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- <text id=89TT2544>
- <title>
- Oct. 02, 1989: A Day In The Life Of China
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989
- Oct. 02, 1989 A Day In The Life Of China
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- NOSEC, Page 30
- A Day in The Life . . .
- . . . Of China
- </hdr><body>
- <p>By Howard G. Chua-Eoan
- </p>
- <p> What is a single day to a nation that has lived through
- more than 1 million days? For China, April 15, 1989, promised
- to be nothing out of the ordinary. Yet it would prove to be
- portentous. Editorials in that morning's newspapers sounded
- Malthusian alarms at the news that China's population had
- officially reached 1.1 billion. A devastating forest fire raged
- in Inner Mongolia, destroying precious woodlands. More tales of
- bureaucratic corruption bubbled up. And Hu Yaobang, the
- reformist Communist Party leader ousted two years before, died
- at age 73. By nightfall, students, inspired by Hu's liberal
- views, began covering walls with posters denouncing the system
- that deposed him. Over the next 50 days, first a few
- demonstrators and then hundreds of thousands would occupy
- Tiananmen Square and paralyze the regime, which struck back the
- only way it knew how -- with the army. It all began on April 15.
- </p>
- <p> Just as he had done for projects on the U.S., Japan and the
- Soviet Union, David Cohen dispatched 90 photographers to
- capture a 24-hour period in the People's Republic. A Day in the
- Life of China, due Oct. 1 from Collins Publishers ($45) and
- presented here in a 27-page selection, aimed simply to be a
- snapshot of an ancient country trying to come to terms with
- modernity. Coincidence would have it chronicle April 15, the day
- China began to tremble.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
-