Many of the other student leaders, however, were jailed or exiled. She was able to slip back to her campus and managed to avoid any official repercussions for her involvement. China’s Woodstock, without mud but with plenty of blood.” “Tiananmen was a big party against the Party. More than 40 days of joy, tears and blood had been washed away.”įor a short time, the square had been a “mini-utopia where everyone was a participant and had a say – everyone had a sense of responsibility for the community that was the square”, Tang, who now lives in New York, said. The songs, the screams, the roaring tanks, the loud speakers: where have they gone? All I could hear was the sound of sprinkling water. “All I could see was the clean wet concrete ground glittering in street lights,” she said. Trucks were spraying water on the streets. The troops must have used shrapnel.”Ī few days later Tang returned to the square in the hope of finding her bicycle. “The doctors couldn’t find any whole bullets. In the hospital a man showed her a tiny piece of metal. Hong Kong jails ‘Occupy’ leaders over 2014 democracy protests.Police lock down Beijing financial district as protesters gather.Disquiet in China at move to allow Xi Jinping rule indefinitely.He did not turn his head as I crawled past him and jumped off the other side.” A soldier was aiming his gun at the crowd. “I climbed up on one tank and crawled over the tread. A soldier kicked me and wielded his stick but the stick just grazed my head.”Ī line of tanks were fencing them in. “I trampled over a few bodies, not knowing if they were dead or alive.
Rushing to get out of the square, Tang said she fell a few times and her glassed were smashed. Soldiers started bludgeoning the students with batons. The square was suddenly flooded with light, and there was a “deafening noise of tanks thundering towards us from three directions, like green monsters”. Then sparks started bouncing off the Monument to the People’s Heroes. “Must be rubber bullets, they would not dare kill us!” Tang and her friends said. Hearing sounds of firecrackers exploding in the distance, the students cheered, saying it was like the Chinese New Year festival.
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With an empty beer bottle in each hand, she said she “felt like a warrior clutching hand grenades”.Ī Chinese man blocks a line of tanks heading east on Beijing’s Changan Blvd on June 5th, 1989, after Chinese forces crushed a pro democracy demonstration in Tiananmen Square. She wrote a short letter to her boyfriend and gave it to her roommate, asking her to pass it on if she didn’t return. She looked ready for battle, and was especially proud of her new hairstyle, with the back of her head shaved to create an image of Marilyn Monroe’s lips. For camouflage, she donned black jeans and a black jacket, and put an ornate pocket knife she had been given as a gift in her jeans pocket. “It’s time to become a revolutionary hero!” Tang thought, evoking the heroic tales from her textbooks of communist martyrs who were killed in the civil war, or by the invading Japanese. On the night of June 3rd, word went around Beijing that the military was moving in on the square to remove the students. They were heady days and the students sang songs and gave speeches, and rock bands performed impromptu concerts in the square in displays of solidarity.Īs the 30th anniversary looms, Tang now reflects on the tragedy that unfolded then before her eyes. Down with corruption! Down with Li Peng! ’” “I lost my voice from shouting: ‘We want democracy. Standing in the blazing sun was no fun, though,” Tang said. No one could answer.ĭonated Cokes and cakes were handed out and the sloganeering continued. This was confusing to her and most of the other young protesters who had never heard the word “democracy” by itself, detached from expressions like “proletarian democratic dictatorship” from their textbooks. Rose Tang, then a 20-year-old college freshman, said the word “democracy” figured on nearly all the banners and slogans that people shouted. In the weeks before the June 4th, 1989, massacre there was a festive mood in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, with throngs of students partying amid a sea of flags, banners and makeshift tents.
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