Tiananmen Square- Twenty years later

The visuals were one of the grimmest ever to have been seen by the world.
A lone young man stood in the path of a tank, desperately trying to block it's path.

What happened next was something that surely has to be unparalled in the world's history of brutality.
That a country could wreak on it's own countrymen in the late 20th century.

For the tank simply just....
Ran him down and moved onwards and into the square, mowing down countless others like him.

The demonstrations in Tiananmen Square have been described as the greatest challenge to the communist state in China since the 1949 revolution. They were called to coincide with a visit to the capital by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, by students seeking democratic reform.

Troops were used to clear the square despite repeated assurances from Chinese politicians that there would be no violence.

It has been suggested that the Communist leader Deng Xiaoping personally ordered their deployment as a way of shoring up his leadership. Hundreds, and possibly thousands, of people were killed in the massacre, although it is unlikely a precise number will ever be known.

Peking has since become more widely known as Beijing.

As I reflect on that day today, I really wonder, how much, has changed?
Or then, if at all, it has....?













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