Tiananmen: how dangerous is protest in China now?

Beyond Today

BBC

News

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 4 June 2019

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

China has ramped up efforts to prevent people from reading about the student protests of 1989 that ended in bloodshed when the government sent tanks into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Activists have been arrested and censorship has been stepped up, with bans placed on English-speaking foreign media such as CNN and the BBC. We speak to the BBC’s longest serving foreign correspondent John Simpson, who was in Beijing in 1989. We also examine how the truth has been suppressed and what the government has done to erase Tiananmen from the history books. One person who is trying to keep the memory alive is a secretive artist called Badiucao, also known as ‘the Chinese Banksy’. Danny Vincent, who reports from Hong Kong for the BBC, has travelled to Australia to meet him. And Yaxue Cao from chinachange.org tells us about the Chinese artists who have been rounded up and what it’s like to be a young dissenting voice in China. Producers: Duncan Barber and Lucy Hancock. Mixed by Nicolas Raufast. Editor: John Shields.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:06.6	Hello, I'm Matthew Price.
0:08.2	This is Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4.
0:10.9	Every day we ask one big question about one big story.
0:14.0	Today, 30 years after Tiananmen, how dangerous is protest in China.
0:26.0	And hello if you're listening in China.
0:35.0	Which you're not because this episode will be banned there.
0:39.0	We're pretty certain.
0:40.0	Access to the BBC to CNN to other foreign news services inside the country, tends
0:46.4	to get shut down this time of year in what's maybe the world's largest exercise in trying
0:52.0	to keep the truth from getting out and in this case
0:55.2	the truth is 30 years old.
0:57.9	Soon the soldiers had cleared the main East West Avenue that runs through Tiananmen Square
1:02.3	cleared it by the deliberate use of random firepower.
1:06.5	The whole world knows about the Tiananmen protests, the killing of probably hundreds of protesters by the Chinese army in
1:16.9	1989. There's footage of it. It happened. We're going to hear from the BBC
1:22.3	reporter who was there and counted some of the bodies.
1:26.4	But we're also going to hear about how that truth has been suppressed.
1:30.6	The Communist Party has been trying to erase Tiananmen from the history books and it's done it as part of a larger campaign to clamp down on dissent.
1:39.0	There are still people who are only now finding out about it inside China.
1:44.0	And we're going to start with one of those.
1:46.0	The man that some people call the Banksy of China, a secretive artist who are reporter in Hong Kong,
	...

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