BANGKOK — In 1989 Chinese troops, on orders of the government, mowed down demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. It was a sad spectacle that China is still living down, though memory fades with every year of spectacular economic development — and with the nation's steady prideful movement toward hosting the Olympic Games next summer.
In Myanmar (but let's still call it by its former name, Burma), protesters, led by monks, have marched through the central streets of the capital in somewhat the same way, and the killings have started. Will Yangon in the end meet the fate of Tiananmen?
Will the Yangon of 2007 look like the Burma of 1988, when street protesters were smashed like so many toy figurines, 3,000 people dead in the streets?