Role in Tiananmen Square Protests
Yu Dongyue was formerly a fine arts editor with Liuyang News in Hunan. In May 1989, he went by train to Beijing with two other men, Yu Zhijian (Chinese: 余志坚), a school teacher, and Lu Decheng (Chinese: 鲁德成), a truck mechanic. They planned to join the ongoing demonstrations calling for democracy in China. They decided to make a disturbance that would readily be captured by news media then reporting on events in Tiananmen Square. Yu Dongyue, a graduate of the Department of Art at Xiangtan Teachers College, Hunan, was 21 years old at the time.
On May 23, the three men threw eggs that had been emptied and refilled with red, blue and yellow paint at the large portrait of Mao Zedong displayed prominently near Tiananmen Square. Splatters of paint landed on the face and shirt of the People's Republic of China's founding leader. According to news reports, other demonstrators seized the three men and turned them over to police.
Read more about this topic: Yu Dongyue
Famous quotes containing the words role in, role and/or square:
“My role in society, or any artist or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.”
—John Lennon (1940–1980)
“His role was as the gentle teacher, the logical, compassionate, caring and articulate teacher, who inspired you so that you wanted to please him more than life itself.”
—Carol Lawrence, U.S. singer, star of West Side Story. Conversations About Bernstein, p. 172, ed. William Westbrook Burton, Oxford University Press (1995)
“O for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through! Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country? Hardly one.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)