Tiananmen Square - 1989 revisited - part 17

The 17th part in a PBS piece published in 2001 by Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link:

The troops finally are able to leave, but the government views the whole episode as another humiliation and challenge to its power. "The party leaders feared that the whole edifice of communism was going to collapse," says journalist John Pomfret. "They needed to make a stand, and a bloody stand, to show their population, and in effect, to cow their population, back into submission."

Tim White