For China, the Tiananmen massacre was an "incident …

Tomorrow will mark the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Mbadacre in Beijing. Recalled in China with the euphemism of "the June 4th incident", this day of the beginning of the summer of 1989 was the bloodiest event of modern political history .

Hundreds of civilians were killed by the 200,000-strong People's Liberation Army as part of a brutal crackdown on pro-democracy student protesters who shook the world.

The army was named after the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Deng Xiaoping declared martial law in the capital, seeking to end six-week protests across the country. One million young Chinese people had occupied the famous landmark for organizing hunger strikes and demanding an end to state corruption, greater transparency and increased civil liberties after the death of reformist leader Hu Yaobang April 15th.

The protests on Tiananmen Square were a shame for the Chinese government before the visit of Soviet Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev, whose arrival would draw China to the attention of the international media, hence the sudden need to clean the streets.

After attempting to use non-violent methods to disperse the demonstrators and then tell them that they had an hour left, members of the 27th Army Group opened fire on the crowd with rifles. automatic five minutes later. The snipers fired bullets from the roofs, the soldiers used bayonets to strike wounded and armored personnel carriers, many of whom crushed students who had linked to form chains human.

The excavators removed the bodies for incineration and the blood was deposited in the gutters. The wounded were taken to the hospital by bicycle.

While the CCP insisted that the mbadacre was necessary to avoid a "counterrevolutionary riot," US President George HW Bush denounced the violence and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said that She was "shocked and horrified".

China has officially registered the death toll of no more than 300, while the Chinese Red Cross said the death toll was 2,700. But Alan Donald, Britain's ambbadador to China at the 39 At the time, said that the death toll was much higher.

In a note that was declbadified in 2017, Alan Donald expressed his belief that the death toll was actually 10,454 and suggested that the 27th armed group, "60 percent illiterate and called primitive," had been specially chosen for this task. for his reputation for unconditional obedience.

In another recently declbadified text, the same diplomat had warned Downing Street that the mbadacre was inevitable. "The Chinese government decided that there was no way to avoid the bloodbath," he wrote on May 20, 1989.

Tank Man, one of the most iconic protest images ever recorded, most often remembers Tiananmen Square: a lone man holding two stationary shopping bags on the pbadage of four tanks. This extraordinary moment was captured by five foreign press photographers from the balconies of a hotel overlooking the horrors of the square. The Stuart Franklin version published in magazines The weather and Life after the roll of film was smuggled out of China in a tea box. Charlie Cole, whose photo won the 1990 World Press Photo Award, only managed to get his film after hiding it in a restroom when authorities burst into his room, forcing him to deliver a fake movie and to sign a confession that he had taken photographs in violation of martial law. The image of Stuart Widener for AP was the most widespread.

The man-tanker was identified as a 19-year-old archeology student, Wang Weilin, but his fate remains unknown. Secretary General Jiang Zemin denied knowing of his arrest but insisted that it would not have been crushed or executed later. Some think that he escaped to Taiwan. His story became the subject of Lucy Kirkwood's work, Chimerica, in 2013.

Nowadays, Tiananmen Square is never mentioned in the Chinese media and is not taught in schools. An increased police presence on the site is the only unspoken gesture to what happened 29 years ago.

The Chinese artist Badiucao also inspired a social media campaign to commemorate this anniversary, encouraging young people around the world to disguise themselves as Tank Man and set important milestones to express their opposition to the Chinese government.

Of L & # 39; Independent from Great Britain. Special for Page12

Translation: Celita Doyhambéhère