tiananmen square 2 - leadup
OK, here's the first of the posts I promised you on this. There'll be regular updates up to June 4th and beyond. This is just a bit of scene-setting, and some personal recollection.
For those of you who don't remember - maybe most of you - back in 1989 the communist world was beginning to unravel. That was pretty disconcerting for anyone. If you were any older than about 15 then you'd grown up with the near certainty that you weren't going to get old. Someday sooner or later some idiot was going to launch nuclear armageddon and if you were lucky you'd die straight away. But in recent years Mikhail Gorbachev had begun to open up the Soviet Union and start an unstoppable movement of change.
China seemed largely impervious, but it had followed a separate path for a long time. But in early April '89 there were signs of change. There were those in the leadership who were in favour of some reform, largely economic, particularly Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang.
In the countryside there was growing discontent with corruption and economic inequalities, and in the cities students were increasingly unhappy. All of this went largely unnoticed in the West, it certainly went well over my head at the time, until protests began to pick up some momentum. Really nothing much was happening to interest people outside of China until Hu Yaobang died on April 15.
For those of you who don't remember - maybe most of you - back in 1989 the communist world was beginning to unravel. That was pretty disconcerting for anyone. If you were any older than about 15 then you'd grown up with the near certainty that you weren't going to get old. Someday sooner or later some idiot was going to launch nuclear armageddon and if you were lucky you'd die straight away. But in recent years Mikhail Gorbachev had begun to open up the Soviet Union and start an unstoppable movement of change.
China seemed largely impervious, but it had followed a separate path for a long time. But in early April '89 there were signs of change. There were those in the leadership who were in favour of some reform, largely economic, particularly Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang.
In the countryside there was growing discontent with corruption and economic inequalities, and in the cities students were increasingly unhappy. All of this went largely unnoticed in the West, it certainly went well over my head at the time, until protests began to pick up some momentum. Really nothing much was happening to interest people outside of China until Hu Yaobang died on April 15.
Comments
Even then things might have been handled differently, but Zhao Ziyang had spent a lot of time out of the country on diplomatic trips, allowing conservatives at home to wrest back the initiative.
But like I say, I'll get into all of this again later on.