Two decades ago, China's youth were at the forefront of a movement to bring democracy to the world's most populous nation in demonstrations bloodily put down around Beijing's central Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.
Today, after years of breakneck economic growth, the young are more pro-government, more suspicious of the West, and genuinely proud of China's achievements, such as the Beijing Olympics, making a repeat of June 4 unlikely.
Today's young also no longer look at the democracies of the United States or Europe as much for their inspiration. The NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 prompted student attacks on Western embassies in Beijing. Some 10 years later, young people went online to vent their invective at "biased" reporting in the Western media of unrest in Tibet
"The students became very disillusioned with the West, especially with the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade," said Bo Zhiyue, a Chinese politics expert at the National University of Singapore's East Asian Institute. "They learned that the West was trying to 'get' China whether or not China was going to have democracy," he added. (Yahoo News/Reuters)
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