June 4th, 1989 is a day that changed China forever. Children growing up in China today will not be able to learn about every aspect of their country in schools, even the most important events. Even though the people in China are forbidden to even talk about it, it is still an important event in history not only in China, but the whole world. There were a lot of causes that shaped the massacre and the goals were very hard to be achieved, but the people of China never gave up. Censorship played a major role in this event. The Tiananmen Square incident of 1989 will never be forgotten. The death of Hu Yaobang, the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, was a major cause of the June Fourth Incident. Hu Yaobang's death led many people, especially university students, to believe it was the end of social reforms. Yaobang's death led many students to call for confrontation between themselves and the government. The confrontation escalated to the April-May sit in the Tiananmen Square when their protests went unanswered. Another major cause of the protests...
Or that the racial tensions exploded into riots in many cities, particularly after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. In addition, frustrations with the political process mounted on both the left and right. Left-wing thinkers attributed problems to the underlying causes of the demonstrations, notably the continuing war in Vietnam and the Government's failure to address racial and social inequalities quickly enough. Right-wing politicians argued that the demonstrators themselves were the problem and blamed the confrontations on indulgent political officials, although most Americans fell between the two.
In the Chinese history there is an important date that many remember. That is the Cultural Revolution that started in 1966 (Chan 103). This Cultural Revolution wasn’t a war by any means, but a competition between the different factions of the communist party for power. The Cultural Revolution was also a very important event in the history of the Chen Village. We saw through the different chapters of Chen Village just how it affected the different people that were living there during the eleven year span that it lasted (Chan 103). The Cultural Revolution caused a lot of problems to stir up in Chen Village.
“No radical change on the plane of history is possible without crime,” This quote from Hermann Keyserling is just one of many statements that help describe the meaning and true raw power of Civil Disobedience. Civil disobedience as defined by Merriam Webster is the “refusal to obey governmental demands or commands especially as a nonviolent and usually collective means of forcing concessions from the government”. The most promising and understandable of the definitions of Civil Disobedience would be that given to us by Gandhi from India “Compassion in the form of respectful disagreement”. Even the Veterans Fast for Life from here in the United States must agree when saying, “when leaders act contrary to conscience, we must act contrary to leaders.” To understand why civil disobedience is so important in our lives you must first look into your heart and realize that the integrity of mankind has no need of rules.
were put to death. Even though the original opinion of the people about the uprising wasn’t in favor of it, after the death of the leaders they were outraged. (Coogan,”Troubles” pgs. 19-25)
The Civil Rights Movement was a series of actions that really peaked in the 1960's. These political actions were aimed at gaining rights for African Americans. However, there were two ways of going about the movement. There were ones who protested peacefully, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and others who wanted a more pro-active way of fighting, like the black-rights activist Malcolm X. However, which way was more proactive? Even though both had great intentions, Dr. Martin Luther King had a better way of trying to achieve rights for the African American community.
The Civil Rights Movement brought many accomplishments to African Americans such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The key issues that African Americans fought for were voting rights, integration and racial equality. They were tired of the discrimination and humiliation they received as a result of the segregation laws imposed on them. “State laws mandated racial separation in schools, parks, playgrounds, restaurants, hotels, public transportation, theaters, restrooms and so on” (Blumberg 40). Lawsuits had been tried to gain rights such as the unsuccessful Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 and the successful Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Although, the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka declared the “separate but equal” clause unconstitutional, de facto segregation continued in the South. During the 1960s, two methods were used: nonviolence and violence. Violence proved to be ineffective since it perpetuated social tensions among Whites and Blacks. Nonviolence was the most effective method in bringing social change in America during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement because it attracted sympathy towards Black people, provoked positive media attention, and promoted unity among African Americans.
There is no better way to learn about China's communist revolution than to live it through the eyes of an innocent child whose experiences were based on the author's first-hand experience. Readers learn how every aspect of an individual's life was changed, mostly for the worst during this time. You will also learn why and how Chairman Mao launched the revolution initially, to maintain the communist system he worked hard to create in the 1950's. As the story of Ling unfolded, I realized how it boiled down to people's struggle for existence and survival during Mao's reign, and how lucky we are to have freedom and justice in the United States; values no one should ever take for
At first Zhu points out that this was merely a regional political issue for the locals to deal with but over time it grew to be a nation-wide phenomenon that eventually led to the Chinese Exclusion Act. This major impact was mostly to do with the timing of the actual riot. There were only two days that separated the riot and the national election which impacted the voting of society. The negative impacts of the riot gave way to the equal rights that had shortly before been won after the Civil War. This was a major step back for American society.
The May Fourth Movement did not directly result China to be a communist regime. Indeed, no studies or evidences support the claim of which the May Fourth Movement was inspired by the Soviets or led by the communist leaders. Despite, this movement had awaken Chinese consciousness and new nationalism; moreover, Chinese started to realize the fault of warlord systems, and traditional ways of thinking; being pushed out toward new ways of thinking. Besides, New Youth magazines, Chen Duxiu, and Hu Shi played important roles in the May Fourth Movement in view of how these encouraged Chinese to think outside of box, away from Confucianism, but encouraged to seek and adapt new ideas.
From the Boston Tea Party of 1773, the Civil Rights Movement and the Pro-Life Movement of the 1960s, to the Tea Party Movement and Occupy Wall Street Movement of current times, “those struggling against unjust laws have engaged in acts of deliberate, open disobedience to government power to uphold higher principles regarding human rights and social justice” (DeForrest, 1998, p. 653) through nonviolent protests. Perhaps the most well-known of the non-violent protests are those associated with the Civil Rights movement. The movement was felt across the south, yet Birmingham, Alabama was known for its unequal treatment of blacks and became the focus of the Civil Rights Movement. Under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, African-Americans in Birmingham, began daily demonstrations and sit-ins to protest discrimination at lunch counters and in public facilities. These demonstrations were organized to draw attention to the injustices in the city. The demonstrations resulted in the arrest of protesters, including Martin Luther King. After King was arrested in Birmingham for taking part in a peaceful march to draw attention to the way that African-Americans were being treated there, their lack of voter rights, and the extreme injustice they faced in Alabama he wrote his now famous “Letter from Birmingham.”
He disliked communism as a result of his experience in Moscow. This partly explains why the United Front ended. A second reason was because Chiang Kai-shek’s distrusted of the communists. He had reasons to feel so as the CCP was organizing the workers into unions all over central and southern China at the same time when Chiang was reunifying China. In Shanghai, February 1927, the CCP organized general strike to demonstrate how they could bring China’s largest city into a standstill.
The Chinese government is afraid that Liu’s writings would continue to cause protests and violence. Liu’s involvement in the human rights movement had disturbed the social order that the Chinese government put into place and the government would not accept this. This is why the Chinese government tried to silence Liu Xiaobo by banning the publication of his writing, barring him from public speaking and locking him behind bars. Locking him behind bars has caused some controversy within the Chinese leadership. Lui Xiaobo was used as an example to show the people what the government would not allow. There was controversy because he was the leader of the human movement in which many people were either a part of or agreed with its objectives.
China is a communist country, whose citizens faced many difficult situations while trying to fight for their human rights. According to the “Freedom Rankings” from the database CountryWatch China is not a free country. Specifically the Political Rights and Civil Liberties are in their maximum numbers; this means that these rights are confiscated from the people. Therefore freedoms of press, expression, speech, religion, and movement are all severely limited in China. The government has also kept a close watch on art in China; Chinese art went through many different stages starting from the year 1842. But the massacre of Tiananmen Square in the year 1989 was a turning point in the political life of China and on the country's art. Until the year 1992 art in china was underground, but it kept expanding. As a result of that some Chinese artists started to do art works that rebel against their government and express their feelings towards China. One of these artist is the famous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei who expressed in each piece of art he did, his feelings that China should let its people break away from the rotten traditional, in order to express their thoughts freely.
This was one of the many protests that were led by the civilians of the P.R.C. in the latter half of the 1980s that protested the communistic government that was in place which sought to have a democratic government established. However, it took a turn for the worse when the Chinese military started firing on the pro-democracy protesters on June 4, 1989 and killed hundreds of them (Richelson and Evans). This massacre caused the U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush to announce sanctions on China that prevented the U.S. and China from commercially selling weapons to each other (Richelson and Evans). This differed from the past actions of former presidents in that they did not send troops over to defend the people of China like they did in sending troops to South Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
In order to have a better understanding about the conflict of Tiananmen and its influence on further American relations with People’s Republic of China, this paper gives a short background of the bilateral relations until 1990. Historically, the United States and China did not have good relations due to the political regime of China. In addition, China was not that developed economically to have trade or any kinds of relations with the US. According to some historical data, the first China-US negotiations at the ambassadorial level started on August 1, 1955. The bilateral relations of America and China consist of several stages. The first stage of the US-Chinese relations started in 1971 when both opened their doors to financial and economic ties. The trading volume of these countries stood at US$ 4...