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<\/a>To this day, no one is sure who he was – the man who stood, eye to barrel, before a convoy of Chinese tanks on a street outside Beijing\u2019s Tian\u2019anmen Square.<\/p>\nBut that image – taken by AP photographer Jeff Widener just after the government crackdown that claimed the lives of as many as 1,000 democratic protesters and civilians – has become known worldwide as an enduring depiction of courage.<\/p>\n
There is more to the story. On Nov. 14, Boston University commemorated the 25th anniversary of Tian\u2019anmen Square with a lecture and discussion<\/a> on the aftermath of the violence which erupted when Chinese soldiers attacked protesters in Beijing in June of 1989.<\/p>\n “I spent last year on leave living in China. I remember speaking with a colleague who was working on an oral history, learning stories she could not publish,” said Robert Weller, professor at the Boston University Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs.<\/a> “She said, I haven’t told the truth since 1989. No one in this country has.”<\/p>\n The talk was moderated by Eugenio Menegon, Director of the Center for the Study of Asia,<\/a> and presented by Weller, Joseph Fewsmith of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University,<\/a> and Rowena Xiaoqing He of Harvard University.<\/a><\/p>\n The event was part of the Boston University International Education Week. It was sponsored by Santander Universities and attended by around 50 audience members. It was hosted with cooperation from Boston University Global Programs<\/a> and the BU Center for the Study of Asia.<\/a><\/p>\n “The Tian’anmen Square crackdown truncated the conversation between society and state about how to open up China,\u201d said Joseph Fewsmith of the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. \u201cAs more and more Chinese people enter the middle class, this is a conversation that needs to happen.”<\/p>\n The roots of the Tian\u2019anmen Square protests are found in the the years after Mao Zedong\u2019s death in 1976. As the country became more economically liberal, the intellectual class, particularly university professors and students, began agitating for democratic reform.<\/p>\n By April of 1989, as many as 100,000 students had taken to the streets in support of democracy. Martial law was declared on May 20, and army began its advance into Beijing. On June 3, soldiers opened fire, beginning one of the worst civilian massacres in Chinese history.<\/p>\n \u201cIt has been\u00a0a war of memory against forgetting, a struggle between the power and the powerless,\u201d\u00a0said Rowena He. She spent eight years working on a book, called\u00a0\u2018Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China,\u2019<\/a>\u00a0telling the stories of those whose voices that were silenced after the massacre. “We didn\u2019t take to the street in 1989 out of anger, we did it out of trust that the government would reform itself. But our\u00a0 hope were crushed by guns and tanks.\u201d<\/p>\n