The Tiananmen Square incident, 4 June 1989 Sources Question

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Coursework Assignment:

The Tiananmen Square incident, 4 June 1989

By Gavin Meredith 10CN

Q1) The strengths and weaknesses of Source A as an interpretation of the Tiananmen Square incident are; that in the extract it tells of how some people in the Chinese Communist Party blamed some of the new economic policies, introduced at that time, for bringing back corruption and social vices that had been common in China before the revolution, but the extract does not tell us what these economical policies were. Also it tells us that the protestors at Tiananmen Square didn’t want a dictatorship of old men, and unfair privileges enjoyed by many high officials, but it doesn’t tell us what they DID want from the protest. The source states that in the eyes of the Chinese officials the new ‘foreign influences’ were even worse than the new economic policies, although just what influences they were talking about is not clear at all.

Q2) Sources B and C contain three different sets of figures about casualties in the Tiananmen Square incident.

 

   Source B reports that at least 35 people were killed and several hundred wounded. Source C tells us that about 1,000 people were killed! It also gives a statement from a Chinese government official which states “only 23 students died, with a few hundred troops”.

   Some of the reasons for these differences are that source B was written by a reporter for ‘The Sunday Times’ on the same day as the Tiananmen Square incident so it was almost impossible to account for all the casualties that happened that day. Whereas an American historian wrote source C in 1990, which would have allowed the writer plenty of time to gather all the facts and figures of the casualties. But because they were American they may have bent the truth a bit to make the Chinese look worse e.g. where they add the phrase “though this figure may well be too low.” This phrase is not a fact it is the writer’s opinion, which would be biased against the Chinese. In some ways this means source B could be more accurate than source C because the reporter was in Beijing at the time so would have been able to see the incident take place and the casualties that occurred, first hand.

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Q3a) Source D was produced as a symbol of one man stepping out and publicly defying the communist government and making a stand for freedom, it was designed to make the communists look bad and show that no one should be afraid of this dark power ruling over them any more.

   Source E was produced to make fun of the communist leader Deng Xiaoping and openly support the protestors that were in Tiananmen Square. It depicts him standing in front of a tank representing the truth. It was designed to switch the roles of the previous source and ...

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