
At 4:00 a.m. the streetlamps went out. In the dark, armored personnel carriers rolled forward into the square. The protesters on the monument held their ground. Just before 5:00 a.m. the lights came back on, revealing the soldiers, guns at the ready, preparing to rush the monument. With that, the protesters began filing off the monument and out the south end of the square. By dawn, the army had sealed off Tiananmen and the streets around it.
Tank reinforcements were rolling into the center of Beijing. The Communist Party's mopping up of the protest movement began in earnest, marked by checkpoints, arrests and gunfire echoing here and there for days around the capital. There was also a crackdown across all of China.
At the time, I was working for the editorial pages of this newspaper. In the story I filed later that day to New York, I closed with the observation that by dawn on June 4 the Chinese army had already destroyed the white statue of liberty built by the protesters and that no doubt the square, tidied and thoroughly policed, would soon be available again for official functions. I noted that it would be important to remember the heroes of 1989, the people who carried banners to Tiananmen demanding democracy, the people who that spring cried out so many times: "Tell the world what we want. Tell the truth about China."
Here is today's action on the Square, increased police patrols. How tragic.
Pray for human rights in China.
Read the entire article at the Wall Street Journal.
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