Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
A lone and unknown man (sometimes called “Tank Man” in the West) holds up a
column of tanks on the streets of Beijing in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Massa-
cre. His fate remains unknown today, even though this photograph is world
famous. (Reuters/Corbis)
murders of their own countrymen. The perpetrators of the Tiananmen
Square Massacre will, as the Chinese saying goes, “leave behind a his-
torical stench for ten thousand years” (yichou wannian).
The popular student-led protest movement of 1989 was often called
a pro-democracy movement in Western journalism, but this was prob-
ably a mistake, or at least an overstatement. True enough, many of the
students touted “democracy” as a corrective for China's problems, but
few if any of them possessed a sophisticated knowledge of democracy
or democratic societies. Most of them emphasized their patriotism and
their desire to create a legal opposition within China's socialist system.
Only a small fraction of them actually advocated the overthrow of the
Chinese Communist Party, the dissolution of the socialist system, and
the full-fledged introduction of multiparty, Western-style democracy
in China. Instead, they were reacting to the disruptions, corruption,
inflation, and mismanagement in an economically liberalizing country
ruled over by an ossified, authoritarian Leninist gerontocracy, or rule
by old men. These problems were largely of the Chinese Communists'
own making because they did not fully understand how to govern a
nation that had fairly quickly transitioned from a clunky, socialist com-
mand economy to a more open and market-oriented economy which
sanctioned the accumulation and investment of private capital and
