On my return from the meeting with Dr Fry, I spent some time walking about Tiananmen Square and took some photographs. Though I had not seen any wall posters there, I did notice six large portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hua. In the middle of Tiananmen Square there were several small open air photography stalls around which people were queuing up to have themselves photographed at the great revolutionary centre.

On the streets leading down to the main road to Tiananmen Square, furious people stared in disbelief at the glow in the sky, listening to the sound of shots.

Only history can tell us where China will go from here. The Chinese leadership's brutal crackdown on students seeking fundamental democratic rights makes it difficult to chart the future. Those brave students who laid down their lives against the tanks of Tiananmen Square confirmed what I'd always believed: that no totalitarian society can bottle up the instinctive drive of men and women to be free, and that once you give a captive people a little freedom, they'll demand still more.

Because it was a state visit, the Chinese government insisted on a formal arrival ceremony in Beijing. We usually conduct these ceremonies on the White House South Lawn, and the Chinese usually conduct theirs in Tiananmen Square. Bill and I debated whether we should attend a ceremony in Tiananmen Square, where Chinese authorities had used tanks to forcibly suppress pro-democracy demonstrations in June of 1989. Bill didn’t want to appear to endorse China’s repressive tactics and violations of human rights, but he understood the square’s importance over centuries of Chinese history and agreed to respect the Chinese request.

In 2011, a statue of Confucius was placed in Tiananmen Square within sight of Mao’s mausoleum — the only other personality so honored.

"We must make economic stability our top priority," Li told delegates gathered at the cavernous Great Hall of the People on the west side of Tiananmen Square.

On the 33rd anniversary of the crushing of pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, Taiwan has emerged as one of the last places in the Chinese-speaking world remembering the deaths of thousands at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, after authorities banned such demonstrations in Hong Kong.

The situation had its parallels to the one that developed in China that year: one might not be in the mood to talk with that country's leaders after Tiananmen Square, but if you really wanted to move them in the direction of democracy, and get them to restore the very rights they had trampled on, you were better off talking to them than driving them into hard-headed isolation.

After 79 days, Occupy Central — the protests for democracy that swarmed Hong Kong — is gone. On Monday, police began clearing what was called the biggest political protest in China since Tiananmen Square in 1989.

But now the best argument against Trump's parade is that it will become a cultural-war flashpoint and “the resistance” will try its utmost to ruin the affair. Just imagine a protester in a pussy hat in a Tiananmen Square-style standoff with an M1 Abrams tank.

Tiananmen square

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