Former latimes bureau chief David Holley covered the Tiananmen massacre 30 years ago. This is his memory of the experience:
Then-Times bureau chief David Holley, center with hand raised, interviews people in Tiananmen Square during the seven weeks of protests in 1989.
For me, what the Chinese call simply “June 4” — a date that fundamentally shaped today’s China — had begun the previous evening.I was the Los Angeles Times Beijing bureau chief then, and had overseen the newspaper’s coverage of the pro-democracy protests since they began in mid-April. The Times’ team had been taking turns staking out the square, and my shift was to begin at midnight.
I decided to telephone the bureau from the Beijing Hotel — mobile phones were still a rarity in Beijing at the time. At the hotel entrance, security searched me for cameras or film. I found a phone in the dark coffee shop, and to my relief the hotel operator put me through to my office. I watched the shooting through the windows and periodically phoned in more notes.
That was an implicit criticism of the surviving leaders. Yet it was difficult for the police to immediately suppress this because superficially it began as mourning for a top Communist. That was significant. The gunfire we heard from the square after 4 a.m. had been warning shots and soldiers shooting out loudspeakers that students had hooked up. The earlier, deadly gunfire, some of which I had witnessed, had been along Changan Avenue, which crosses the north end of the square and past the Beijing Hotel.
Soon I was on an upper-floor balcony with a spectacular view of the northern tip of the square, with tanks, armored personnel carriers and soldiers in that direction, and the seemingly fearless crowd of enraged ordinary citizens below us and to the left.
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