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Witness History

Tiananmen Square escape

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.51.6K Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2019

⏱️ 10 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On the evening of June the 3rd 1989, the Chinese People’s Army opened fire on thousands of students who had been campaigning for democracy in the middle of Beijing.

Dan Wang was a 20-year-old student leader from the elite Peking University and was one of the most high profile democracy activists. He says the demonstrators never thought their protests would end in bloodshed. He spoke to Witness History about how the Tiananmen Square crackdown changed his life.

(Photo: Dan Wang speaking in Tiananmen Square. Credit: Peter Turnley/Corbis/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0

Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless

0:06.8

searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the

0:11.8

telly we share what we've been watching

0:14.0

Cladie Aide.

0:16.0

Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.

0:19.0

Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.

0:21.0

And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less

0:24.9

searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds.

0:31.0

This This is the Whitney's Heatry podcast from the BBC World Surveys with me, Yashoniao.

0:41.6

Today I'm taking you back to China in 1989, when the People's Army opened a fire

0:47.8

on tens of thousands of students who'd been protesting for weeks in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

0:54.3

Dan Wang was one of the students leaders.

0:57.3

On the evening of June 3rd, 1989, I was in my dormitory in peeking university with other students.

1:05.9

We were discussing the future of our protests.

1:08.9

Someone called us from a phone box in a street near Tiananmen Square.

1:12.4

He said troops had opened fire on the

1:14.3

students. The noise of gunfire rose from all over the center of peeking.

1:18.8

I was in shock. I'd never thought anything like that would happen. I had no feelings, no emotions.

1:26.4

I had no fear, no sorrow, no joy, nothing. My mind was empty.

1:31.6

The troops have been firing indiscriminately, but still there are thousands of people on the streets who will not move back.

1:40.0

We immediately organized about 200 students to go to Chaneman Square to support the others.

1:46.0

But when we left our campus all the main roads were blocked by Army lorries,

...

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