Tiananmen Square Protests Quotes

He took over, and he said: 'If I have to shoot 200,000 students to save China from another 100 years of disorder, so be it.'" - Recalling how former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping dealt with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests

I asked him once what he believed to be the basic flaw in the character of Germans, and he replied “obedience.” When I consider the ghastly orders obeyed by underlings of Columbus, or of Aztec priests supervising human sacrifices, or of senile Chinese bureaucrats wishing to silence unarmed, peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square only three years ago as I write, I have to wonder if obedience isn’t the basic flaw in most of humankind.

The Chinese censorship army is so widespread that June 4 (the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests) is sarcastically known as “Internet maintenance day.

North Korean students and intellectuals didn’t dare to stage protests as their counterparts in other Communist countries did. There was no Prague Spring or Tiananmen Square. The level of repression in North Korea was so great that no organized resistance could take root.

In the aftermath of the Edsa Revolution, Thai protesters filled the streets of Bangkok. Another man stood before another tank at Tiananmen Square. The Berlin Wall fell, with Germany thanking the Philippines for showing them the way. Once upon a time, we were heroes.

The result was a double disaster. The Chinese delegates refused to sign the final treaty, and left Paris in high dudgeon. When the news reached China, anti-Western and anti-Japanese riots exploded across the country. On May 4, some five thousand Chinese students stormed into Tiananmen Square in Peking to protest the Treaty of Versailles.

What is soft power? It is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. It arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies. When our policies are seen as legitimate in the eyes of others, our soft power is enhanced. America has long had a great deal of soft power. Think of the impact of Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms in Europe at the end of World War II; of young people behind the Iron Curtain listening to American music and news on Radio Free Europe; of Chinese students symbolizing their protests in Tiananmen Square by creating a replica of the Statue of Liberty; of newly liberated Afghans in 2001 asking for a copy of the Bill of Rights; of young Iranians today surreptitiously watching banned American videos and satellite television broadcasts in the privacy of their homes. These are all examples of America’s soft power. When you can get others to admire your ideals and to want what you want, you do not have to spend as much on sticks and carrots to move them in your direction. Seduction is always more effective than coercion, and many values like democracy, human rights, and individual opportunities are deeply seductive. As General Wesley Clark put it, soft power “gave us an influence far beyond the hard edge of traditional balance-of-power politics.” But attraction can turn to repulsion if we act in an arrogant manner and destroy the real message of our deeper values.

North Korean students and intellectuals didn’t dare to stage protests as their counterparts in other Communist countries did. There was no Prague Spring or Tiananmen Square. The level of repression in North Korea was so great that no organized resistance could take root. Any antiregime activity would have terrible consequences for the protester, his immediate family, and all other known relatives. Under a system that sought to stamp out tainted blood for three generations, the punishment would extend to parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins. “A lot of people felt if you had one life to give, you would give it to get rid of this terrible regime, but then you’re not the only one getting punished. Your family would go through hell,” one defector told me.

I had been in law school in 1989. I recalled sitting alone in my basement apartment a few miles from Harvard Square, glued to my secondhand TV set as I watched what would come to be known as the Velvet Revolution unfold. I remember being riveted by those protests and hugely inspired. It was the same feeling I’d had earlier in the year, seeing that solitary figure facing down tanks in Tiananmen Square, the same inspiration I felt whenever I watched grainy footage of Freedom Riders or John Lewis and his fellow civil rights soldiers marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. To see ordinary people sloughing off fear and habit to act on their deepest beliefs, to see young people risking everything just to have a say in their own lives, to try to strip the world of the old cruelties, hierarchies, divisions, falsehoods, and injustices that cramped the human spirit—that, I had realized, was what I believed in and longed to be a part of.

In China, they officially call it the “June Fourth incident” because the state-controlled media doesn’t like referring to that 1989 incident as the Tiananmen Square massacre. It might give people the right idea. Students have often been at the forefront of pro-democracy protests, which is why repressive regimes love to cut funding to education because they need lots of stupid people to say fuck yeah this totalitarian regime is awesome. See: Trump voters.

It’s often said that an impoverished, poorly educated, agrarian country like China cannot sustain democracy. Yet my most powerful memory of that night 15 years ago is of the peasants who had come to Beijing to work as rickshaw drivers. During each lull in the firing, we could see the injured, caught in a no-man’s-land between us and the troops. We wanted to rescue them but didn’t have the guts. While most of us in the crowd cowered and sought cover, it was those uneducated rickshaw drivers who pedaled out directly toward the troops to pick up the bodies of the dead and wounded. Some of the rickshaw drivers were shot, but the rest saved many, many lives that night, rushing the wounded to hospitals as tears streamed down their cheeks. It would be churlish to point out that such people are ill-prepared for democracy, when they risked their lives for it.

1989 played out a little differently in China, of course. When thousands of students converged upon Tiananmen Square in Beijing to demand a little democracy--Hey hey, hey ho, Maosim has got to go--they were greeted with a decidedly old school response. Deng Xiaoping, the chain-smoking gnome with the twinkling eyes who then ruled China, simply reached for his totalitarian rulebook, flipped toward the index--Democracy protesters, suitable response--and followed directions. He shot them. And that was that. Except, of course, it wasn't...

5. Community. At SoulBoom, our diverse community will embrace inclusion at every level—more on that in a little bit. Most importantly, however, our community will have a singular focus on empowering, training, and investing in children and youth. Our goal here is social revolution via spiritual transformation. Century after century, it has been youth who sparked the greatest revolutions in the world: the Arab Spring, the Velvet Revolution, the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins, the Tiananmen Square protests. All the way up to Black Lives Matter and the young women and students leading an uprising against oppression in Iran.

The strategy was brilliant – it pushed for marketization rather than for privatization – and was intended to retain control of the economy while giving free play to entrepreneurial talent.

When I consider the ghastly orders obeyed by underlings of Columbus, or of Aztec priests supervising human sacrifices, or of senile Chinese bureaucrats wishing to silence unarmed, peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square only three years ago as I write, I have to wonder if obedience isn’t the basic flaw in most of humankind.

reform-minded general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the most powerful position in Russia, the Soviet satellites were moving toward independence. I was in Prague the night the Velvet Revolution separated Czechoslovakia from Moscow’s rule and spent time in Poland with the charismatic Lech Walesa, who led Solidarity. Nineteen eighty-nine was that kind of year. Earlier, in June, I finished a commencement address at Tulane University School of Medicine on a Saturday morning and got a call from our news desk: Chinese troops had moved on young urban protesters who had taken over Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital, demanding more political and personal freedom after a state visit from Gorbachev, who was reforming

Another native German Heinrich, Heinrich Böll, a great writer, and I became friends even though we had once been corporals in opposing armies. I asked him once what he believed to be the basic flaw in the character of Germans, and he replied “obedience.” When I consider the ghastly orders obeyed by underlings of Columbus, or of Aztec priests supervising human sacrifices, or of senile Chinese bureaucrats wishing to silence unarmed, peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square only three years ago as I write, I have to wonder if obedience isn’t the basic flaw in most of humankind.