Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
cities.HuYaobang,generalsecretaryoftheCommunistParty,
expressed some sympathy for the views of Fang and the students,
and for this he became a hero among them. For Deng, however, this
was “bourgeois liberalism” that had gone too far, and he pressured
Hu into resigning his position in January 1987. Hereafter, Hu Yaobang
was both a hero and a political martyr in the eyes of the students.
By the late 1980s, the fast-moving pace of Chinese political develop-
ments had cast Deng and his supporters as conservatives, or people
who had reservations about the demands for democratization in
China. Reformers, on the other hand, were now people who favored
more extensive liberalization. Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, once
thought of as moderates in Deng's camp, had by now emerged as
more progressive and pro-reform than Deng. (Conservatives as now
defined were, of course, still far less committed to class struggle and
mass movements than the radical Maoists had been in the 1960s and
1970s.) In 1987 and 1988 conservatives launched an anti-bourgeois lib-
eralization campaign, but it soon ran out of steam. Something of a
standoff between reformers and conservatives had developed by
1988, and it did not resolve itself in favor of the Dengist conservatives
until the tragic Tiananmen Square Massacre of June 1989.
THERAPEOFPEKING:THEBEIJINGSPRING
AND THE TIANANMEN SQUARE MASSACRE
In the early hours of June 4, 1989, dozens of tanks and thousands of
Chinese troops from the 27th Army of the PLA entered Tiananmen
Square in Beijing and brutally slaughtered hundreds, if not thousands,
of unarmed students and civilian protestors. The bloody crackdown
was ordered by Deng Xiaoping himself, who feared that the protests,
which had been occurring almost constantly since April 15, would
threaten his power and that of the Chinese Communist Party. The
slaughter was broadcast in living, gory color to a horrified world via
satellite feed. The massacre at Tiananmen Square put the Chinese peo-
ple and the whole world on notice that the Chinese Communists
would brook no serious challenge to their rule over China. In so doing
they undermined their legitimacy and moral standing domestically
and abroad. Beijing still suppresses the truth about the Tiananmen
Square massacre, but sooner or later it will come out. Those respon-
sible for the massacre and those who still voice approval of it, includ-
ing former current Chinese leader Jiang Zemin, will one day stand
condemned in history for their complicity in the gratuitous and brutal
