Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
gunfire. The crowd began to scream, “Go back! Go back!” The soldiers
responded with another hail of bullets.
By 2:48, the soldiers had cleared a wide swath at the north end of the
square. The crowd had thinned a bit. At 3:12, there was a tremendous
round of gunfire, lasting several minutes. People stampeded down the
Avenue of Eternal Peace.
The soldiers strafed ambulances and shot medical workers trying to
rescue the wounded. Some cyclists flung bodies across the back of their
bicycles. Others just carried the wounded on their backs. Beijing's
doughty pedicab drivers pitched in. Between 3:15 and 3:23, I counted
eighteen pedicabs pass by me carrying the dead and wounded to the
nearby Beijing Hospital.
(Wong 1996, 253)
Toward dawn, the soldiers moved on Tiananmen Square and slaugh-
tered students there:
At 5:17, the soldiers allowed the frightened students to file out through
the south side of the square, making them run a gauntlet of truncheons
and fists. The students straggled past the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet
and then north. As they turned west onto the Avenue of Eternal Peace,
they saw a row of tanks lined up between them and the square.
A retreating student hurled a curse. Suddenly, one of the tanks roared
to life and mowed down eleven marchers from behind, killing seven
instantly.
(Wong 1996, 256-57)
The slaughter that is named after Tiananmen actually took place in
the streets of Beijing in the vicinity of Tiananmen Square. Shen Tong
was an eyewitness to the bloody events of the night of June 3-June 4
at the intersection of Xidan and Chang'an Avenue, near his house:
I fought my way through the crowd, trying to get into the avenue, but
I stopped when one of the soldiers fired rapidly at my feet. I wasn't hurt,
so I tried to look for the shells, to see whether the bullets were real. Hun-
dreds of people rushed into the avenue to put up barricades, but as soon
as they reached the middle of the street, a spray of machine-gun fire
scattered them. People who had been hit fell to the ground and lay still.
Those people are dead, I thought to myself. The bullets are real.Icouldn't
believe it. It was as if this were all happening in a dream
...
three soldiers jumped from an armored car and shot into the
crowd. A flash of bright orange light went up a few meters away; two
buses had been set on fire by the people. I walked toward the wreckage
and stood behind a tree, watching the flames, which actually looked
beautiful against the night sky. More shots were fired at my feet. When
I looked in the direction of the gunfire, I found myself staring at a
...
