Fifteen years ago today (China time) at 26, I was driving around the south end of Halifax with my mother picking up groceries listening to reports from Bejing of the massacre in Tianamen Square. All that summmer I had worked in the library of the Dal Law School researching a paper on the principles of sentencing for Prof. Bruce Archibald and had watched Chinese grad students sending faxes all day about the demonstrations. No one had really thought the tanks would roll, especially as Gorby had visited just a few weeks before.
Hope my favorite guy is out there and ok.
Comments
marcia - June 4, 2004 12:28 PM
15 years ago today, I had just finished second year university as an East Asian Studies major, and had been actively studying the Democracy movement in China. I was due to arrive in Beijing 17 days later - we obviously did not plan to go in light of Tiananmen Square. Instead, I went to Hong Kong and then Nanjing and later Beijing for 2 days (instead of 2 months.) June 4th changed China forever. It also changed my life. Had it not been for Tiananmen, I likely would be a professor in Chinese contemporary history. Living for 6 months in Hong Kong and China in 1989 was enough to diminish any idealized dream of studying China - so here I am, a child psychiatrist.
Alan - June 4, 2004 1:18 PM
I forgot that, Marcia, and I am just remembering our Poland to China correspondence on matters of the heart!
Alan - June 4, 2004 2:17 PM
More brave people arrested in the Square.
Bill - June 4, 2004 11:31 PM
In China then as is still now, there was a government so far from the true feelings of the people that it can only stay in power by either quashing dissent or through fear. Tianamen square is an extreme result of a system where the government has decided it knows what is best for the people without actually asking the people what they think.
Such is the way of all leftist movements. Enslave people by telling them that they are being freed.
Alan - June 5, 2004 1:16 AM
I was with you, Bill, until the last sentence - as the right can be accused of the same at the same extreme.