The blood of the people

- first part -
- second part -

For those like me who have reached their forties it is absolutely natural to associate the memory of Tiananmen Square with the image of that anonymous young man who, completely unarmed, stopped with his body an entire column of tanks that had intervened in Beijing to repress the student revolt. It was June 5, 1989 and the violence of the army had been unleashed the evening of two days before.

There are other less famous but equally emblematic images of those events. In a video from the previous days filmed by Swiss TV, you can see a Chinese army officer oppose a composed but firm refusal to a student who wanted to offer him slices of cake. Shortly thereafter, on the night between June 3 and 4, one of the two, the officer, would massacre the other, the student, in one of the bloodiest and most brutal street repressions of recent times. Right from 6:30 PM on June 3, the announcement from the Beijing government and the Martial Law Command repeatedly resounded: "Beijing is now on high alert. Citizens are asked not to be on the streets or to go to Tiananmen Square. All those who have a job must remain at their jobs and all citizens must remain in their homes to safeguard their lives."

After a few hours, the fierce clash began between the army, equipped with armored vehicles and automatic weapons, and the students, armed with clubs and sticks, which would last throughout the night and the following day. Victim of the brutal repressive violence was also the statue depicting the goddess of democracy and freedom, over 10 meters high, that the students of the Academy of Fine Arts had erected on May 30, right in front of the giant photograph of Mao and which in just a few hours became the symbol of the aspirations of young people.

It all began on April 15, on the occasion of the commemoration of Hu Yaobang, former secretary of the CCP from 1982 to 1987, when thousands of university students began to protest for a university free from the interference of power. Considered a reformist, Hu Yaobang had criticized the excesses of the Maoist cultural revolution of the 1960s, because it was characterized by unprecedented violence that had divided and bloodied Chinese society. The students wanted to be heard by the government and hoped that the leaders of the Communist Party would take their proposals into consideration.
In fact, the young people showed deep suffering towards the Chinese ruling class embodied by the great old Deng Xiaoping. Deng's economic reforms were not enough for them, they wanted political reforms that would bring about a true democratization of China. Deng's was in fact an epochal process that was introducing elements of free market in the economic sphere, but which left the Communist Party with a monopoly on power. For those young students, economic liberalization had to be accompanied by authentic political liberalization.
[continued in the next issue]


Renato Bonomo
NP October 2024