27/06/2008

Six-Four

A large number of people decided that they'd had enough, that their goverment needed a more democratic approach, and that their society needed a change for the better. It started of with 10 000 students sitting at a square. It soon grew to 100 000 people protesting against what they felt was a unjust government. 1 000 of these went on a hungerstrike that for some lasted 3 weeks. The protests lasted for almost a month, but since there was no clear message behind them, other than that they where for a reform of the government, things became highly confused. Same thing happened with the government. Some where in support of the protesters, some where not. The ones against the protests soon got the upper hand and declared martial law, sending the military in. This, of course, resulted in a lot of deaths. Most sources seem to place the numbers in the thousands, and at least some of the dead where military personel. They stormed the sqaure, shooting indescriminatly, beating up anyone for just being there. People hidding in busses, or leaving the square as well. All of this happened before I had turned 2 years old, but I've always heard about it from my mom, who visited that same square a few years before all of this happened. I can only imagine what she felt when she watched this on tv when it took place. And a lot of it ended up on tv, despite the censur and media control of the country in question. This was because at that time, the Russian president was visiting, so it was to some degree a stroke of luck that we know so much that we do. The image of the man standing if front of the tank, refusing to move is probably the one image a lot of people have burned onto their retina. We still don't know who he was, if he got executed for it, or if he lives in hiding somewhere to this day. In conclusion, about an hour of documentry about the "incident" in 1989, and quite a lot about China today, and why we don't care about the obvious disregard for human rights, censorship, and general fasicm in todays China.

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