Customer Reviews

Standoff at Tiananmen (Chinese Language, Simplified Character Edition) (Chinese Edition)

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I've known the author through an online forum that we frequent. He is an honest person with integrity. He also helps expose academic corruptions in China. He promoted his book a few years ago, but I didn't have a chance to read it. Finally a friend's birthday came up and I decided that my friend needs to read this book. I bought two, one for my friend and one for me.

The book is worth the money, and I really enjoyed reading it. In the book, the author narrates the student movements in a neutral, unbiased and fact-based way, yet the events he describes were fascinating and sometimes very moving. As I read the book, it brought me back to those days when we enjoyed our freedom and speeches against a corrupt dictatorship. Those wonderful days were gone and would never come back.

Though the book is mainly about the Tiananmen Movement in 1989, the author has captured all the important student movements during the 1980s, re-staged them chronically through the participating students and scholars, and led the readers back to the earlier democratic movements such as Xidan Wall Movement in 1978, April 5th Movement (another Tiananmen Movement) in 1976.

During the Tiananmen movement, many democratic leaders and organizations emerged. Many famous people made public announcements of their supports for the students. It would be great but very hard for the author to write about all of them. Though the author has put a lot of efforts to include as many people as possible, he focuses his book on the student leaders and a few scholars who played roles in the campuses and Tiananmen square.

The author doesn't make any comment or criticism on anyone or any side, which makes it an excellent history book for anyone who either wants to learn the history of student movements or has already known about it. The only shortcoming of this book is the he doesn't write much about the government officials who deeply got involved, especially Zhao Ziyang (Party Secretary General), Li Peng (Premier) and Yuan Mu (Press Secretary of State Council). The latter two were the most notorious and hated persons in the nation.