Tiananmen Square

‘A callow, shaken face appears live on CCTV’s English programme, for no more than fifteen seconds: “Please will all of us remember the dark day today, June the fourth, when many people, including a few of my own colleagues, were killed.” Yang Lian wrote,”In this instant the laughter of angels is the sound of gunfire.” from Virtual Geography, by McKenzie Wark, Indiana University Press, 1994 He also points out in the book that the working people who supported and joined in with the predominantly student uprising, and who constructed barricades around Beijing to stop the tanks and armoured vehicles from entering, are the ones who suffered the worst.For them, he writes, there was the firing squad. It is important to remember the particulars of their demands, what they put their lives at risk for: ‘Starting on the night of 17 April, three thousand PKU students marched from the campus towards Tiananmen Square, and soon nearly a thousand students from Tsinghua joined. Upon arrival, they soon…