'DEMOCRATIC MOVEMENTS IN CHINA'

In 1989 I worked at the Tom Bradley Terminal LAX as a U.S. Customs Inspector (Status: Teacher Temp). I remember sadly the days after the Chinese government acted to quench the 'Lady Liberty' demonstration in Tiananmen Square. I had a rare opportunity to talk to a number of people who witnessed this historic event with their own eyes. I recall clearly one university professor telling me details of the culminating horror; tanks rolling over the bodies of protesters sleeping in their sleeping bags etcetera. He was certain many hundreds died in the mad chaos. Grammaticas writes about Mei Chongbiao who - after two decades - decided to protest this massacre by going to a park in the province of Guizhou and protested aloud by shouting "Long live democracy" and "Down with dictatorship". When correspondent Grammaticas arrived in Guiyang to meet Mei he discovered that he was too late - his son Mei Zuheng's flat was ransacked by local police and taken his parents away. The son summed up the present in an ominous tone,"China is like an apple that's rotten inside. On the surface, you see little. People think the apple is still edible. But it is not, our whole system needs changing or we'll never have human rights." I find myself appreciating our First Amendment rights.

Re: our take on the events at Tiananmen Square: I had an interesting conversation with a student several years ago about this. She was a recent immigrant from the PRC. She stated that the protest was really just a bunch of criminals and troublemakers. This is very different from the narrative that we have in the US. When the conversation got to the question of why they were protesting, the gaps in the "official record" became a little more clear to us both.