Tiananmen: The People Versus the Party (2019)

• 81%
• 2019
• Documentary
• History
• TV Movie
• Ian MacMillan
• Audrey Maurion
• Corey Johnson
• Howard Zhang
• Shen Tong

It's been thirty years since the massacre at Tianamen Square in Beijing, where upwards of a few thousand students were killed in the military crackdown on their protests, the massacre which the Communist Party of China refuses to talk about or even acknowledge as having happened. With new official documents coming to light as well as the surfacing of other eyewitness video accounts, the seven weeks of the protest leading to the massacre are dissected in detail, it a time when China seemed to be on the brink of a new direction to possible democracy. While many factors led to the ultimate outcome, the core issues seem to be the students being unable to convince even the reformers within the Communist Party that they wanted a dialogue as the potential future leaders of the Party rather than wanting a regime change (i.e. to overthrow the existing government), while the Party leaders seemed to focus in on one word in a report - turmoil - they wanting to avoid long term turmoil with the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s still relatively fresh in their minds.