Bullets and Opium

Real-Life Stories of China After the Tiananmen Square Massacre

A “memorable series of portraits of the working class people who defended Tiananmen Square” (The New York Review of Books) during the protests from the award-winning poet, dissident, and “one of the most original and remarkable Chinese writers of our time” (Philip Gourevitch).

Much has been written about the Tiananmen Square protests, but very little exists in the words of those who were actually there.

For over seven years, Liao Yiwu—a master of contemporary Chinese literature, imprisoned and persecuted as a counter-revolutionary until he fled the country in 2011—secretly interviewed survivors of the devastating 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Tortured, imprisoned, and forced into silence and the margins of Chinese society for thirty years, their harrowing and unforgettable stories are now finally revealed in this “indispensable historical document” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

Will change how you view China.

This book is extremely disturbing and filled with the horrors of chinese imprisonment. It illustrates its people not as martyrs, but as normal battered people who have suffered tremendously. The things said of him are correct, Liao Yiwu is a modern day chinese Solzhenitsyn.

It's History remember it!

O what a world we would have if people would set aside there media and learn about history, in context leaving aside the peanut gallery. I enjoy history in biography form with personal testimonies. I recommend this book to anyone that would like to see how tyrannical governments act and how the people suffer.
How do leaders end up so nasty? simple as Jesus told the religious people in his day you fallow your father the devil. Satan is alive and well, until Jesus returns and every knee will bow and tung confess that Jesus is LORD both in heaven and earth to the glory of God.

Honest truth

Well documented and easy to walk through. I appreciate the well-worded grammar and the details provided. Very much needed information to be read by all who care.