I was an argumentative teenager, and after emigrating from China to London one of the biggest rows I had with my British school friends was over Tiananmen. They’d insisted on calling it a massacre. I was adamant – it wasn’t a massacre, and the government did what it had to. Did my friends not understand that the protests had shut down the city of Beijing – not to mention other major cities across the country – for months? The protestors were a nuisance; they threatened the livelihoods of small business owners, blockaded roads, cost the country’s economy God knows how many yuan.
I didn’t back down then. But I wish I had done. To this day I blush whenever a friend dredges up that awful memory. Knowing what I do now, it’s hard to justify ever having been so naive.
My mind changed on this when I trawled through Wikipedia, trying to put pieces together and make sense of it all.
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