On June 4, 1989, a pro-democracy protest movement was crushed when Chinee troops stormed Tianamen Square. The death toll is unknown to this day, but hundreds, and possibly thousands, of mostly young Chinese demonstrators were killed as the Chinese government moved to suppress dissent.
In a story on the front page of the New York Times, reporter Nicholas Kristoff (now a Times columnist) reported —
Beijing residents seemed stunned by the violent attacks on the protesters for democracy, but unsure how to respond. While many students and young workers are militant and insist that they will win in the long run, older people already seem to have accepted defeat.
”The democracy movement is already finished,” a Chinese journalist said despondently.
Kristoff’s blog on the event can be found here:
The most famous image of the event –a young man standing in front of a line of Chinese army tanks, is an icon. The man’s identity and fate are unknown. This is a PBS story on that image.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/view/
