中间这段提到了64
To begin with, what was the uprising about? What demands were the students – and most of them were indeed students, rather than ordinary workers and peasants – intent on pursuing to the end? The initial protests were over reductions in student subsidies. As an economizing measure, the government decided to drastically cut student allowances, while China’s generous foreign scholarship program, which enabled many students from Africa to study in Chinese universities, was continued, in spite of the cutbacks.
This outraged the fiercely nationalistic Chinese students, who, in the winter of 1988, used it as an excuse to rampage through the living quarters of African students, injuring 13. What began as a lynching miraculously turned into a "human rights" protest, as 3,000 demonstrators showed up in Nanjing, where slogans such as "Kill the black devils!" mingled with demands for "political reform."
From Nanjing, where the movement originated, anti-African demonstrations spread to other cities, notably Shanghai and Beijing. A major motivation behind the demonstrations was apparently the success African students had with Chinese women. That the anti-African riots were the prelude to the Tiananmen protests, the spark that started a roaring fire in the center of Beijing, was evidenced in the slogans and banners raised by the students in the square, such as "”No Offend Chinese Women” [sic].
Imagine if such sentiments were displayed at an American university! The miscreants would be rounded up, charged with "hate crimes," and summarily shipped home with their tails between their legs. Western reporters didn’t see fit to report on this aspect of the "democratic" uprising in Tiananmen Square.
Perhaps they didn’t notice: people see what they want to see, especially Western journalists bent on pursuing a ready-made – and easily believable – narrative, one that (just coincidentally, of course) fit in rather nicely with the U.S. government’s stance. They saw the "goddess of democracy," but they failed to see the portraits of Chairman Mao, the worst despot and mass murderer since Stalin, reverently carried by many of the marchers.
According to the narrative spun by the Western news media and simultaneously promulgated by U.S. officials, the Tiananmen Square incident was provoked by the lack of "democracy" in China and was a surge in favor of Western-style liberal humanism in the face of Red Chinese "totalitarianism." Clean, easy, black-and-white, good guys vs. bad guys: Cut! And that’s a wrap!
The reality, however, was quite different, and the inability of Western reporters to see this is not hard to fathom. After all, what did they know? Only what they saw, or, rather, what they chose to see. The context in which these events occurred was invisible to them. |