The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 culminating in the Tiananmen Square Massacre were a series of demonstrations in and near Tiananmen Square led by labour activists, students, and intellectuals in the People's Republic of China (PRC) between 15 April and 4 June 1989.
A day after the death of Hu Yaobang, supporters of liberalization started small scale protests. While the protests lacked a unified cause or leadership, participants were generally against the authoritarianism and voiced calls for economic liberalization and democratic reform within the structure of the government. The demonstrations centered on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, but large-scale protests also occurred in cities throughout China, including Shanghai, which stayed peaceful throughout the protests.
The movement lasted seven weeks from Yaobang's death on 15 April until tanks cleared Tiananmen Square on 4 June. In Beijing, the resulting military response to the protesters by the PRC government left many civilians dead or injured. The reported tolls ranged from 2,000–3,000 (Chinese student associations and Chinese Red Cross figures).
Following the violence, the government conducted widespread arrests to suppress protesters and their supporters, cracked down on other protests around China, banned the foreign press from the country and strictly controlled coverage of the events in the PRC press. Members of the Party who had publicly sympathized with the protesters were purged, with several high-ranking members placed under house arrest, such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protest caused widespread international condemnation of the PRC government.
In the immediate aftermath of the protests, some within the Communist Party attempted to curtail free market reforms that had been undertaken as part of Chinese economic reform and reinstitute administrative economic controls. However, these efforts met with stiff resistance from provincial governors and broke down completely in the early 1990s as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union and Deng Xiaoping's trip to the south. Deng Xiaoping knew the antidote to cure this problem was to introduce capitalism and accelerate economic reforms while at the same maintaining the Communist Party's iron fisted grip on power. Deng knew that the Chinese people would abandon their pursuit for democracy if they enjoyed economic prosperity.
Deng was right as the continuance of economic reform led to economic growth in the 1990s, which allowed the government to regain much of the support that it had lost in 1989. In addition, none of the current PRC leadership played any active role in the decision to move against the demonstrators, and one major leadership figure Premier Wen Jiabao was an aide to Zhao Ziyang and accompanied him to meet the demonstrators. Today there are economic "sectors" in which business can thrive and this has opened up economic freedom and access to goods.
The protest leaders at Tiananmen were unable to produce a coherent movement or ideology that would last past the mid-1990s. Many of the student leaders came from relatively well-off sectors of society and were seen as out of touch with common people. A number of them were socialists. Many of the organizations which were started in the aftermath of Tiananmen soon fell apart due to personal infighting. Several overseas democracy activists were supportive of limiting trade with mainland China which significantly decreased their popularity both within China and among the overseas Chinese community. A number of NGOs based in the U.S., which aim to bring democratic reform to China and relentlessly protest human rights violations that occur in China, remain. One of the oldest and most prominent of them, the China Support Network (CSN), was founded in 1989 by a group of concerned Americans and Chinese activists in response to Tiananmen Square.
Capitalism itself has reared it's ugly head with personal liberty and freedom of speech being traded off for profit. This happened when the Chinese Government pressured Yahoo! to turn over to its police the names of political dissidents who use the company’s e-mail service. China also convinced Microsoft to shut down Internet blogs in which Chinese users were criticizing their government, and persuaded Google to censor its search engine results.
The same scenario can play out in Malaysia should Najib Razak become Prime Minister. Even more scary is the possibility of the events of Tiananmen Square repeating itself on our streets considering the fact that Najib will be a 'remote controlled' PM of the authoritarian former PM Mahathir, a fact that has been admitted by former Minister Zaid Ibrahim. Malaysiakini has also reported that Mahathir will be Najib's advisor. This following Article contributed by ANONYMOUS is a must read for all Malaysians and freedom loving people everywhere. Read more about that Article here:
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