1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei

Author:Ai Weiwei [Ai Weiwei]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2021-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

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The big story in the spring of 1989 was of turmoil elsewhere. In late May of that year, several of my telephone conversations with Ai Dan were drowned in the din of military helicopters flying low over downtown Beijing. Leaflets were scattered, demanding that protesters withdraw immediately from Tiananmen Square.

The sudden death by heart attack of Hu Yaobang, former general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, on April 15, 1989, triggered a power struggle between top leaders who favored political reform and those who tolerated only economic reform. Marches to Tiananmen Square by university students mourning Hu Yaobang soon developed into demonstrations demanding that the government address inflation, unemployment, and corruption and uphold media freedoms, democratic processes, and freedom of assembly. In mid-May, a group of students began a hunger strike, attracting support from some four hundred other cities in China. It did not take long for the government to abandon dialogue with the students, and the hard-liners, led by Deng Xiaoping, chairman of the Central Military Commission, decided to crush the demonstrations by brute force. On May 20, martial law was declared in Beijing, and 300,000 troops were deployed.

In the early morning of June 4, soldiers armed with assault rifles and live ammunition, supported by armored vehicles and tanks, shot their way along Chang’an Avenue, the main approach road to the square, taking hundreds of innocent lives and leaving a trail of crushed bicycles and burned-out buses in their wake. Beijing residents had never imagined that the army would open fire on students peacefully petitioning for policy change. The legitimacy of the Chinese regime, undermined so often by one blunder after another, crumbled to dust in the slaughter. But state violence did not loosen the rulers’ hold on power. On the contrary, now they simply gripped their weapons all the more tightly.

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