https://www.quora.com/What-did-it-feel-like-to-be-in-Beijing-during-the-Tiananmen-Square-massacre
Written By Feifei Wang
I was in elementary school when Tiananmen Square Massacre happened. At the time I was living with my grandma some 3 miles from Tiananmen Square, my parents however was living in an apartment on Chang Chun ave, about 2 miles from Tiananmen Square.
I vaguely remember my grandma was very nervous since late May, but I was way too young to understand what's going on. I remember she went pick me up at school instead of letting me walk home myself (as I usually did). I saw green military trucks drove by with soldiers inside. There're people giving speeches on street corners but my grandma never allow me to stick around and listen. I guess I wouldn't understand what they're talking about anyways.
On the day of June 4th, we received notice that schools were closed, and we're to stay home until further notice. To be honest, I was happy. I mean NO SCHOOL! But my grandma wouldn't allow me to go out and play. I stayed home the whole day. My grandma was watching TV all the time, which was quite odd to me, since she usually only watched evening news.
School went back to normal 2 days after June 4th. I remember seeing heavy black smokes raising from not far away from my home. Later I saw from the news that one military truck was attacked by mobs and burned down.
It wasn't until much later when I was in high school my parents told me their experience. My father and step mom actually walked to Tiananmen square when the students gathered there. They're not activists, although they sympathies with their cause, most people did at the time. The students were making simple demands, nothing outrages: want to meet with government officials, want to stop corruption. The official stories denied firing at the students, but my parents later told me, they heard gun shot, and saw horrified people running away from the square. They saw people carrying gunshot victim to hospital. And they saw bullet hole on the wall outside their apartment building.
I never believed Tanks were actually in Beijing, and I never believed soldiers could open fire to unarmed students, not when I was in China. The news coverage talked about how mobs attacked soldiers and how the disciplined soldiers never return fire. I saw mutilated corpses of soldiers but never the students. It wasn't until I came to the US, saw the famous Tank man picture, I realized I was being lied to and was brainwashed all these years! It is a horrifying epiphany. You heard about brainwash all the time, thinking it's some hellish experience, like those in the book 1984. But in reality, most brainwash happens gradually, repeat lies a thousand times, it does become the truth.
However, Tiananmen square massacre isn't simply "horrible government crashing down innocent students", far from it. There're multiple layer of power struggle at play, while most westerners considered Tiananmen Square massacre to be a beacon of Chinese struggle for democracy and civil rights, the incident actually slowed down Chinese political and economical reformation process. The students, especially during the later stages of the movement, were far from innocent. The leaders never had a clear goal, and start infighting almost immediately after they occupied the square. I often wonder what would happen to China if we don't have the Tiananmen Square massacre, we would have very different history indeed.
@Rain Man @Daniel808 @boomslang @21 Dec 2012
Another comment by Kenneth Ho:
I travel to China pretty often for business and would always raise the issue of the Tiananmen Square massacre with the locals (Taxi drivers, managers, businessmen). From what I gather, 100% of these local Chinese that I spoke to all agreed that Tiananmen Square massacre was a necessary evil. They all felt that if the CCP hadn't flexed its strength that day, China would have fallen into anarchy.
One of them whom I spoke to is a general manager of a US company (who himself had also been educated in the US) based in Shanghai. He was one of the students present at the Tiananmen massacre. Looking back, he tells me that it was stupid of him to take part in the demonstrations. The leaders (like what Feifei Wang said) didn't have a clear goal. At the demonstrations, they were collecting donations, and nobody knows where the money went. He also felt that, though unfortunate, the response from the government was justified, for the greater good of China.
