Posted on 05/07/2007 6:37:03 AM PDT by oblomov
WHEN the first flames flared around the theatre’s stage, many of the excited Chinese children watching must have thought it was all part of the show.
Within minutes 288 of them were dead, a tragedy that has haunted their parents for more than a decade but was forgotten by many as China began its headlong rush to prosperity.
It is not forgotten any more, thanks to a band of internet campaigners who have exposed the shameful truth: the schoolchildren perished because they were ordered to sit down in their theatre seats so that Communist party officials could leave first.
The revelations have prompted millions of Chinese to discuss the incident in recent weeks and forced the state-controlled media to acknowledge it for the first time.
The facts were suppressed for more than 12 years until Chen Yaowen, a reporter for China Central Television, posted on his website a documentary that he had made about the disaster but which the censors had banned.
Scant details of the fire, which has come to be known among Chinese as the “12/8/94 incident”, were reported by the state news agency and by a few foreign media outlets at the time.
On December 8, 1994, 500 schoolchildren were taken to a special variety performance at a theatre in Karamay, an oil-producing city in China’s northwest Xinjiang province.
Most were the best and brightest pupils in their classes, aged between seven and 14, the offspring of well educated Han Chinese engineers and physicists brought in to exploit the mostly Muslim region’s natural resources.
After they were seated, a delegation of the city’s most senior officials entered to ritual applause and took their seats. The show began.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
What amazes me is that a majority of Americans want socialism here.
On November 21, 1970 Jane Fonda told a University of Michigan audience of some two thousand students, "If you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would some day become communist." At Duke University in North Carolina she repeated what she had said in Michigan, adding "I, a socialist, think that we should strive toward a socialist society, all the way to communism." Washington Times July 7, 2000
Her dad wasn’t exactly a conservative, either.............I dunno about her brother........
Give Communism a chance. A hundred million dead people can’t be wrong.
“forced the state-controlled media to acknowledge it for the first time” Yep. There are many other suppressed incidents in Chinese history that should come out into the open. None will be good for the commies.
The Chicom equivalent of "do you know who I am".
It’s amazing that anyone would ever imagine that these government bastards in Commie China are even human!
We should be bombing them NOT buying their goods!
Those effing communists and their backward value systems—now the Chinese have put poison in the medicine after putting melanine in the wheat gluten. My personal boycott of Chinese products continues.......
Letting children burn so corrupt useless officials can save their own hides...what a bunch of murderers.
“the schoolchildren perished because they were ordered to sit down in their theatre seats so that Communist party officials could leave first.”
This is not surprising at all. Anyone that thought otherwise is a fool.
The reason party officials were the first to leave is because “some...are more equal than others”.
I saw an interesting show on nightclub disasters the other night.
What intrigued me most was a recreation of the firs at the Rhode Island night club, the station. They ran a clock in the bottom corner during it.
The fire started out, and the first 20 seconds wasn’t that scary. By 1:30 it looked like everyone in the room should be dead. I made my kids watch it. In a fire there is just no time to hesitate in any way.
Why are they aghast? They choose to live under the iron fist of communism, that’s what happens.
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