Tiananmen Square

BEIJING - On a warm summer night in 1989, a 21-year-old Chinese student waded into the South China Sea from a deserted beach. Still wearing his clothes and Nike sneakers, he swam to a speedboat waiting 200 yards offshore. Wuer Kaixi's role as a student leader in the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests had landed him the No. 2 spot on the Chinese government's list of 21 most-wanted organizers. His plan was to escape with the help of activists in Hong Kong, who had arranged for the speedboat, and return to China when things calmed down.

BEIJING - On a warm summer night in 1989, a 21-year-old Chinese student waded into the South China Sea from a deserted beach. Still wearing his clothes and Nike sneakers, he swam to a speedboat waiting 200 yards offshore. Wuer Kaixi's role as a student leader in the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests had landed him the No. 2 spot on the Chinese government's list of 21 most-wanted organizers. His plan was to escape with the help of activists in Hong Kong, who had arranged for the speedboat, and return to China when things calmed down.

4:45 a.m. The sky is still murky with night when the hard-core convene at Tiananmen Square. Only the most patriotic Chinese and the most dedicated tourists have yanked themselves out of bed to watch the Chinese flag rising over Beijing at sunrise. As the sun peeks out over the high-rises of the nearby financial district, the guards in military regalia goose-step to the flagpole for the daily ritual in front of the iconic portrait of Mao Tse-tung.

BEIJING — Tapping a visa track to America used by thousands of Chinese students, U.S. officials say they have struck a face-saving compromise with China over the fate of a blind Chinese human rights activist, possibly resolving a messy diplomatic dispute that brought deep embarrassment to both countries. The U.S. State Department said Friday that it had secured Chinese agreement to allow Chen Guangcheng to apply to study in the United States, apparently accompanied by his family, under terms that would not require him to seek formal political asylum.

A man set off explosives in Tiananmen Square, killing himself and injuring a South Korean tourist in what Chinese police quickly labeled a suicide. Police said the bomber was a mentally ill man from Hubei province. A police official said the man, Li Xiangshan, was known to police, having come to the capital four times previously to appeal to Chinese leaders. The government-run New China News Agency described Li as a farmer and said the South Korean tourist was slightly injured.

In watching Richard Gordon and Carma Hinton's superb three-hour documentary "The Gate of Heavenly Peace," you have to wonder whether Mao Tse-tung would have created Beijing's vast Tiananmen Square if he could have foretold the bloody massacre that would take place there on June 4, 1989, when armed tanks ended a seven-week, student-led demonstration calling for democracy. For without a space capable of holding 1.

After eight months under wraps, a refurbished Tiananmen Square in Beijing reopened to the public with new tank-proof paving, rules against chewing gum and an ordinance that temporarily banished one of the giant plaza's greatest charms: its kite flyers. The square, China's symbolic political heart and home to massive pro-democracy protests in 1989, had been closed for a face lift ahead of this year's 50th anniversary of the founding of Communist China on Oct. 1.

As Washington and Beijing move toward an exchange of visits in the next two years between President Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin, Americans will hear lots of talk about the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing. That event was seared into the American consciousness as the "Tiananmen Square massacre." In a night of terror, the Chinese army shot its way into Beijing against the unarmed resistance of the city's citizens, ending seven weeks of protests.

Bao Zunxin, an activist who was jailed for his role in the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement, has died, a fellow dissident said Monday. He was 70. Once considered one of China's leading intellectuals, Bao died Sunday in Beijing from a brain hemorrhage, said Liu Xiaobo, a former professor at Beijing Normal University who also spent 20 months in jail for joining the 1989 protests.

In its first response to newly published documents that claim to show how top leaders decided to quash the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, the Chinese government today rejected the papers and stuck to the party line. The bloody crackdown in Beijing on June 4, 1989, was "highly necessary to the stability and development of China," Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao said in a statement carried by the official New China News Agency.

HONG KONG - A few days ago, an art professor from northern China named Li Xu was in a small Beijing gallery in the shadow of Tiananmen Square explaining the unlikely inspiration for one of his paintings: the $2.7-billion blockbuster "Avatar. " After the 34-year-old finally caught the film last year (it first opened in China in early 2010), Li wanted to see if he could marry the serenity he felt infused "Avatar"with the aesthetic of traditional Chinese painting, his primary medium.

Here is a nightmare assignment for a restaurateur: Cook for 250 people using all-organic ingredients procured locally in a country infamous for its tainted food supply. Create a romantic setting in a latter-day fortress, the fluorescent-lighted U.S. Embassy. Alice Waters' celebrated Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, was transported to Beijing last week as part of a four-day U.S.-China Forum on the Arts and Culture. Berkeley and Beijing don't have much in common except as food writer Michael Pollan, another delegate, sarcastically put it, "both are socialist paradises.

In a country with zero tolerance for public displays of disaffection, the 77-year-old retired doctor went very public with her anger over the demolition of her property in a booming Shanghai neighborhood: She stripped naked on the steps of a courthouse. This might well be called the season of discontent in China. People, many of them middle-class homeowners, have been taking to the streets across the country in the last few months to air their grievances. At times, the protesters have turned violent — overturning police cars or smashing windows with baseball bats — but more often, they are engaging in civil disobedience.

Mao Tse-tung, Confucius and Louis Vuitton have been mixing it up lately on China's most-renowned stage: Tiananmen Square. For decades, Mao's portrait has hung over the Tiananmen Gate at the far north of the square, at the entrance to the Forbidden City, even as his embalmed body has lain in the mausoleum built immediately after his death in the center of the square. Chairman Mao, the Great Helmsman, founder of the People's Republic of China, looms mightily over the square, reminding the Chinese people of the Communist Party's achievement in raising the country out of its "feudal" and impoverished past and restoring it to prosperity and global influence.

Filled with Frank Sinatra music, Chicago architecture and references to U.S. brands like Nike, the 2000 film "What Women Want" about a chauvinist ad exec who gains the ability to hear women's thoughts is a "a very American movie," director Nancy Meyers says on the commentary track of the DVD. "And the character is very American. " A decade later, "What Women Want" has been remade in China and was released last month in the U.S. by upstart distributor China Lion. Meyers, for one, might be surprised to see how few details needed to be changed to make her story relevant to Chinese moviegoers.

In military terms, it might be called a disproportionate preemptive strike, one that underscored how nervous the Chinese government is about pro-democracy demonstrations taking place thousands of miles away in the Middle East. The merest whiff of protests in Beijing and elsewhere in support of the so-called jasmine revolution brought out a massive showing of paramilitary, uniformed and undercover police Sunday. The calls for demonstrations in 13 Chinese cities apparently originated on a Chinese-language U.S.-based website called Boxun.

Ma Lik, 55, the head of Hong Kong's leading pro-Beijing political party who questioned whether China's Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 should be called a massacre, died Wednesday, party official Lam Yau-fa said in Hong Kong. Ma underwent surgery for colon cancer in 2004, and the party later said it had spread to his respiratory system.

The crowd of about 150 people dutifully arrived just before sundown outside the Chinese Consulate in Koreatown to commemorate those who were gunned down during the June 4 Tiananmen Square crackdown 19 years ago. Back then, many were idealistic students. On Wednesday, some brought along children and busily snapped photos. They held candles in paper cups, shared a moment of silence and listened as to a handful of speakers called for democracy in China.

The Nobel Peace Prize was placed Friday on an empty chair in Oslo's city hall, creating a potent new symbol of the struggle for human rights and political reform in China. Laureate Liu Xiaobo would have been sitting in that chair, were he not locked away in an obscure prison in northeastern China. Liu, a poet and essayist, is serving an 11-year sentence for penning a manifesto calling for the end of one-party rule and for greater freedoms in China. He has not been seen in public since he was moved to his current prison in May. An enraged Chinese government dismissed the prize as an "anti-China farce" honoring a "criminal," and successfully lobbied 18 countries to join its boycott of the ceremony.

Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese dissident imprisoned for his efforts to promote democracy in his homeland, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in absentia Friday in a solemn ceremony shunned by Beijing but attended by dignitaries and celebrities from most of the world's countries. A giant photo of Liu smiled out on the audience a few feet away from the potently symbolic empty chair where he would have sat had China allowed him to receive the award in Oslo, Norway. Liu, 54, is currently serving an 11-year prison sentence for "inciting subversion of state power" because he helped draft a manifesto known as Charter 08 calling for democratic reform.