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Tiananmen remembered 20 years on

Fang Zheng's last memory before he passed out was the sight of the bone popping out of his upper right leg as the Red Army tank rolled into him.

He woke up the next day in a Beijing hospital, both legs mangled and inoperable. But he was among the lucky ones - 11 fellow students were crushed to death in the tank attack on pro-democracy protestors retreating from Tiananmen Square in the early hours of June 4, 1989.

Nobody knows how many people were killed that night in the bloody crackdown by China's communist leaders, but most estimates put the massacre's death toll at around 3,000.

Then a sports physiology student aged 22, Mr Fang survived but has been confined to a wheelchair for the last two decades. He has just arrived in the United States with his wife and daughter, his move arranged by Humanitarian China, a US charity established by Feng Congde, a fellow Tiananmen veteran.

Mr Feng is irritated by the ongoing debate over whether Western media coverage of the "Tiananmen Square massacre" was faulty, which revolves around suggestions that only a few protestors were actually killed in the square itself.

Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)