Tiananmen Square, Beijing China

Tiananmen - The massacre, 20 years on



Please click on the link above to know more about Tiananmen Square massacre. The above images and video are courtesy of a file shared by the onlinecitizen.com which I felt I had the need to share it on my blog to help me understand what's the importance behind Tiananmen Square that made it one of the places of interest in China. I had finally seen the place during my trip to Beijing on June of this year. The place was actually a very huge open space which was large enough to accommodate an assembly of one million people.

Tiananmen Square has been the site of a number of political events and student protests. It is widely remembered for the protest of June 1989 which resulted in the massacre of Chinese protesters in the streets to the west of the square and adjacent areas. About a hundred thousand people mostly university students have gathered to join the demonstrations in support for democracy.

The tension among protesters had actually escalated after the death of Hu Yaobang, a reformist, who served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of China from 1980 to 1987. The government officials were unhappy with Hu's advocation for social and political reforms so he was forced out of office in January of 1987. He died of heart attack on April 15, 1989 but the government at first did not plan to give him a state funeral so it ended up in furious reactions from university students across Beijing. The students marched on Tiananmen Square calling out for the rehabilitation of Hu's reputation. A delegation of student petitioners who patiently waited to speak with someone for three days  at the Great Hall of the People on April 19 was unfortunately not received by the Government officials which eventually resulted to tremendous tensions from the protesters. It became chaotic then and the next thing happened was that the military repeatedly opened fire on the unarmed citizens. It was not known exactly how many people died but it was only learnt that bloodshed of few thousands people lay dead within that time.