E-Paper
HT This Day: April 24, 1989 -- Chinese rioting for rights
Mobs rampaged in two provincial Chinese capitals burning cars and buildings, beating police and smashing windows, witnesses and official reports said today.
Mobs rampaged in two provincial Chinese capitals burning cars and buildings, beating police and smashing windows, witnesses and official reports said today.
The protests occurred on the same day a huge demonstration took place in Beijing during which about 150,000 students and supporters demonstrated against the communist system at Tiananmen Square. That protest, one of the biggest in Communist China’s 40-year history, ended peacefully.
The official Xinhua news agency said mobs in the ancient city of Xian burned buildings and vehicles and injured 130 security personnel yesterday. American sources and Chinese reports from Southern China’s Changsha said rioters smashed store and car windows along the main street of the city and beat up police.
The rioting was connected to student demonstrations triggered by the death of former communist party leader Hu Yaobang, whose funeral was yesterday. Students, who praised Hu for his reformist stance, have been demanding radical changes in the structure of the Communist system, including a free Press and respect for human rights.
Smaller protests also occurred in Shanghai, Nanking (Nanjing) and Tianjin. In Shanghai, student leaders said their universities had warned them to stop protesting.
In a related development, more than 200 leading intellectuals signed an open letter to the Government supporting student demands. Hundreds of professors and teachers from dozens of Beijing’s leading universities have also sent an open letter calling on the government not to take violent measures to quell the protests. Xinhua said the attack in Xian, provincial capital of Shaanxi province, began when tens of thousands of people, including students, gathered in front of the provincial government compound to listen to a broadcast from Beijing of a memorial ceremony for Hu.
“Some lawbreakers from society” began shouting anti-government slogans and tried to force their way into the government compound, the report said. In all, 130security force members were injured, it said.
N-arms stock
PTI adds: China has amassed a sizeable nuclear inventory, including land and sea based ICBMs (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles) and tactical systems, according to the ‘Jane’s Defence Weekly”.
Although relatively unsophisticated, Chinese military chiefs boast that the nuclear forces possess an effective second strike capability. Chinese deterrent is primarily a land-based force, though submarine launched systems are gradually being built up and the air force has a small nuclear inventory.
The country has nearly 120 nuclear capable bombers, the elderly Xian H- 65, 50 short and intermediate range tactical nuclear missiles and intermediate range and six types of long-range strategic missiles. These include the land-mobile Dong Feng 3, the 20,000 km range Dong Feng 5, capable of reaching the United States, and the solid-fuel, submarine launched 3,000 km Jilong, the weekly says.
Though these weapons are based on 1960s and early seventies technology, .China’s next generation of weapons is already in advance development, it says in an analytical article.
By the mid-1990s, solid fuel, multiple-warhead, longer-range and more accurate strategic missiles are expected to be added.
Tactical systems are also becoming increasingly sophiscated with cruise missiles, capable of “supersonic speed, ultra-low altitude, over the horizon capabilities and automated and accurate guidance systems” under development, it adds quoting Chinese newspapers.
