Project on Popular struggle and movement of china
Answers
Introduction
The People’s Movement began in mid-April 1989, with gatherings of students in Beijing. They ostensibly turned out to mourn Hu Yaobang, a recently deceased Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official associated with reformist ideas, who had been General Secretary and Deng Xiaoping’s heir apparent as paramount leader until being demoted for taking a soft line on campus unrest in 1986–1987. The students used the mourning ceremonies to speak out on issues that concerned them, especially official corruption and nepotism. In later weeks, the struggle spread rapidly in geographical and social terms and increasingly became a fight for political liberalization and the right to protest. In Beijing, local students, who made Tiananmen Square their main protest site, were joined on the streets by intellectual, workers, and even sympathetic journalists and cadres, as well as by educated youths who streamed into the capital from other cities. By late April and May, very large crowds were filling Tiananmen Square, site of some of China’s most important political monuments, while smaller but still significantly sized crowds gathered at the central squares of other cities. The most dramatic events of the movement included a high-profile hunger strike by student leaders, which increased popular support for the protesters, and the creation of a “Goddess of Democracy” statue, which combined design elements from America’s Statue of Liberty with traditional Chinese features. The struggle ended in June with the government using force to put down demonstrations, after condemning the movement as an effort to create “turmoil” (a code word for Cultural Revolution-style chaos) backed by foreigners wishing to destabilize China. The most significant repression took place in Beijing, where soldiers killed many protesters and bystanders—estimates of casualties range widely, but at least several hundred deaths occurred—on the streets near Tiananmen Square late on the night of 3 June and early in the morning of 4 June 1989. Common names for the upheaval include “Tiananmen Movement,” “June 4th Movement” (the most common term in Chinese language publications is Liusi, literally “Six Four”), “Democracy Movement,” “Beijing Spring,” and “1989 Student Movement,” but “People’s Movement” has two advantages. First, it underscores the multiclass, multilocale nature of the struggles and the repression (demonstrations in scores of cities, a massacre in Chengdu as well as Beijing); and it avoids giving the impression that the sole issue was “democracy” (anger at corruption and a desire for increased personal freedoms were also important).