Unrest in main cities

Press, 8 June 1989, Page 10

Unrest in main cities

NZPA-Reuter Peking Many of China’s big cities were gripped by unrest yesterday, with six deaths reported in Shanghai. As a top Government spokesman pronounced China stable, shots were fired into a diplomatic compound in Peking, sending residents fleeing, and fresh signs of unrest emerged in a number of other cities. Shanghai’s “Liberation Daily” said six people were killed and six injured when a train ploughed into a group of protesters blocking the railway north-west of the city. Angry crowds set eight carriages of the train on fire after it failed to stop in time on Tuesday. Students had been blocking rail lines to prevent troops from being brought into the nation’s largest city and its industrial centre. Troops had not been moved into the city but there have been fears of a military move since armed

forces staged an assault on Peking’s Tiananmen Square late on Saturday. Fresh barricades were erected on the city’s streets on Wednesday after they were cleared overnight. Buses and lorries, covered with anti-Government slogans, were blocking main intersections, snarling traffic. “This is the only way we can protest,” said a Jiaotung University science student as he deflated the tyres of a bus to form a barricade. Students and workers erected barricades by the gates of the ancient walled city of Xian in central China, using buses, trucks and even garbage containers. Concrete and steel traffic dividers were also dragged across the city’s streets to block the possible advance of troops. Foreign residents, contacted by telephone from Peking, said

soldiers were seen in the city’s southern suburbs on Tuesday but they had not yet advanced into the city centre. Sichuan radio reported from the provincial capital, Chengdu, that 100 “lawless elements” had been arrested and there were violent disturbances in the city on Tuesday. Security officials, including armed police, had adopted “resolute measures,” it said without elaborating. In the eastern city Nanking, students marched through the streets wearing black armbands in sympathy for those killed when troops moved into Peking. Residents said calls for strikes were scrawled over walls along the city’s streets and there were work stoppages at some factories. In the southern city Canton, several thousand protesters were blocking bridges.