Introduction

Throughout the spring of 1989, the world’s rapt attention was focused on Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Many dozens of television crews brought into living-rooms around the globe scenes of the amazing upsurge of protests that filled the centre of Beijing – and the brutal massacre that ensued. But what hundreds of millions of newspaper readers and TV viewers did not fully grasp that spring was that beyond the range of the television cameras, and largely unreported even by the Western print media, massive protests were engulfing cities and towns across China.