Freedom Of Speech And Tiananmen Square Protests In China
What if we lived in a country without any freedom? What if we didn't have the Bill of Rights to protect our freedom? What if we did not have the freedom of speech, and our government controlled the flow of information. How different would our lives be? Would you want to live in a country where you had no freedom? That is how your life would be like if you lived in China during the 1900s. In China during the 1900s, the Communist party was corrupted, the citizens had limited freedom of speech and limited freedom of press. This led to months of peaceful protests at Tiananmen Square that were initially led by mostly students but were joined by normal citizens.
There were hundreds of thousands of people and even at one point, there were a million people assembled in the square. The students and citizens called for democratic reform, the end of corruption, freedom of speech and freedom of the press. There were many foreign correspondents that were covering these protests because of how important it was to the Chinese citizens. These peaceful objections turned violent once the Communist Party decided to impose martial law and force the citizens to leave.
The military tried to force the citizens to evacuate, but they wouldn't budge. Ultimately, it led to the deaths of around 240 people including military personal, according to an official statement by the Chinese government at the time. However, there has been conflicting information about how many people exactly died during the event. We will never know for sure because of China's censorship.
After the Communist Party declared martial law, they stopped showing the news and blocked all the foreign media from taking pictures and videos, although some information was shown and was broadcast right before they had to stop. That was how my aunt first learned of the protests from the radio and from TV. When my aunt first heard about this incident through the American TV stations and radio, she was shocked. She couldn't believe that the government ordered the military to force the protesters to leave and to kill them. She said that it was wrong, it was unnecessary to kill all those people, especially because they were students. They had their whole future ahead of them. She felt extremely sympathetic for all the families that lost someone, especially because during that time, the one child policy was in effect. If your family only had one son to carry on the family name and they died, your family name cannot be carried on. She was glad that she left China to move to the United States. This was completely the opposite when she listened to the Chinese radio stations. They were saying that the students were wrong and that the government was doing the right thing. They didn’t say anything about killing the protestors, just that they were being forced to leave.
