Monday, April 14, 2014

Tiananmen 25 years on: the 'event' that no one dares remember...

Seventeen-year-old Jiang Jielian was one of the first to die. A bullet punctured his left lung as he scrambled for cover in a flower bed near Muxidi Bridge. “Run!” he said to his friends, as he crumpled to the ground. “I’ve been hit”.

It was just after 11pm on June 3, 1989 as troops from the 38th Corps of the People’s Liberation Army moved down the wide expanse of Fuxingmenwai boulevard on a mission to clear Tiananmen Square.

Half an hour earlier, Jiang had jumped out of a window at his home in west Beijing and joined the protests that came within inches of toppling the Communist party and which, while ultimately failing in China, paved the way for six Eastern European Communist regimes to implode over the following six months.

It was here, rather than in Tiananmen Square itself, where the majority of the blood was spilt during the violent suppression of the student protests, by inexperienced troops ordered to clear the square by dawn.

Yet today, 25 years later, there is no trace of what happened at apartment block 27 on Fuxingmenwai Boulevard. The holes caused by ricochets, one of which killed the son of a senior government official in a nearby building, have been plastered up. There are no memorial plaques. Full story...

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