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The Tiananmen Papers: An Editor's Reflections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2001

Extract

The coercive repression of peaceful, unarmed demonstrators in Beijing on the night of 3–4 June 1989 is one of the starkest human rights violations of recent times. For a government to kill peaceful, unarmed citizens is a violation of the “right to life” that is provided in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights instruments. In addition to the immediate cost in lives – my co-editor Perry Link and I consider the death toll to be still an open question, because the only related document in the collection is the self-interested report of the Beijing Party Committee to the Politburo – Tiananmen set a repressive political course for years to follow. June fourth marked a sharp clash between alternative futures. On that night China made a decisive turn away from liberalization and back toward an authoritarian kind of politics.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© The China Quarterly, 2001

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Footnotes

This essay was given as the Sir Joseph Hotung Annual Lecture on China at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, on 1 June 2001. It has been slightly revised and updated. For comments and information, thanks to Bruce Gilley, He Pin, Kenneth Lieberthal, Jonathan Mirsky, Robin Munro, Barry Naughton and Stanley Rosen.