{"id":66287,"date":"2024-08-18T13:00:17","date_gmt":"2024-08-18T04:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/article\/2024\/aug\/18\/monument-to-history-battle-between-us-and-china-over-future-of-maos-secretarys-diary"},"modified":"2024-08-18T13:00:17","modified_gmt":"2024-08-18T04:00:17","slug":"monument-to-history-battle-between-us-and-china-over-future-of-maos-secretarys-diary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/?p=66287","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Monument to history\u2019 battle between US and China over future of Mao\u2019s secretary\u2019s diary"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Beijing is believed to be behind court bid to secure account of life inside Communist HQ<\/p>\n<p>In the early hours of 4 June 1989, Li Rui, a veteran of the Chinese Communist party (CCP), was standing on the balcony of his apartment on Chang\u2019an Boulevard in central Beijing. He could see tanks rolling towards Tiananmen Square.<\/p>\n<p>For weeks, up to a million protesters had been gathering peacefully in Beijing\u2019s plaza, demanding political reform. But they failed. Instead, as Li observed from his unique vantage point, troops opened fire, killing an estimated several thousands of civilians. It was the worst massacre in recent Chinese history. \u201cSoldiers firing randomly with their machine guns, sometimes shooting the ground and sometimes shooting toward the sky,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/a-former-mao-aides-diaries-spark-a-custody-battle-over-an-unofficial-history-of-china-11631698202\">Li wrote<\/a> in his diary. A \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=kzpE9wPXoY0\">black weekend<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/article\/2024\/aug\/18\/monument-to-history-battle-between-us-and-china-over-future-of-maos-secretarys-diary\">Continue reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Beijing is believed to be behind court bid to secure account of life inside Communist HQIn the early hours of 4 June 1989, Li Rui, a veteran of the Chinese Communist party (CCP), was standing on the balcony of his apartment on Chang\u2019an Boulevard in cen&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3580,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sns_share_botton_hide":"","vkExUnit_sns_title":"","_vk_print_noindex":"","sitemap_hide":"","_veu_custom_css":"","veu_display_promotion_alert":"","vkexunit_cta_each_option":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[41,50,662,614,695,431,47,42,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia-pacific","category-china","category-communism","category-history","category-mao-zedong","category-tiananmen-square-protests-1989","category-us-news","category-world-news","category-xi-jinping"],"aioseo_notices":[],"veu_head_title_object":{"title":"","add_site_title":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3580"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66287"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66288,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66287\/revisions\/66288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}