HONG KONG, June 3 -- Thirty years ago, bullets ripped through the night in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, leaving hundreds if not thousands of unarmed protesters dead in a bloody crackdown by Chinese troops on the student-led demonstrations. Today, China's economy is the second-largest in the world, and its people are in general more prosperous, but when it comes to remembering the June 3-4, 1989, Tiananmen massacre, much remains off-limits for open discussion, while the younger generation seems unaware and even uninterested in what happened. The bloodshed, the sound of gunfire and armored vehicles rolling through streets in and around the square from dusk till dawn, however, became an unforgettable memory for surviving witnesses. "I heard gunshots, I felt the heat (of passing bullets), and when I turned around, I saw bullets holes (in the Beijing Hotel) behind me," Johnny Lau, a Hong Kong political commentator who in 1989 was in Tiananmen Square as a newspaper reporter, said in a forum.Lau, who was subsequently targeted for siding with the "counterrevolutionaries," recalled the close encounter he had with the military crackdown. "Then, a group of ordinary people, unarmed, walked up to the soldiers, scolding them for opening fire at the people. All of a sudden, another round of gunshots rang out, and they all fell." "Later I found out that about 350,000 troops from across the country had gathered in Beijing as part of a show of force in what was believed to be an intraparty power grab," Lau added. "But whatever the causes, it was unforgivable for the military to open fire at the people." According to declassified diplomatic documents and casualty statistics, the death toll from the crackdown was estimated at between hundreds and 10,000. The Chinese government has always denied any wrongdoing, first describing the event as a "counterrevolutionary riot," then as "political turmoil" that was settled and needed no more attention. Another journalist, Leung Wai-man, then a rookie reporting on the student demonstration in Beijing, said she witnessed many citizens killed while trying to block armored vehicles from proceeding. "It's a pity that some people are forgetting (about the movement), isolating themselves from it and some even tried to (ignore) it," Leung said. "June 4 deserves to be redressed."
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