Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The Tiananmen Square protests and the violent government crackdown on June 4, 1989 – known in China as the “June 4” movement – represent one of the most important political episodes in modern Chinese history. Indeed, although the epicenter of the protests and the crackdown itself occurred at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, major protests occurred in many large cities in China. The protests should therefore genuinely be seen as a movement and not as a series of isolated protests. Although there was universal condemnation of the crackdown in the West, the origins and aims of the protests themselves have remained ambiguous to many western observers. The movement was a real attempt at changing the political and cultural dimensions of Chinese society. In this sense, it was a legitimate extension of the protest movements that began to spring up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The most important among these movements was the “May 4th” movement of 1919. This was a movement of students, writers, and intellectuals who sought to modernize China by adopting the powers of modern science, but also through an adoption of democracy and a republican form of government. Chinese culture had always given primacy to intellectuals as critics of state power. Confucian ethics taught that an essential part of the vocation of the intellectual in society consisted of the duty to point ... log in or subscribe to read full text