Tiananmen Square or Tahrir Square: Why Some Protests End in Bloodshed, Others in Regime... - 0 views
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anonymous on 08 Mar 11"Consider the stories of two squares: Tiananmen Square, 1989. After seven weeks of demonstrations, the Chinese authorities had had enough. The army moved in and cleared the square and the surrounding area of protesters. According to eyewitnesses, the soldiers fired into groups of unarmed people, killing hundreds and maybe thousands. The merciless violence ended the protests. The regime endured. Shift to recent history and Cairo's Tahrir Square. As you surely know, 18 days of mostly nonviolent protests eventually moved though the entire country and brought down the regime of 30-year leader Hosni Mubarak. In this case, the Army was deployed but did not fire. Why did the Chinese protests end in death and failure and the Egyptian protests end with relatively little violence and, at least for the moment, victory?"