hands of Beijing: Lives of Defiance in China's Democracy Movement, human rights experts George Black and Robin Munro wrote: "What took place was the slaughter not of students but of ordinary workers and residents - precisely the target that the Chinese government had intended."

Black and Munro point out that the workers of Beijing, whose lives had become harsher as a result of Premier Deng Xiaoping's introduction of crude market reforms from the late 1970s onwards, had "much more to be angry about than the students", and the CPC's aim was to "crush them".
The worst state violence occurred miles away from Tiananmen Square in the western suburbs of Beijing, where, as China expert Jonathan Fenby puts it, there was a "far bigger massacre of non-students". Hundreds of workers were gunned down in the streets, which is why some people, including many Chinese dissidents, refer to the events as "the Beijing massacre" rather than the "Tiananmen Square massacre".

Indeed, just as the CPC's use of the term "4 June Incident" gives the impression that this was a minor event, so the Western-created name of "Tiananmen Square massacre" depicts a serious city-wide uprising as a small-scale, one-square clash.

Jay Mathews, former Beijing correspondent for the Washington Post, says Western journalists have spread irresponsible stories about a square-based massacre: "Hundreds of people, most of them workers and passers-by, did die that night", he says, "but in a different place [to the square] and under different circumstances".

Yet if you question Western representations of June 1989, says Mathews, you'll be looked upon as a pedant or Tiananmen denier. Tell journalists they have given misleading accounts and they will say: "So what? The Chinese army killed many innocent people that night. Who cares exactly where the atrocities took place?"

In China, debate about June 1989 is curtailed by censorship - in the West it is discouraged by those who have propagated the simplistic Square story.

Perhaps feeling they have more in common with the students in the square - who, unlike many of the rioting workers, were peaceful and erudite - Western observers have made the students the central focus of the June 1989 story. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, they have pushed from public view the key victims of the Beijing Massacre.

They have also, in a terrible irony, done the Chinese authorities a favour, helping to represent what was a state-shaking uprising by thousands of workers, residents and students in Beijing and beyond as a relatively small, polite, Amnesty-style protest for "reform".

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/48304,features,the-tiananmen-square-myth-both-china-and-the-west-distorted-the-truth-about-the-massacre-human-rights-amnesty-deng-xiaoping

[Andrei Kuznetsov]

Wow, excellent article V1917. While I still think that the students and workers in Tienanmen Square were still a progressive force within the uprisings, it is revealing that the struggle was much broader outside of Beijing. In fact, such things are growing in China: according to the China Study Group (http://www.chinastudygroup.org/), "In 2004 alone, there were some 74,000 major protests--about 200 on average every day—-and up from just 58,000 in 2003, and 10,000 a decade earlier."

While the Chinese media blacks so much of this out, I think there is more going on in China than we Westerners know about.