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For nearly four decades, the events surrounding Tiananmen Square have remained one of the most controversial and misunderstood episodes in modern Chinese history.

In this episode, Carl Zha joins Jamarl Thomas to provide a firsthand Chinese perspective on the 1989 protest movement, drawing on his own experience as a teenager living on a university campus during the events.

The discussion explores the economic turmoil of China's reform era, the inflation crisis of the late 1980s, official corruption, the evolution of the student movement, and the political divisions inside China's leadership that culminated in the June 4 crackdown.

They also examine the famous Tank Man footage, the role of student leaders, allegations of foreign involvement, and how the events are remembered differently inside and outside China.

Rather than repeating familiar narratives, this conversation focuses on historical context, competing interpretations, and the complexities often missing from mainstream discussions.

Topics Covered

• China's transition from a planned economy to market reforms
• Inflation and corruption in the late 1980s
• The Hukou system and urban-rural inequality
• Why the protests initially gained widespread public support
• The shift from reform demands to political confrontation
• Internal divisions within China's leadership
• The military intervention of June 3–4, 1989
• What happened outside Tiananmen Square
• The famous Tank Man footage and its full context
• Student leadership and controversial statements by Chai Ling
• Operation Yellowbird and the evacuation of protest leaders
• Deng Xiaoping's interpretation of the crisis
• Competing narratives about Tiananmen today

Key Takeaways

• The protests began amid widespread public frustration over inflation and official corruption.
• Economic reforms dramatically improved agricultural productivity but also created major social tensions.
• The movement evolved significantly between April and June 1989.
• Much of the violence occurred on routes leading into central Beijing rather than inside the square itself.
• Historical interpretations of Tiananmen remain deeply contested both within China and internationally.
• Understanding the events requires examining economic, political, and social factors rather than relying on simplistic narratives.

Memorable Moments

• "The demands started with inflation and corruption. By late May, the rhetoric had changed dramatically."
• "The Tank Man footage most people know is only part of the story."
• "History becomes much more complicated when you look beyond slogans."

Elon Musk wants a SpaceX IPO valuing the company at upwards of $1.75 trillion.

To get there, he got the rules changed so that index funds, with millions of Americans' retirement savings, are forced to buy in.

Retirees could take huge losses, while insiders cash out.

I nearly failed out of grad school, defending Chomsky's theory of syntax. Half a decade later, I'm done pretending it was worth it.

Chomskyan generative grammar — X-bar theory, Government and Binding, the Minimalist Program — was taught to me at the University of Pennsylvania as the only legitimate science of language. It was the gatekeeper, the screener, the thing students were washed out of linguistics PhD programs over. As I've come to discover, decades of work in dependency grammar and construction grammar — frameworks I was told didn't exist, didn't matter, or had been "subsumed" — were doing better empirical work the whole time.

In this video:

• What Chomsky actually got right (the cognitive revolution, generative grammar as discrete infinity, the takedown of Skinner's Verbal Behavior)
• Where transformational grammar, deep structure, movement, empty categories, and Universal Grammar go wrong
• The "poverty of the stimulus" argument and why Pullum & Scholz's critique matters
• How construction grammar (Adele Goldberg) handles the active/passive, the dative alternation, "the more the merrier," and coercion — without movement
• How dependency grammar (Lucien Tesnière) handles headedness, raising vs. control, and cross-linguistic data — without phrase structure trees
• Why long-distance reflexives in Mandarin, Icelandic, and Japanese broke Binding Theory
• Why Minimalism's proliferation of functional projections (TP, vP, FocP, ForceP) looks an awful lot like Ptolemaic epicycles
• Usage-based linguistics (Tomasello, Bybee), psycholinguistics (Levelt, Ferreira), and what kids actually do when they learn language

Firstly, it has come to be known that while Kiev was hammered with an assortment of ballistic and cruise missiles, not to mention drones, the Oreshnik did not actually strike Kiev itself, but rather the neighboring Bila Tserkva airbase not far away from the capital city. This was stated by several sources, both Ukrainian and Russian.

FighterBomber believes the Oreshnik cannot be used on Kiev because it’s not exactly a precision weapon. We’ve analyzed the possibilities before and arrived at the likelihood that the Oreshnik submunitions are not independently maneuverable themselves, but are rather aimed kinetically by their “bus” in outerspace like most nuclear MIRV warheads. This means they are unlikely to achieve true precision on the order of 5-10 meters CEP like Iskanders, Kalibrs, etc.

Granted, that’s not to say the Oreshnik wouldn’t destroy the target it was pointed at—it’s simply that it would likely destroy quite a few things around that target also. And in a major population center like Kiev, that’s not quite tenable.

The [Iranian Khorramshahr-4 IRBM] groupings of the submunitions appear much more widely dispersed, which appears to indicate the Oreshnik is quite a bit more accurate. A prominent Iranian analyst believes the reason for this is that the Khorramshahr needs to eject its submunitions much earlier in order to prevent US THAAD systems from targeting the entire bus which carries them. This causes them to disperse more widely during re-entry, making them less accurate. Since Russia doesn’t have to contend with true exo-atmospheric ballistic missile defense in Ukraine, it can dial in the submunition release much closer to the ground, making it more precise—at least according to this theory, which is plausible. It’s like shotgun buckshot or birdshot: the closer you fire, the tighter the grouping of pellets.

Another interesting aspect was the announcement by Ukraine that Russia began to strike Kiev’s water supply facilities. […] If true, it would represent another small milestone in a potential “gloves-off” shift of strategies from the Kremlin.

For those that read the premium piece yesterday and recall my theory that Zelensky and his gang likely provokes such Russian attacks—Oreshnik and all—on purpose because it suits the political agenda to paint Russia as an aggressive force hellbent on destroying civilian cities. Medvedev earlier appeared to share that opinion almost verbatim in his own post.

Cognitive skills assessed in the studies included memory recall, decision-making, and response speed and accuracy. When these assessments were taken as a whole, short-term fasting (with a median duration of 12 hours) didn't significantly change the scoring.

There were some nuances though.

The researchers found modest cognitive performance reductions in fasting intervals over 12 hours, and "noticeable declines" in children and teenagers (though kids only made up a small portion of the participants).

That suggests that young and developing brains might be more at risk from going without food for extended periods, and that for kids and teens, three regular meals a day matters a lot.

Interestingly, food-related tasks testing cognitive performance are where impacts showed up the most. It's possible that very specific brain circuits do start to flag during fasting, though further studies will be required to know for sure.

"Performance deficits were often evident only in tasks involving food-related stimuli, such as looking at pictures of food or processing food-related words," Moreau said.

"In contrast, performance on tasks using neutral content was largely unaffected."

"Hunger might selectively divert cognitive resources or cause distraction only in food-relevant contexts, but general cognitive functioning remains largely stable."

The researchers also found that individuals who were fasting tended to do worse in cognitive tests when they were carried out later in the day – perhaps hinting that going without food acts as a sort of amplifier to the natural dips in concentration that can come with our built-in circadian rhythms.

As well as helping some people to manage their weight, fasting has also been associated with other health benefits in scientific studies, including improvements in cardiovascular health and reductions in inflammation levels.

The plan was daring: Under cover of night, an elite group of forces would ambush Syrian government soldiers and cut off strategic supply lines supporting the regime-held northern city of Aleppo.

These elite fighters were not from Syria. They were Uyghurs — a largely Muslim ethnic minority long persecuted in China. And when the offensive kicked off one night in November 2024, they went to work.

This is the story of how the Uyghurs, a Turkic and predominantly Muslim ethnic minority spread across Central Asia but concentrated in China's far-western Xinjiang region, eventually became the largest contingent of foreign fighters in Syria.

Many of the 40-odd Uyghur fighters and their families that NPR spoke to for this story — all of whom requested that they be identified by only their first names to protect remaining family members in Xinjiang from reprisals by Chinese authorities — say they fled to Syria and fought the way they did because of their deep hatred of the Chinese government.

They say they now hope to preserve their culture and perhaps one day raise an army powerful enough to seize control of Xinjiang, or East Turkestan as the Uyghurs call it, the region that the Uyghurs consider their homeland and that the Chinese Communist Party took control of in 1949.

He and most other Uyghurs first headed to Turkey, home to a large Uyghur diaspora community. But many Uyghurs were unable to secure residency documents in Turkey and feared deportation to China. In 2012, they began trickling into northern Syria through Turkey's largely porous southern border.

There in Syria, around the northern city of Idlib, a loose coalition of thousands of Uyghurs and their families began to settle down.

Many Syrian Arabs oppose the continued presence of foreign fighters, including the Uyghurs, in Syria. Outside Idlib, most Syrians have never seen or met a Uyghur fighter before, and the conservative Sunni Muslim beliefs held by many Uyghurs in Syria have scared Syria's minority communities.

Given China's economic and military strengths, Choghtal and other Uyghur fighters NPR interviewed say that despite their ardent desire to turn their attention to China, attacking it is unrealistic, even foolhardy, and they need to bide their time. "We believe the Communist Party of China will collapse one day, just like we believe in the sun and the moon," Choghtal says. "And then we will be ready."

"Even if it takes until the end of our lives, if only we could return to our homeland, liberate it and live there. To be buried in the earth of our homeland — that is what we dream of," Anas says. "We do not want our children to wander in foreign lands all their lives. Even if we ourselves cannot achieve it, if we open this path, then maybe one day our children can."