When Robin Munro walked off Tiananmen Square – the very last foreigner to do so – as soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army moved in to flush out the students huddled around the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the early hours of 4 June 1989, he already knew how the Chinese Communist party would handle the next phase of these dramatic events.
“The students and intellectuals would, by and large, be spared,” he wrote in a watershed account published a year later in the US magazine the Nation. “The laobaixing [common people] on the other hand would be mercilessly punished in order to eradicate organised popular unrest for a generation.”
Munro is perhaps best remembered for revealing the dire conditions prevailing in Chinese urban orphanages
A hallmark of Munro’s personal philosophy was his dedication to helping individuals
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.