Chaos Under Heaven
The Shocking Story Behind China's Search for Democracy
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The story behind the struggle for democracy in China and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, still the subject of widespread government censorship efforts.
The first complete book on the Tiananmen Square tragedy reveals how diplomats from the United States, Britain, and Europe knew exact details of the impending massacre of the students in Tiananmen. In a vivid narrative window into secret meetings in the Oval Office, CIA headquarters, and the private compound of China’s leaders, more than one hundred interviewees contribute to an untold story.
Chaos Under Heaven reveals America and the West’s betrayal of the children of China, who, for a brief moment in history, brought democracy to their homeland. In this stunning book, Gordon Thomas takes readers inside the tragic drama of those fifty-five days when the young people of China, crying out for freedom, rebelled against the old men of the Long March.
At stake were America’s and the world’s roles in the future of China. Once castigated by Karl Marx as a “carefully preserved mummy in a hermetically sealed coffin,” China has become the superpower of the Pacific. As the students’ demand for democracy escalated, the Western nations realized that their carefully cultivated ambitions for China were at risk. Their goal was to preserve the status quo.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At least six weeks before the June 1989 massacre of pro-democracy students and workers in Tiananmen Square, President George Bush knew that China's rulers were leaning toward the use of military force to crush the protest, charges the author. In the most complete book on the Tiananmen Square tragedy to date, a dramatic chronicle packed with revelations, Thomas ( Journey into Madness ) shows how the CIA bugged the Chinese ruling elite's compound as far back as the mid-1970s. He charges that Bush, relenting to pressure from the CIA and American businesses that had invested billions in China, did nothing to avert the impending crackdown. Soon after the massacre, Thomas asserts, the White House ended the trade restrictions it had imposed on China and, in exchange, China's leaders provided Pentagon planners with the exact locations of Chinese missiles and details of other weapons Beijing had sold to Saddam Hussein. Based on interviews with Chinese diplomats, eyewitnesses and U.S. intelligence officers who insisted on anonymity, Thomas's coherent narrative jump-cuts from White House meetings to the daily lives of China's student activists who, it appears, were pawns. Photos.
