The Iron Curtain crumbles within

Tiananmen Square, Beijing; 1989.

Only 40 years earlier, in this very square, Mao Zedong declared the institution of the People's Republic China. Now, at one entrance to the square, we see 5 tanks of the People's Liberation Army (at this point the name could not be more misleading) stopped in their tracks by a single student protester.

Tiananmen Square has actually witnessed some of the world's most influential occasions and proclamations--a fitting history for the world's largest city square, 4,736,120 square feet, that separates one of the world's largest capitals from the iconic Forbidden City.

Regarded as one of the most significant, The Tiananmen Sqaure Massacre represented the collapse of a revolutionary experiment gone horribly wrong. More symbolized than captured by this picture, the Tiananmen Protests were in fact a citywide, countrywide, and world-recognized movement for the liberalization of what had become a totalitarian regime. But if one thing should be said about totalitarian regimes, it is that they don't die quietly.

Beginning April 15th, in response to the death of a leading force in the liberalization of China, CPC General Secretary Yu Habong, students poured into city streets to protest--but always nonviolently. Resorting instead to civil resistance, the students had gathered 100,000 strong in Tiananmen by May 20th. That day Premier Li Peng declared martial law--the use of military force to clear resistance.

Rising to a fever pitch on June 4th, the People's Liberation Army shattered the aura of civility by using live fire on protesters in the path on the way to Tiananmen Square. No death count has ever been released, but the protests were promptly crushed.

But if history teaches us anything, it is that revolutions are transcendent of human bodies. The PRC may have killed those students in Beijing on that day, but truly the revolution had spread like a virus throughout China and had no intention of surrender. Killing those students was like placing a Band-Aid on a wide, deep, festering wound. In reality, the era of totalitarianism was crumbling--as did the Berlin Wall in the same historic year, 1989.