During 1989, I was a colleage student participating in that movement. To me, the right and wrong in that movement is just like day and night. Throughout chinese history, no ruler has dared to kill students during student movement. (One ruler did so and was forced to resign.)

Furthermore, in cultrual revolution, Mao once said, "anyone who suppressses student movement will not have good endings."

Also, in chinese, we have a idom, called "law will not prosecute mass". If you have lots of people, law can not get to you. I think this kind of background partly contribute to the escalation of the event.

My comments may be politically incorrect. My thought is that the ultimate goal is to prevent similar tragedy from occurring in next movement. Simply demonizing Deng's decision will not help. Deng is a sharp and logic person. (For example, Deng fought for communism for his whole life and decided to abandon it in his eighties. Few people can make that U-turn when he is that old.) I think he truely wants china to be rich and strong.

Steve, I agree that Deng wanted China to grow rich and strong, and his reforms changed China forever, mostly in a good way.

About preventing similar tragedies from happening again: In this respect, I think Deng succeeded. By showing the Chinese people he was willing to cut them down like animals and run them over with tanks, he succeeded in frightening perople so they would not try it again. Tragic, that he had to use brute force and murder his own citizens.

Personally, I think the move towards economic advancement (and hence the abandoning of Communism) was mainly to detract attention away from the government.

The idea is to sastisfy China's educated with economic reform, so that they enter a stage of political apathy; where as long as they are making enough money to support their materialism, nothing else really matters.
Which is quite the case now, so i feel :)

Isabella, I think you are exactly right.

I was there. The students had broad support from beijing-ren, Peking citizens... teachers, taxi drivers, retirees, factory workers, goverment workers, you name it. Every evening I walked to the Square from the Minzu Hotel a couple of hundred yards away and found people from all walks of life mingling and bringing little gifts to the kids in the tents. I had to pass by Zong Nan Hai where all the biggies have their compounds. The soldiers in front of this original gated community were ordered to sit cross legged in a line. The army did not want to appear threatening. Remember those pictures? In the days before the massacre, it was a remarkably exciting and peaceful scene with an overhanging gnawing unknown tension. The local attitude was best summed up by a white haired grandmother, "they are so loveable (ke ai)". Everyone wanted something better, a quality of life, of society, not of money.

A note about the army... it was widely reported that the Beijing Commander would not accept orders to shoot on the students, and checked himself into the hospital. The divisions were brought in from far away and the soldiers were fed drugs.

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Isabella is right. All these hundred names, what will they want today?

And since I jumped in here by chance from your column on the Chinese economic engine, what will befall all of us tomorrow?

Matt, very interesting comment. Hope you can come by here again soon.

In acknowledging the noble cause of the "tank man", one should also be balance by acknowledging the people along the chain-of-command of the leading tank, their humanity. This might be "politically incorrect" and also the communist party line, but think about it.

Joshua, I absolutely have thought about it, and the driver of the tank deserves to be as much a hero as the Tank Man. (Unfortunately, the driver has no "face" unlike Tank Man.) As to chain of command, I don't know and am inclined to disagree. It all happened way too fast and was over in a matter of seconds, so I doubt if there were orders coming down to the tank driver -- he just followed his own humane instincts. One can only wonder what happened to him later on for doing so.

Richard, thank for reminding me of the time factor in this.

I should have read the linked Time magazine article.

Quoting the article:
"As one of the pro-democracy movement's leaders said, the heroes of the tank picture are two: the unknown figure who risked his life by standing in front of the juggernaut and the driver who rose to the moral challenge by refusing to mow down his compatriot."

Maybe this whole thing had been staged by the PLA to show its humane side.
(oops! Shouldn’t be thinking out loud)

Use the "Video" link at the bottom to play a one-minute video of the event
http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/tiananmen/

That guy is one brave guy i would never have the guts to do what he has done hope he's alright.

I am doing a school assignment on psychology of the masses (riot/mob mentality) by focussing on the case study of Tiananmen. If you have any thoughts....???

i was born and raised in china. when this event happened, i was in middle school. till today, after reading hundreds of articles and seeing numerous pix, i still don't believe that the soldiers started killing. with a mass demenstration like this, it is easy to errupt into disasters.

the western world hates communism and has brainwashed people to shun away from the communists (they have the same propoganda in china). this, to me, is wrong. the communism is a good "idea/goal" but it can never come true. it wants equal share of everything for every citizen. and we all know human beings are greedy creatures.

With so much unending attention to the events of 6/4, one would think that Tienamen was the only significant massacre that ever occurred in the world. Where's the outrage over the Korean massacre of students in Kwangju in the early '80s? Hundreds, perhaps thousands died at the hands of the police, with the collusion of the CIA. Nor do we read much of the massacre of suspected Chinese leftists during the hellish days of the 60's in Indonesia, also with the collusion of the CIA. Where are the tributes to the massacred peasants of central america by the US funded rightwing death squads? There's a pattern here.

cj, there's a very simple answer to your question. For many weeks prior to the TS MAssacre, the eyes of the world were riveted on Beijing because of unprecedented media coverage. Those students were living, human being to all of us; we knew them. The other massacres may well have been much worse, but they didn't occur in front of our eyes like TM, where we have thousands of photos and first-person testimonies. This is in no way amnesia. If the massacres of American Indians had been covered in a similar manner and preserved on videotape, there would be similar outrage. It's not fair, but that's what the media can do. Oh, one more thing: you're a moron.