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Originally Posted by Hari Michiru
Hm...I'm probably wrong about the traffic problems, but after a month of protesting, the hygenie must have been horrendous, and they were also going on a hunger strike.
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The hunger strike had started a couple of weeks before 4 June. And realistically, there's no way to rationalize the crackdown without concluding that the central government grossly overreacted. I don't think that you're very clear about the details of the course of events, so I direct you to the PBS documentary that I linked to earlier:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/. It's a good refresher course on the sequence of events.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hari Michiru
Sorry, I wasn't being clear. When I said closed off, I meant culturally closed off.
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Even culturally, that's a questionable claim. The amount of outside cultural/technological influence allowed from the outside would vary depending on who was calling the shots. The real problem is that China was overly insular while simultaneously being too unstable during the later Qing era. If the late Qing had been able to pull off the same level of organization and competence as their early counterparts, China would have been able to come out of the 19th century in much better shape. And really, a lot of the fear of change stems from the overall instability of the system at the time.