17th Anniversary of the Tiananmen protest already. I picked this story up from AP:
EXCERPT:
Hong Kong leader Donald Tsang, while in China’s southwestern Yunnan province to attend a regional cooperation conference, urged his fellow citizens to look at the Tiananmen crackdown practically.
"Mainland China has undergone a level of change that has gained the world’s attention in the past 17 years. These changes have brought much prosperity to Hong Kong … so Hong Kong people can make an objective judgment," Tsang said.
Hong Kong Cardinal Joseph Zen, a fierce democracy advocate, disagreed with Tsang.
"How can we let it go? Should we just let it slide, forgive, pretend nothing happened? This is irresponsible. The successors of those responsible for the June 4 incident should give an explanation,’‘ Zen said.
I’d like to offer couple more references in addition to PBS Frontline’s “The Tank Man”, where it reported the fact students were allowed to leave peacefully once the troops arrived, and Chinese government did investigate this, and release casualty figure of 240 some dead (incidentally in-line with our own NSA intel estimate.)
An article by Gregory Clark on pack journalism:
http://mparent7777.livejournal.com/7702519.html
“the so-called massacre was in fact a mini civil war as irate Beijing citizens sought to stop initially unarmed soldiers sent to remove students who had been demonstrating freely in the square for weeks. When the soldiers finally reached the square there was no massacre.”
An article by Columbia Journal Review on passive journalism:
http://archives.cjr.org/year/98/5/tiananmen.asp
“as far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square.
…
Hundreds of people, most of them workers and passersby, did die that night, but in a different place and under different circumstances.”
[Just for reference, throwing molotov cocktail at riot police is a crime in US.]