No, I did not think those students who have made very good leaders either. However, they were voicing their opinion and obviously they had enough support. Sending out tanks and troops to steamroll them? Smooth move.
Sigh. It's time to educate you. I leap the wall all the time, don't think I don't know this. My father even participated in the local protest in 1989. I have a very objective view of these events, taken with references. I will employ ONLY western sources, so you do not have the right to say this is CPC propaganda.
Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Due to the initial stress on educated people to guide development, the number of universities expanded (400 universities in 1977 to 1,975 in 1988), as did student enrollment (625,319 in 1977 to 2,065,923 in 1988).[23] However, the Four Modernizations were “gradually dropped”, as central planning gave way to a market-economy development strategy being adopted.[24] The reform process would now emphasize the role of the market, agriculture, light industry, the service sector, private initiatives, and foreign investment.[24] This shift in orientation was not received well by the burgeoning student population, who found it difficult to find job placements as “the recently prospering industrial sectors, that, is rural collective industries and private businesses, did not really need and could not attract university graduates.”[25] Undergraduate students in the social sciences and the humanities, 18.3% of all Beijing undergraduates in 1988, were especially hard hit because their training did not give them an advantage in the new market economy.[23] This problem, growing since the mid-1980s, was exacerbated by a reform to the job assignment system in 1988, creating the two-way selection system. This allowed private companies to veto the job placements, instead of accepting students the universities matched them with. The two-way system is referred to by Dingxin Zhao as the “backdoor selection” system, because it was pervaded by nepotism and favoritism, as “employers only took students who had acquaintances in their unit regardless of the students' academic performance.”[26]
Comments: Note the root causes. It was economic in nature. The government decided to switch from a self-sufficient economic model to one based on foreign investment. My father graduated earlier than this, in 1985, but remained as a lecturer at the university. He indeed noted that during his day, students were assigned to work units, but as early as 1988, and definitely by 1992 when my oldest cousins graduated, it was almost totally privatized.
In a general sense, students and intellectuals demanded political democracy, media freedom, freedom of speech and association, rule of law, and to have the legitimacy of the movement recognized.[37] More specific demands opposed official corruption and peculation, opposition to the princely party (elites with special privileges), and called for price stability, social security, and the democratic means to supervise the reform process, and the reorganization of social benefits.[30] Transitioning from a socialist ideology that espoused equality to a new market oriented ideology, the reforms, "Created a crisis of state legitimacy from two different directions: on the one hand, people could rely on the nature of state economic policy to criticize the legitimacy of the state ideology and its method of rule, while on the other they could use the ideology of socialism to take issue with the legitimacy of the new state economic policy."[30] Wang Hui encapsulates the protesters' motivation by stating that, "Regardless of whether we are talking about students, intellectuals, or any others who participated in the movement in support of reform (political or economic) and demands for democracy, their hopes for and understanding of reform were extraordinarily diverse. When looked at from a broader or synthetic perspective, however, the reforms that the greater part of the populace hoped for and their ideals for democracy and rule by law were for the purposes of guaranteeing social justice and the democratization of economic life through the restructuring of politics and the legal system."[38]
Comments: So how did a primarily ECONOMIC phenomena turn into a POLITICAL protest? Well, the theories are many. 1.) People at the time believed that corruption had a correlation with democracy. That is, more democratic, less corrupt. This has shown to be NOT TRUE. 2.) People at the time were deeply swayed by US propaganda due to China-West "Honeymoon". 3.) They were students of social sciences and humanities, and thus were trained mostly in literary analysis, not in hardcore statistical research. Not until the 90's would China's economics and sociology departments become extremely quantitative.
On the same date of 15 April, many students at Peking University and Tsinghua University expressed their sorrow and mourning for Hu Yaobang by posting eulogies inside the campus and erecting shrines, and joined the civilian mourning in Tiananmen Square in a piecemeal fashion. Organized student gatherings started outside of Beijing on a small scale in Xi'an and Shanghai on 16 April.
On the afternoon of 17 April in Beijing, 500 students from China University of Political Science and Law marched to the eastern gate of the Great Hall of the People, part of Tiananmen Square, and commenced mourning activities for Hu Yaobang. The gathering in front of the Great Hall of the People was soon deemed obstructive to the normal operation of the building, so police intervened and attempted to disperse the students by persuasion. The gathering featured speakers from various backgrounds giving public speeches (mostly anonymous) commemorating Hu Yaobang, expressing their concerns of social problems.
Starting at midnight on the night of 17 April, three thousand students from Peking University marched from the campus towards Tiananmen Square, and soon nearly a thousand students from Tsinghua University joined the ranks. Upon arrival, they soon joined forces with students and civilians who were in the Square earlier. As its size grew, the gathering gradually evolved into a protest, as students began to draft a list of pleas and suggestions (List of Seven Demands) that they wanted the government to listen to and carry through: (1) affirm as correct Hu Yaobang's views on democracy and freedom; (2) admit that the campaigns against spiritual pollution and bourgeois liberalization had been wrong; (3) publish information on the income of state leaders and their family members; (4) end the ban on privately run newspapers and permit freedom of speech; (5) increase funding for education and raise intellectuals' pay; (6) end restrictions on demonstrations in Beijing; and (7) hold democratic elections to replace government officials who made bad policy decisions. In addition, they demanded that the government-controlled media print and broadcast their demands and that the government respond to them publicly.[43]
On the morning of 18 April, the students remained in the square. Some gathered around the Monument to the People's Heroes singing patriotic songs and listening to impromptu speeches by student organizers. Another group of students sat in front of the Great Hall of the People, the office of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress; they demanded to see members of the Standing Committee and show them the List of Seven Demands. Meanwhile, a few thousand students gathered in front of the Zhongnanhai building complex, the residence of the government, demanding to see government leaders and get answers to their earlier demands. Students tried to muscle their way through the gate by pushing, but security and police, locking arms, formed a cordon that eventually deterred students' attempts to enter through the gate. Students then staged a sit-in. Some government officials did unofficially meet with student representatives, but without an official response, frustrations continued to mount.
While the protests lacked a unified cause or leadership, participants were generally against authoritarianism and voiced calls for democratic reform[4] within the structure of the government. Unlike the Tiananmen protests of 1987, which consisted mainly of students and intellectuals, the protests in 1989 commanded widespread support from the urban workers who were alarmed by the new economic reforms, growing inflation, and corruption. In Beijing, they were supported by a large number of people. Similar numbers were found in major cities throughout China such as Urumqi, Shanghai, and Chongqing; and later in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Chinese communities in North America and Europe.
Comments: Their demands are mostly political, yet the root causes are economic. Inflation, corruption, and unemployment were the main problems of the day. They were indeed serious, but would NOT have been solved by the type of democracy they were protesting for, evidenced by democracies in India, Phillipines, Russia and Mexico. In fact, they made several explicitly economic demands. In addition, note the date. It was APRIL 17th. The army only moved in on June 4th. Take note.
On 4 May, approximately 100,000 students and workers marched in Beijing making demands for free media and a formal dialogue between the authorities and student-elected representatives. A declaration demanded the government to accelerate political reform.[4]
The government rejected the proposed dialogue, only agreeing to talk to members of appointed student organizations. On 13 May, two days prior to the highly-publicized state visit by the reform-minded Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, huge groups of students occupied Tiananmen Square and started a hunger strike, insisting the government withdraw the accusation made in the People's Daily editorial and begin talks with the designated student representatives. Hundreds of students went on hunger strikes and were supported by hundreds of thousands of protesting students and part of the population of Beijing, for one week.
To avoid losing momentum, the students decided to hold a hunger strike, which began in May 1989 and grew to include "more than one thousand persons".[50] The hunger strike brought widespread support for the students and "the ordinary people of Beijing rallied to protect the hunger strikers...because the act of refusing sustenance and courting government reprisals convinced onlookers that the students were not just seeking personal gains but (were) sacrificing themselves for the Chinese people as a whole".[51]
The hunger strike not only gained significant support nationally for the students, but also rang further alarms in China's top leadership. The national press, then still relatively free to cover ongoing events without propagating the party line, aired the talks between Premier Li Peng and student leaders on the evening of 18 May. During the talks Wu'er Kaixi, Wang Dan, and others openly accused the government for being too slow to react and rebuked Li Peng personally for lacking the "sincerity to conduct real discussions". The discussion did not yield much results, but gained student leaders prominent airtime on China's national television.[52] Li Peng and other leaders, however, maintained the government was only trying to "maintain order", but alluded to the students actions as "patriotic".
As the hunger strike escalated, numerous political and civil organizations around the country voiced their concern for the students, many empathizing with their positions. The Chinese Red Cross issued a special notice and sent in a large number of personnel to provide medical services to the hunger strikers on the Square. For the first time, on 19 May, two of the highest ranked members of China's central leadership, Premier Li Peng and General Secretary Zhao Ziyang went to Tiananmen personally in an attempt to neutralize the situation. At 4:50 am, Zhao Ziyang went to the Square and made a speech urging the students to end the hunger strike. Part of his speech was to become a famous quote, when he said, referring to the older generation of people in China, "We are already old, it doesn't matter to us any more." In contrast, the students were young and he urged them to stay healthy and not to sacrifice themselves so easily. Zhao's emotional speech was applauded by some students on the Square; it would be his last public appearance.
Comments: There were multiple offers to negotiate. They were rejected by the students. Why? Well, we have the interview by Chai Ling: "We wanted to make sure there was bloodshed, to make sure that the government was forced to use force to remove the students." Here is the link to her views:
Chai Ling - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"The students kept asking, 'What should we do next? What can we accomplish?' I feel so sad, because how can I tell them that what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed, for the moment when the government has no choice but to brazenly butcher us."
