Remembering Tiananmen Square 1989
Thirty years later, a radically different world looks back and in communist China, people must mourn the massacre in secret, if they know about it at all.
Even today, in the Information Age, we don’t know how many student demonstrators were killed during the Chinese government’s infamous military crackdown in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.
We don’t know how many protestors were arrested that day, how many injured, or how many were imprisoned. We don’t know how many were later executed for crimes of sedition and treason.
We don’t even know the identity of “Tank Man”, the iconic Chinese man holding what appeared to be shopping bags as he faced off with a line of tanks, only feet from the gun turret of the first tank in line.
The set of his shoulders in the grainy photograph, his ubiquitous workaday pants and white shirt, his complete vulnerability; “Tank Man” was all of us on that day in 1989. His was a portrait of David facing down Goliath.
“Why?” Seemed to be his bereft question. “Why?” was everyone’s question.
The students had been mostly peaceful in their demonstrations, with a few…