For 1 Day, 20 Years Ago, China Tasted Freedom
The Chinese government is acting in its usual — some would say usually paranoid — way about the Tiananmen anniversary. It blocked the social networking site Twitter, apparently trying to head off any cyber-efforts at organizing protests.
For those with access to foreign satellite news services CNN and BBC, there is heavy-handed censorship. When a Tiananmen anniversary story starts running, the screen literally goes black. Once the story is over, the news is back.
Not subtle.
The odd thing is that most of China is shrugging off this anniversary. Twenty years ago it was students who led the protest. Today's students are disinterested, as we discovered when CBS News Beijing researcher Amy Zhang talked with some of them.
"I know very little about it," one female student said. "Just very broad things, like there was a student movement. I've never looked into it."
More typical was the comment from 23 year old Yuan Peng: "I'm a second year masters student, and I'm about to graduate, so I'm mainly concerned about getting a job."
The government has sent several well-known dissidents out of town, telling them to go back to their home villages and not to give interviews to the foreign news media.
I was based in Moscow at the time of the deadly crackdown in 1989, and was sent to Beijing to cover the visit by Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Like all the rest of the CBS News team assembled for this historic visit, the history unfolding on the streets became our story.
The amazing thing was watching a whole country rise up. In the weeks before the crackdown the country basically stopped. People traveled into Beijing from surrounding farms joining tens of thousands in the city who simply wanted to walk through the square and show their support.
One day, producer Margery Baker and I followed a Chinese TV crew doing their story at the Square.
In days past, their story would have been heavily censored by Communist Party officials assigned to their newsroom. But he was tossed out in the heady spirit of freedom, and the reporter and cameraman were giddy at the thought of telling the story as they saw it.
Before the protests, before they were emboldened by the events at the Square, their stories were fashioned by a Party censor making sure they followed the party line.
It was an amazing moment for them, a taste of press freedoms that we Americans take for granted. How sad… how very, very sad, that their moment was so brief.
This story was filed by CBS News correspondent Barry Petersen in Beijing.