The American Sun
Myth of the 20th Century
Tiananmen – The Gate of Heavenly Peace
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Tiananmen – The Gate of Heavenly Peace

In the founding myths of the Chinese Communist Party, youth and student movements play a crucial role, with the Red Guard and Cultural Revolution being ideological tidal waves that transformed the nation. In the founding myths of post Cold War neo-liberalism, it was another student movement – the one that took place on June 4th, 1989 in and around Tiananmen Square, Beijing – that shaped much of its identity as a supposed free and open society to a counterpoint of communist authoritarianism. In the West, notions of calls for Western style democracy were what the students appeared to be advocating for, yet in China, the people on the ground, in actuality, were searching for something, like most ordinary people, for things more practical, and in practice – nearly orthogonal to that promoted in Western media and government propaganda.

Myth of the 20th Century – Episode 223 – Tiananmen – The Gate of Heavenly Peace

— References —

The Gate of Heavenly Peace, Hinton and Gordon (1995)

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