A Survivor Remembers the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Thirty Years Later
Rose Tang was a 20 year-old attending college in Beijing in 1989 when students started amassing by the thousands in Tiananmen Square, right in the heart of the Chinese capital. She remembers the crowd belting out the leftist anthem "The Internationale" in Mandarin.
"It was really festive! It was really weird, looking back. How were we so fearless?"
Then the tanks arrived, and the shooting began.
"All I could hear, apart from the screaming, was the thuds, the noise of human flesh being beaten, badly, around me," Tang said.
Men and women were bayoneted or run over or beaten to death. The British ambassador to China told his government that at least 10,000 people had been killed.
Tang managed to escape relatively unharmed.
She left China, traveled and studied journalism. She eventually settled in the US and taught at Princeton. She's now 50 and lives in Brooklyn. She plays in bands, and continues her activism. And she's electrified by what she sees in young, politically active Americans.
"They're ready!" she said. "They are so idealistic and they're so youthful and so smart. They're great organizers. I'm very hopeful."
It's a dangerous and exciting time, she said, and a moment when organizers need to bring different communities together.
"If we do not fight to defend our human rights to maintain our democracy, the Tiananmen massacre could happen to anybody, anywhere, at any time."
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