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Article: '1989 Tiananmen square massacre: twenty years ago this spring, China's army forced a bloody confrontation against peaceful student demonstrators.(World)
- Article from:
- Junior Scholastic
- Article date:
- March 2, 2009
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2009 Scholastic, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
On May 29, 1989, a 27-foot-tall foam-and-papier-mache statue appeared in Tiananmen Square, the 100-acre heart of Beijing, China's capital. For more than a month, thousands of college students had occupied the square in defiance of China's Communist government. The towering figure, named the Goddess of Democracy, symbolized the students' goal of forcing the government to loosen its grip on the lives of China's 1.1 billion people.
But to China's repressive rulers, the statue was an insult, perhaps more so because its features were not Chinese. Within days, they sent in army tanks to break up the protest. The result was one of the ...