Experience in China
In the spring of 1989 Taft was travelling in China leading a dinosaur fossil expedition. It was here that he witnessed the pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square and the brutal suppression of students by the Chinese government.
When asked later, Taft said; “There were thousands of them.... It felt like Woodstock, as if someone had taken the chains off these students.... There was a sense of revolution.”
The response came weeks later in early June, when the military was called in and, in a night of bloodshed and chaos, killed — depending on reports — hundreds to thousands of protesters. Taft said, "It was like springtime and then the depths of winter."
Read more about this topic: Kevin Taft
Famous quotes containing the words experience and/or china:
“All experience teaches that, whenever there is a great national establishment, employing large numbers of officials, the public must be reconciled to support many incompetent men; for such is the favoritism and nepotism always prevailing in the purlieus of these establishments, that some incompetent persons are always admitted, to the exclusion of many of the worthy.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“Whether the nymph shall break Diana’s law,
Or some frail china jarreceive a flaw,
Or stain her honour, or her new brocade,”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)