The 1950 Japanese film "Rashomon" owes its enduring appeal to director Akira Kurosawa's superb treatment of an ancient and universal theme: What is the truth? A samurai and his bride come upon a bandit in a forest grove, where the traveler dies and his wife is ravished. The only witness is a woodcutter. The story turns on the magistrate's efforts to extract the facts from completely different yet equally plausible perceptions of what occurred.
A similar conundrum awaits anyone who wants to unravel the meaning of the events that occurred 25 years ago on the night of June 3, 1989, in the Chinese capital of Beijing. Most people think they already know the truth about Tiananmen Square. The communist rulers of China, determined to crush a pro-democracy movement, sent the soldiers and tanks of the People's Liberation Army, guns blazing, into Beijing's massive central square and mowed students down by the hundreds.
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