Today's happy hour book with snack and Mozart liqueur martini...
“On Saturday, April 15, 1989, Hu Yaobang, the former party general secretary who had been purged for being too soft on student protests in 1986–87, died of a heart attack.
Through that weekend, wall posters commemorating his life went up on college campuses around Beijing.
Student groups carried commemorative wreaths to the Monument for Revolutionary Martyrs in the center of Tiananmen Square.
Within days, hundreds of thousands of people mobbed the square in the largest outpouring of dissatisfaction with the regime since the rally following Zhou Enlai’s death in 1976.
Demonstrations spread to hundreds of Chinese cities.
The student-led demonstrations took their inspiration from many sources, but the United States played a leading role.
From the movement’s sound track, a rollicking rock and roll ballad from a Chinese guitarist named Cui Jian, to its symbol, a thirty-three-foot-tall statue called Goddess of Democracy—a knockoff of the Statue of Liberty—the movement had an American accent.
The students and hundreds of thousands of other participants never coalesced around specific demands for American-style democracy.
Most wanted lower inflation, less corruption, equal opportunity, and more freedom.”
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“Behind those demands lay a burning desire for a new New China, a China that embraced not just the technology and investment of the West but its foundational ideas as well.
The party understood how dangerously attractive the United States was to China’s younger generations.
On June 1, the Ministry of State Security issued a secret report on American “ideological and political infiltration” into China.
Prepared for Premier Li Peng, who became the main advocate of a violent crackdown on the movement, it accused the United States of using professors, radio broadcasts, scientific and cultural exchanges, the media, and undercover missionaries to undermine China’s socialist system.
Once again, the “peaceful evolution” advocated by John Foster Dulles had emerged as a bogeyman haunting the Communist state.
“It is now clear,” the report said, “that murderous intent has always lurked behind their protestations of peace and friendship.”
A day later, as senior leaders gathered to discuss the document, Li Peng declared the only way to deal with the turmoil was to crush it by force.
On the night of June 3, 1989, the People’s Liberation Army attacked the protesters. By dawn on June 4, Tiananmen Square had been cleared.
Hundreds, if not thousands, had been killed.”
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