Chinese Students Urge End to Siege of Beijing Square

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the nationwide, student-led democracy movement in China, and the subsequent June 4th military crackdown in Beijing. To commemorate the student movement, CDT is posting a series of original news articles from 1989, beginning with the death of Hu Yaobang on April 15 and continuing through the tumultuous spring. The full series can be read at Twenty Years Ago Today: Tiananmen Square Student Movement..

From the May 28, 1989 New York Times:

China’s student leaders today called for an end to their two-week occupation of Tiananmen Square, in the center of the capital, but said that they would continue to hold large-scale demonstrations to press for greater democracy and the resignation of Prime Minister Li Peng.
The announcement represented a major success for Mr. Li. In effect, the Government will have evicted the students not by politically embarrassing means such as brute force, but by waiting until the square was so fetid as a result of lack of garbage collection and the students so malodorous that they chose to leave on their own. ‘We Have Responsibility’
”It is very difficult to continue our sit-in,” a student leader, Wuer Kaixi, told a press conference. ”As leaders, we have responsibility for students’ health, and the difficulties are obvious. Hygiene is extremely bad and the food is insufficient.” [ In a report from Beijing on Sunday, Reuters said that thousands of students took to the streets of the capital to renew their call for democracy and to protest the purge of reformers in the Chinese leadership. Students set out in five columns from the city's northwestern university area toward central Beijing. Some carried banners reading, ''I can die, democracy cannot die,'' Reuters said. ] The call to leave the square is only a proposal, and it must be voted on by the students who are occupying it. But most seemed ready to go, and some students are leaving even before the official pull-out date of Tuesday.
Mr. Li today gained further support in the power struggle within China’s ruling circle when former President Li Xiannian warned that ”people in the leadership” of the Communist Party had created confusion in China. It was a clear reference to the party leader, Zhao Ziyang, who is now being criticized in preparation for an attempt to dismiss him.

Also from the same paper:

About 200,000 young people attended a daylong open-air pop concert in Hong Kong today to raise money for the pro-democratic demonstrations in China.
The crowd fell silent as a relayed newscast from Beijing reported the apparent triumph of hard-line leaders. ”We are very disappointed,” said a student, putting her head in her hands.
But organizers and performers vowed the struggle would go on.
[...] When asked why they had come to the concert, two students looked slightly bewildered by the question. ”Can’t you see?” said one. ”We are Chinese.”

Supporters from Hong Kong join a student march for democracy on May 28, 1989. Their banner reads “Hong Kong compatriots whole-heartedly support you” (via CND)