The Beginning of the End
on December 21, 1995
Failed rebellions are often like failed marriages: former partners and their friends blame the other side for what went wrong; old tensions are magnified; the past is rewritten; feuding camps are formed. This pretty much sums up the situation among the survivors of the Beijing Spring, which ended in the so-called Tiananmen Massacre of June 1989. “Moderate” students and intellectuals blame other, more “radical” students for the bloody conclusion. Veterans of the square, as the authentic “freedom fighters” (their words), look down on those who were overseas at the time.
