Tiananmen: A reporter’s first-hand account

By Guy Dinmore

Published: June 3 2009

Beijing serene in spring sunshine. Students gaily acting as traffic police. Normally surly bus conductors and shop assistants suddenly becoming models of politeness. Tiananmen Square a circus fairground of banners, tents and clapped out vehicles bringing exuberant demonstrators from across China.

In those two weeks 20 years ago – in that brief illusion of space created by the absence of all signs of authority when the Communist party and security forces seemed to have completely melted away – the People’s Republic finally appeared just that: a country run by the people for the people.

Chinese draw their power from Tibet’s sacred lake

Chinese draw their power from Tibet’s sacred lake: A hydro-electric project on the Yamdrok Tso threatens ecological disaster next century, a correspondent writes in Lhasa

Published on The Independent on 20 July 1993

SHAPED like a giant scorpion with its claws outstretched, Yamdrok Tso is one of Tibet’s largest freshwater lakes to the north of the Himalayan divide, twisting around mountain ranges high above the valley that leads to the capital, Lhasa.

A few villages hug its rocky shores, multi-coloured prayer flags fluttering from rooftops. Yaks and goats graze the slopes, migrating birds arrive in the summer months and an abundance of fish swim in its waters – as does a mythical dragon.

China mulls ways to stave off democracy

Article from: Chicago Sun-Times
Article date: December 31, 1990
Author: Guy Dinmore

BEIJING China’s Communist rulers, confronted with the decline of Marxism abroad and widespread dissent at home, issued a rallying call Sunday to preserve socialism and block Western political infiltration.

The long-delayed six-day meeting of the Central Committee, headed by party leader Jiang Zemin, also adopted an economic blueprint for the next five years that Chinese economists said was a muddled compromise between reformists and conservatives.

Homeless expelled in Beijing `cleanup’

Article from: Chicago Sun-Times
Article date: August 20, 1990
Author: Guy Dinmore

BEIJING The homeless and hungry, seen as a blight on China’s capital, say they are being rounded up and hounded out in a campaign to beautify the city for next month’s Asian Games.

In dusty lanes near Yongdingmen railway station, they gathered as usual over the weekend with their meager bundles, brewing tea on fires made from garbage. “We make an ugly sight,” said one woman. “The authorities don’t want you foreigners to see us.” Nearby, posters proclaimed the Games’ official slogan: “Unity, friendship, progress.”

China warns of chaos if party yields power

Article from: Chicago Sun-Times
Article date: February 8, 1990
Author: Guy Dinmore

BEIJING China’s Communist Party responded quickly Wednesday to the radical changes approved in the Soviet Union by warning that taking a similar path in this country would bring on civil war.

Some Western diplomats said China and the Soviet Union, the world’s two Communist giants, appeared to be on the brink of a new ideological rift.

After President Mikhail S. Gorbachev won agreement from the Soviet Communist Party to surrender its 70-year-old guaranteed monopoly on power, China’s 47 million-member party delivered its reply in ominous tones. It was the most extreme warning since senior leader Deng Xiaoping ordered the army to crush pro-democracy demonstrations last June in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

ibetans and Chinese Divided by Wide, Bitter Gulf of Misunderstanding

by GUY DINMORE, REUTERS

Published on the Los Angeles Times on January 07, 1990
LHASA, Tibet — Before the brother of Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, returned to Lhasa as a guest of the Chinese government after years in exile, officials met local people and urged them not to spit or hurl stones at their former “slave master.”

The guests duly arrived–but far from being abused they found themselves greeted by thousands of weeping and prostrating Tibetans anxious to touch them.

In scenes at once embarrassing and shocking for Chinese authorities, some Tibetans even chanted pro-independence slogans and wished the absent Dalai Lama eternal life.

That was 10 years ago, and a Tibetan intellectual who recounted the scene said a gulf of misunderstanding between the Chinese who rule the Himalayan region and its 2 million people continues.

Diplomats see Beijing hard-liners increasingly left out in the cold

by Guy Dinmore, Reuter News Service
Published: Thursday, Nov. 2, 1989 12:00 a.m. MST

While President Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev plan their first summit in the Mediterranean sun next month, diplomats see China’s new hard-line leaders increasingly left out in the cold.

Just hours before Washington and Moscow announced Tuesday their surprise summit, China launched a harsh attack on the United States, harangued France for supporting dissidents and expelled two Hong Kong citizens from a law-drafting body.

Diplomats said while the developments were clearly not connected, they reflected China’s increasingly isolationist stance. “There is definitely a worldwide current turning away from China,” a senior diplomat said. “They have lost their magnetism of being a challenging and most interesting development in the world. The magic has gone,” he added.

Chinese artist creates “European” statues – for Europeans

by Guy Dinmore
Published: Sunday, Oct. 29, 1989 12:00 a.m. MDT

China’s artists have a hard time making ends meet, but if there was an award for “selling refrigerators to Eskimos,” Ye Shuguang would be a top contender.

Past the sprawling Capital Iron and Steel Works and just before the Fragrant Hills rise out of the flatlands of Beijing, Ye is building a castlelike residence where he is modeling himself after a Renaissance art master.Inside, trucks deliver boulders from which this 34-year-old reclusive eccentric and his 50 apprentices hope to build fame and fortune – by selling European statues to Europe. Ye is a sculptor. His figures in white and black marble stand, lie and crouch around the grounds of the “castle” – abstract shapes, imperial lions, traditional Chinese deities and, looking over them all, Venus de Milo.

400 tibetans arrested

22 October 1989
The BBC reports that earlier that week, Wang Naiwen, a spokesman for the Tibet regional PSB, told Reuters correspondent Guy Dinmore that over 400 Tibetans had been arrested following the March demonstrations: 320 had been released; 63 had been tried and sentenced; and about 20 nuns had been sent to labour camps without trial for up to three years.

Tanks with blazing guns, armoured convoys patrol Peking

By Guy Dinmore

4 June 1989

Reuters News

PEKING, June 5, Reuter – Convoys of tanks and armoured vehicles patrolled Peking early on Monday, a day after an army assault against anti-government demonstrators in which more than 1,000 people may have been killed.

Ten tanks and 16 armoured troop carriers firing machineguns rumbled from central Tiananmen Square, the centre of seven weeks of student-led protests, along the capital’s Avenue of Eternal Peace for two miles (three km) on Sunday night to Peking’s main embassy district and then returned.

“It must be to keep people inside,” said a Western diplomat living in the area.