Former Chinese premier Li Peng known as the \u201cButcher of Beijing\u201d for his role in the Tiananmen Square crackdown has died aged 90, state broadcaster Xinhua said on Tuesday.
The former chairman of the National People\u2019s Congress Standing Committee died of an unspecified illness in Beijing on Monday, Xinhua said.The ex-premier had previously battled bladder cancer.
Li gained notoriety worldwide as one of the key architects of the brutal breakup of mass pro-democracy demonstrations in the capital on June 4, 1989, and stayed at the top of the Communist regime for more than a decade, while remaining a hated symbol of the repression until his death.
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After vast crowds of\n students, workers and others had been encamped for weeks in Tiananmen \nSquare to demand change, Li proclaimed martial law on May 20, 1989.Two \nweeks later, on the night of June 3-4, the military put a bloody end to \nthe protests, killing hundreds of unarmed civilians by some estimates \nmore than 1,000.
Though the decision to send in the troops was a \ncollective one, Li was widely held responsible for the bloody \ncrackdown.Li afterwards frequently defended the decision to fire on the \ndemonstrators as a \u201cnecessary\u201d step.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Former Chinese premier Li Peng known as the \u201cButcher of Beijing\u201d for his role in the Tiananmen Square crackdown has died aged 90, state broadcaster Xinhua said on Tuesday. The former chairman of the National People\u2019s Congress Standing Committee died of an unspecified illness in Beijing on Monday, Xinhua said.The ex-premier had previously battled bladder […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":66541,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66540"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66542,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66540\/revisions\/66542"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}