On the afternoon of May 31, chengguan in Yan'an, Shaanxi province reportedly got into a scuffle with merchants. The video that was posted to Youku shows the civilian eventually being surrounded by urban management officers, with one particular chengguan -- the fat one, natch -- delivering a terrifying two-footed stomp on his head. Witnesses say the chengguan smelled like he was drunk.
Chen Xitong, who was Beijing's mayor from 1983 to 1993, has died at age 84, multiple sources have told SCMP. The news was first reported by Hong Kong China News Agency (HKCNA) today.
Chen's exact date of death is not confirmed, but it's ironic that the public would learn about his passing on today of all days, the 24th anniversary of the brutal military crackdown on Tiananmen Square.
This was the song that Cui Jian performed in Tiananmen Square 15 days before the military crackdown of June 1989. As he told Time in 1999: "I sang A Piece of Red Cloth, a tune about alienation. I covered my eyes with a red cloth to symbolize my feelings. The students were heroes. They needed me, and I needed them."
Liao Yiwu was a fledging poet without a formal education, a hot-tempered philanderer prone to fights, a dreamer who actively despised politics -- until the early hours of June 4, 1989, when, from the living room of his home in the river town of Fuling, he listened with Canadian Michael Day to shortwave radio reports of Chinese troops opening fire on students around Tiananmen Square. "The bloody crackdown in Beijing was a turning point in history and also in my own life," he writes in his prison memoir For a Song and a Hundred Songs...
If you haven't already, watch The Gate of Heavenly Peace, directed by Richard Gordon and Carma Hinton, with writing by Geremie Barmé and John Crowley. The three-hour documentary was released in 1995 to rave reviews -- "the atmosphere of the Beijing Spring is conveyed beautifully in all its pathos, drama, hope, craziness, poetry, and violence," wrote Ian Buruma; "a hard-headed critical analysis of a youthful protest movement that failed," wrote The New York Times -- and remains the best film ever made about the June Fourth Incident, neither gorifying the student leaders nor incriminating the Communist Party, but explaining how a peaceful democracy movement could possibly have resulted in martial law and Chinese troops opening fire on their own citizens.
A spate of stories about schoolmasters sexually abusing their pupils in China has caused public outrage, and at least one activist has done something to capture the mood. She nailed it on the head, judging by the authorities' reaction to her -- namely, beating her up.
Ye Haiyan, on May 27 outside Wanning primary school in Hainan province, held a sign that read, "Principals, spare the school kids, get a hotel room with me instead!"
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