Watch on YouTube as sharing on other sites has been disabled.
“World News” report from April 21, 1989: Following the death of Hu Yaobang, student demonstrations begin in Beijing, China.
This then is interesting — from the South China Mornng Post. This video was originally published on 11 April 2014.
Beijing may not have been thrilled by that…
The following report is from Indian TV which is not famous for neutrality when reporting on China! But there is no doubt substance to it.
Watch on YouTube — 11 months ago.
Some on the Left — rather extreme views — will tell you that nothing much actually happened 34 years ago in Beijing!
A sample — and I have heard it all before from certain quarters.
It’s highly unlikely that our “front-line” soft power combatants employed by the ABC and Nine-Fairfax Media have not read these articles or similar articles, so they have either chosen to believe that all these witnesses and independent investigators are liars, or that they have all succumb to false memories, in which case no amount of evidence to the contrary will change these people’s mind. Alternatively, they do know the student “massacre” thesis is flawed, but they are determined to hold the line anyway — a modern day Deus hoc vult (the righteousness of their cause and the free world is on their side, so any means, including making up lies, justifies the ends). Either way, if you are looking for stories by independent journalists who report the facts accurately and fairly then the ABC and Nine-Fairfax Media are not the places to look, at least in regards to China.
Source
My problem with that
I began by saying that in 1989 I really was not paying attention. 1989 was in many respects a personal annus horribilis encompassing a burn-out that forced me to give up my job at Masada — at one point I was off the radar to such an extent that my mother sent the police to do a welfare check and the Deputy Principal of Masada came to Paddington to see what was going on. Therapy with the amazing Dr Cedric Bullard in Randwick really helped. By the end of the year I was working again at Sydney Boys High. There was also the suicide of a dear friend and the death of my father in 1989. So Tiananmen did not really occupy my thoughts at the time.
But that changed in 1990 when I found myself teaching Chinese adults at Wessex College of English.
Rather awkwardly for the hoax thesis I was teaching people who were actually there.
Richard Zhang who one day in 1990 in the coffee shop next to the language college burst into tears when he told me he had a letter from his mother telling him it was too dangerous to go back to China. Through his tears he said to me: “I used to believe in Communism. Until I saw them killing their own people.” That was not the Fairfax Press — that was a living breathing person who sat across the table from me. I had arranged to have coffee with him as I was concerned that his English was going backwards and he seemed really preoccupied.
The ballet dancer who asked why we teachers did not talk more about Tiananmen, to which I gave a diplomatic answer. She had been a member of the Beijing Ballet. “My best friend was beside me. He was shot.”
The guy working in the Darlinghurst coffee shop who as he served me noticed I was reading a picture book about Tiananmen. “I can tell you all about that,” he said. He was one of the guys in Tiananmen Square riding his bike and taking the wounded away.
And then there was the one in an evening class — clearly suffering PTSD of some kind — who would suddenly shout out a slogan like “The People’s Army loves the people” and laugh….
In later years in the 1990s I met one of the hunger strikers who later was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — Liu Xiaobo. Yes,him I actually met. Eventually he was committed to a long spell in prison. On 26 June 2017, it was reported that Liu had been granted medical parole after being diagnosed with terminal liver cancer in late May 2017. He died in July 2017.
Another of the hunger strikers was rock star Hou Dejian. I never met him but I did meet his Australian biographer Linda Jaivin. See my post Linda Jaivin on Hou Dejian.
I am finding it fascinating in itself, but also because I have some kind of connection, albeit minor, as I mentioned in Lost in translation–and also in time! in December 2013.
I renewed contact with an ex-student from SBHS the other day via Facebook/Twitter. Chris Rodley now writes for The Guardian, among other things. Point is, he was part of a cohort that I was teaching when I was working on my book From Yellow Earth to Eucalypt which Nicholas Jose so kindly remembered in his contribution to Telling Stories, which I am still reading. In other words, around twenty years ago! As presumably is the Christmas party – I think it was Christmas – in Riley Street Surry Hills at Nicholas Jose’s place where I would have met Linda Jaivin. That all happened through my then partner M, who had known both Jose and Jaivin in China and subsequently…
Through that same connection I met, briefly mostly, quite a few other people mentioned in The Monkey and the Dragon. See also my posts Nicholas Jose – Fiction and Non-fiction (2005), I too was offered a free trip to China… (2009), Tiananmen and all that – 20 years on (2009), Liu Xiaobo (2009), Free Liu Xiao Bo (2010), 2010 Nobel Peace Prize (2010), Twenty and more years ago (2010), Tiananmen 25 years on (2014), Random Friday memory 16 – among the Chinese (2015).
Hou Dejian’s song “Descendants of the Dragon” became a kind of anthem on Tiananmen Square in 1989.
I did not dream any of that or read it in the media. Those things all really happened and remain vivid memories. And I could tell you more.
With Bill from Guangzhou in China — Hyde Park 1990. He said he was a good swimmer as he had practised swimming the distance from the Pearl River to Hong Kong.
So yes — it really did happen, so put that far Left propaganda in the nearest bin. Though it is true not so many were killed in the Square itself. But the streets around the Square? Another matter.
34 years is a long time and much has changed. That is true. In many ways life for Chinese people has greatly improved. The advances in many fields have been quite remarkable. I am not a supporter of the more extreme neo-Cold War rhetoric one sees and hears too often. See my March 2023 post On China — hysteria and caution — with update.
Me in deep conversation with Andrew, a former member of the People’s Republic of China Air Force, in a Berala backyard in 1991.
Neil's Commonplace Book 