30 years ago – 1989, for weeks, hundreds of thousands of Chinese students and workers defied their authoritarian leaders and camped out in Beijing’s Tienanmen Square, calling for change.
It would culminate with an image of a lone man, known simply as “Tank Man”, or elsewhere as the “Unknown Rebel”standing in front of a line of tanks in Tienanmen Square. Incredible Extended Footage
Not many people in China know about Tank Man, alongside the names of the victims, student leaders, workers and activists, and certain foreign media sites.
Tank Man’s image is officially banned in China and whenever it slips through via social media, in the form of a doctored photo, or a coded cartoon using David and Goliath imagery, Chinese authorities intervene quickly and remove it.
On each anniversary, and so on, numbers of every permutation (6/4, 64, squareof8, 31May, 89etc and even baijiu, a liquor that sounds like 89) are suppressed.
You can’t even search the terms “tank” or “tank man” on Weibo, but outside China, the iconic image is everywhere. Even “sensitive word” and “internet block” are disallowed.
The name of the former Chinese prime minister dubbed the “Butcher of Beijing”, Li Peng, for his role in the Tiananmen Square crackdown, is temporarily banned.
A survivor recounts:
I think it was a revolution, in that the native people, for the first time, were questioning the authority in China, in a way which never had happened before.
The protesters had captured the world’s attention, while the Communist Party struggled to deal with this growing People’s Movement. It really was a movement of the whole society.
A flood of people poured onto the streets of Beijing and into Tienanmen Square demanding democracy, freedom of speech, and an end to corruption.
After a 7 week standoff, the government called in the troops and a bloody battle ensued.
The number of deaths is not known. 
The Chinese Red Cross initially issued a statement, saying 2,600 people had been killed, but rapidly retracted that.
The Chinese government claimed that 241 people died, including 23 soldiers, but that’s how it ended.
Let’s look at how it started and why it felt like a betrayal.
Through their personal stories and the stories of others who witnessed this historic movement, we can start to see what happened in Tienanmen Square, Beijing- the heart of the world’s most populous nation.
It was there that Mao Zedong declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. His picture still gazed down.
Mao’s Cultural Revolution (a decade long series of purges until his death in 1976) had brought great suffering to the Chinese people. Liberties had been squashed and people imprisoned, tortured, and killed after Mao’s death.
A purge is a removal of a group of people considered undesirable from an organization or place in an abrupt or violent way.
CHINA LOST 14 MILLION PEOPLE IN WORLD WAR II. WHY ARE THEY THE FORGOTTEN ALLY.
The Middle Kingdom’s 8-year war against an invading Japan—a war that had been under way for more than 2 years before the Nazis invaded Poland, which is the usual starting point for histories of World War II.
“Essentially,” Rana Mitter explained in an interview with Pacific Standard, “the politics of the Cold War had covered over, what is coming to be realized, I think, as one of the great missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of World War II.”
Now, a combination of archives is opening up and has cracked the historical window.
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The contribution of the Soviet Union to the Chinese Nationalists (who were actively battling the Chinese Communists), was large and sustained.
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While it might have been ideologically unexpected, it fit in with Josef Stalin’s desire to most effectively check Japanese designs on the USSR. The two countries actually fought a sustained series of battles in Mongolia in 1939 which left thousands dead on both sides.
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While the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and Communist Mao Zedong, are usually depicted as the titans of China’s resistance and its on-again, off-again civil war, Mitter details the rise and eclipse of a third figure, Wang Jingwei, whose stature and influence long equaled Chiang and Mao’s—until he made accommodation with the Japanese.
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The scale of China’s involvement in the war was massive. Chiang, for example, fielded 4 million troops at the Nationalist’s height, while China as a whole, lost an estimated 14 million in the war.
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Had China folded, Japan’s capacity to fight the U.S. or even the Soviets would have been vastly amplified.
But it’s also a reminder to the American public that there was this very important historical moment that which had been forgotten and which is important for two reasons:
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one of which has to do with the very contemporary significance of understanding why Sino-American relations and Sino-Japanese relations, which are crucial to the shaping of the world, let alone the region, remain very volatile.
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But the second reason actually has to do something with historical justice. Regardless of the many flaws of the Chinese government at the time, Chiang Kai-shek’s government, I think it’s fair to say that they never, neither then nor now, have been given sufficient credit for what has often been regarded as a purely American victory in Asia, and particularly the Pacific.
But the Chinese contribution up, to now, has generally been mostly dismissed or regarded as very minor, secondary, and not really worth bothering with.
I think, as we move decades and decades away from the events themselves, it’s no longer tenable to retain that position.
How was Mao Zedong important?
Mao Zedong (26 December 1893 – 9 September 1976) was a Chinese Communist leader.
He was Chairman of the Communist Party of China (CPC) from its establishment in 1949, until his death in 1976.
He also led the Communist Party of China to victory, in a civil war against the Nationalist regime.
Mao Zedong’s policy of rapid industrialization and collectivization of land, the “Great Leap Forward,” had killed tens of millions of people by starvation.
The world was watching an era, when a new generation of Chinese wanted to finally break from the shackles of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
It is what is referenced in the famous song by the Beatles , Revolution.
China’s leadership knew that they had to make changes in order to remain in power, but what reforms should they make?
The Communist Party leaders split between those who advocated drastic reforms (including a move toward capitalist economic policies and greater personal freedoms for Chinese citizens), versus those who favored careful tinkering with the command economy and continued strict control of the population.
The country then descended into the terror and anarchy of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), an orgy of violence and destruction that saw teenaged Red Guards humiliate, torture, murder hundreds of thousands or millions of their compatriots.
Irreplaceable cultural heirlooms were destroyed; traditional Chinese arts and religion were all but extinguished.
Meanwhile, with the leadership unsure of which direction to take, the Chinese people hovered in a no-man’s land between fear of the authoritarian state, and the desire to speak out for reform.
The government-instigated tragedies of the previous two decades left them hungry for change, but aware that the iron fist of Beijing’s leadership was always ready to smash down opposition. China’s people waited to see which way the wind would blow.
And By the late 1980s, the leaders of China’s Communist Party knew that classical Maoism had failed.
Hu Yaobang was a reformist, who served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of China from 1980 to 1987.
He advocated rehabilitation of people persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, greater autonomy for Tibet, rapprochement with Japan, and social and economic reform.
As a result, he was forced out of office by the hardliners in January of 1987 and made to offer humiliating public “self-criticisms” for his allegedly bourgeois ideas.
One of the charges leveled against Hu, was that he had encouraged (or at least allowed) widespread student protests in late 1986.
As the General Secretary, he refused to crack down on such protests, believing that dissent by the intelligentsia should be tolerated by the Communist government.
Hu Yaobang died of a heart attack not long after his ouster and disgrace, on April 15, 1989.
Official media made just brief mention of Hu’s death, and the government at first did not plan to give him a state funeral.
Hardliners within the government were extremely uneasy about the protests, but General Secretary Zhao Ziyang believed that the students would disperse once the funeral ceremonies were over. Zhao was so confident that he took a week-long trip to North Korea for a summit meeting.
As the protests developed, the authorities responded with both conciliatory and hardline tactics, exposing deep divisions within the party leadership, so events begin to spin out of control.
Set off by the death of pro-reform Communist leader Hu Yaobang in April 1989, amid the backdrop of rapid economic development and social changes in post-Mao China, the Tienanmen Square protests of 1989, culminated in a series of demonstrations in and near Tienanmen Square, in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) between 15 April and 5 June 1989 – year in which many other socialist governments collapsed.
While Tienanmen protesters did use many American symbols , it also reflected contemporary protests around the world.
For example :
1989 was the year of the first Brazilian presidential elections in 29 years, since the end of the military government in 1985 which ruled the country for more than twenty years, and marked the redemocratization process’s final point.
F. W. de Klerk was elected as State President of South Africa, and his regime gradually dismantled the apartheid system over the next 5 years, culminating with the 1994 election that brought jailed African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela to power.
In contrast, the year saw the violent suppression of mass political protest in China, in June. The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 ended with a military crackdown resulting in the deaths of both protesters and soldiers. It was a mountainous pressure.
With Zhao Ziyang out of the country, hardliners in the government such as Li Peng took the opportunity to bend the ear of the powerful leader of the Party Elders, Deng Xiaoping.
Party leader Deng Xiaoping, led China into a new era, opening the economy up to the West, who had been already had been arrested, came out again and said, “why don’t we try capitalism/socialism isn’t really working”
Let’s try capitalism, so all of a sudden trying to make changes seemed very exciting. Suddenly, there was this idea maybe the West wasn’t such a bad place, after all.
But political reform was not moving at the same pace as economic reforms, though there was a sense that China was coming out of it’s shell and moving forward.
Then in 1987, an anti bourgeois liberalization campaign was purged along with some famous intellectuals.
Deng was known as a reformer himself, supportive of market reforms and greater openness, but the hardliners exaggerated the threat posed by the students.
Li Peng even told Deng that the protesters were hostile to him personally, and were calling for his ouster and the downfall of the Communist government. (This accusation was a fabrication.)
Clearly worried, Deng Xiaoping decided to denounce the demonstrations in an editorial published in the People’s Daily on April 26th.
He called the protests dongluan (meaning “turmoil” or “rioting”) by a “tiny minority.”
These highly emotive terms were associated with the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution.
Rather than tamping down the students’ fervor, Deng’s editorial further inflamed it.
The government had just made its 2nd grave mistake.
Not unreasonably, the students felt that they could not end the protest if they were labeled dongluan, for fear that they would be prosecuted.
Some 50,000 of them continued to press the case that patriotism motivated them, not hooliganism.
Until the government stepped back from that characterization, the students could /would not leave Tienanmen Square.
But the government too was trapped by the editorial.
Deng Xiaoping had staked his reputation, and that of the government, on getting the students to back down.
Who would blink first?
A survivor remembers: We needed an excuse….then we bonded while commemorating a former General Secretary of Communist Party, Hu Yaobang, not something that is outrageous.
I mean, it’s something people can do. The government wouldn’t be able to just suppress, what started. Then the protest grew in momentum.
Emboldened, the protesters wrote a list of demands, and they poured onto Tienanmen Square.
University students felt, they could make a change and had a social responsibility to fulfill.
‘If We Don’t Cry Out, Who Will?’
We were passionate about our country and the demands made, at the time, were worthy -just from dealing with corruption and wanting to speed up the political reform, for media freedom, and the law of democracy.
They were the kind of desires shared by all students in the 1980’s.
The demonstration started to take the form of an outdoor rock festival.
I think, when the students went to the square. The people were amazed, at a spontaneous demonstration .
It hadn’t happened before so, people were really surprised and a little nervous and curious, but also it was almost joyous because the students were waving flags and the weather was good.
I walked into Tienanmen Square in April 1989, purely for curiosity, I started listening to the students public speeches.
They were intellectuals so, they were good speeches.
I was so inspired. As the protests continued, the students demands grew.
Soon the protesters started asking for democracy.
I think the word democracy misled a lot of overseas viewers, because it didn’t seem to means the same thing. [The other nations ] understood what majority rule is and elections, but the students didn’t understand it.
To them, democracy just meant, you know get off our back, we probably didn’t know what democracy was.
Living in China, we have a pretty good idea what totalitarianism is, but not democracy.
A published article and a damning editorial in the people’s daily newspaper, calling the protests anti-party and anti-socialist.
Because the labels of anti socialists and anti-party are so divisive, and so strong, and so frightening -that when you get those labels put on you, you know that a light line has been drawn.
I mean, their parents, probably were sent to labor camps for 20 years. For that kind of label, that editorial was a blow.
People went oh my god, this is the Communist Party pronouncing its verdict on what it’s going to do, so people were really angry, really upset, rather than turning the population against the students the editorial had the reverse effect in support of the students.
Policemen, journalists, government workers, and even some members of the Armed Forces, joined the peace protests. On Sundays there were a million people in Beijing.
The population then was only 10 million, so I think everybody everybody was on the street.
I almost couldn’t find anyone who hadn’t been part of a protest, but if they weren’t actually marching – they were definitely gawking.
Showdown, Zhao Ziyang vs. Li Peng
General Secretary Zhao returned from North Korea to find China transfixed by the crisis.
He still felt that the students were no real threat to the government, though, and he sought to defuse the situation, urging Deng Xiaoping to recant the inflammatory editorial.
Li Peng, however, argued that to step back now would be a fatal show of weakness by the party leadership.
Meanwhile, students from other cities poured into Beijing to join the protests.
More ominously for the government, other groups also joined in: housewives, workers, doctors, and even sailors from the Chinese Navy!
The protests also spread to other cities – Shanghai, Urumqi, Xi’an, Tianjin… almost 250 in all.
By May 4, the number of protesters in Beijing had topped 100,000 again.
On May 13, the students took their next fateful step.
They announced a hunger strike, with the goal of getting the government to retract the April 26 editorial.
Over a thousand students took part in the hunger strike, which engendered wide-spread sympathy for them among the general populace. The foreign press had already amassed in anticipation of Gorbachev’s arrival for meeting. There were so many shifts in government in 1989, it was assumed the same would happen in China.
The government met in an emergency Standing Committee session the following day.
Zhao urged his fellow leaders to accede to the students’ demand and withdraw the editorial. Li Peng urged a crackdown.
The Standing Committee was deadlocked, so the decision was passed to Deng Xiaoping.
The next morning, he announced that he was placing Beijing under martial law.
Martial Law, is military government, involving the suspension of ordinary law.
Immediately after the crackdown, President George Bush — the first Bush president — dispatched senior American officials to China to reassure the Chinese that the United States wanted to continue its strong relationship with China.
Zhao was fired and placed under house arrest; hard-liner Jiang Zemin succeeded him as General Secretary; and fire-brand Li Peng was placed in control of the military forces in Beijing.
Shortly before 5 am on 19 May, Zhao appeared in Tiananmen Square and wandered among the crowd of protesters.
Using a bullhorn, he delivered a now-famous speech to the students gathered at the square, Zhao Ziyang suddenly told the protesters:
Students, we came too late.
We are sorry.
You talk about us, criticize us, it is all necessary.
The reason that I came here is not to ask for your forgiveness.
What I want to say is that you are all getting weak, it has been 7 days since you went on a hunger strike, you can’t continue like this.
As time goes on, your body will be damaged beyond repair, it could be very life-threatening.
Now the most important thing is to end this strike.
I know, your hunger strike is in hope that the Party and the government will give you a satisfying answer.
I feel that our communication is open. Some of these problems can only be solved through certain procedures.
For example, you have mentioned about the nature of the incident, the question of responsibility; I feel that those problems can be resolved eventually, we can reach a mutual agreement in the end.
However, you should also know that the situation is very complicated, it is going to be a long process.
You can’t continue this hunger strike, it has lasted longer than 7 days, and still insist on receiving a satisfying answer before ending the hunger strike.
You are still young, we are old, you must live healthy, and see the day when China accomplishes the Four Modernizations.
You are not like us. We are already old, we do not matter anymore.
It is not easy for this nation and your parents to support your college studies.
Now you are all about 20, and about to sacrifice your lives so easily, students, couldn’t you think rationally?
Now the situation is very serious, you all know, the Party and the nation is very anxious, our society is very worried.
Besides, Beijing is the capital, the situation is getting worse and worse everywhere, this cannot continue. Students, you all have good will, and are for the good of our nation, but if this situation continues, and loses control, it will have serious consequences elsewhere.
In conclusion, I have only one wish.
If you stop this hunger strike, the government won’t close the door for dialogue -Ever!
The questions that you have raised, we can continue to discuss.
Although it is a little slow, we are reaching some agreement on some problems.
Today I just want to see the students, and express our feelings.
I hope students could think about these issues calmly. This thing can not be sorted out clearly, under illogical situations.
You all have that strength, you are young after all.
We were also young before, we protested, laid our bodies on the rail tracks, we never thought about what will happen in the future at that time.
( here he is referencing the May 4th event of 1919)
Finally, I beg the students once again, think about the future calmly.
There are many things that can be solved. I hope that you will all end the hunger strike soon, thank you.
You are not like us, we are already old, it doesn’t matter to us anymore.”
It was the last time he was ever seen in public, he passed away in 2005.
Perhaps in response to Zhao’s appeal, during the last week of May. Tensions eased a bit, and many of the student protesters from Beijing grew weary of the protest and left the square.
However, reinforcements from the provinces continued to pour into the city.
Hard-line student leaders called for the protest to continue until June 20, when a meeting of the National People’s Congress was scheduled to take place.
Hearing the calls for a prolonged protest, on June 2 the Communist Party Elders met with the remaining members of the Politburo Standing Committee.
The Standing Committee of the Central Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China, usually known as the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC), is a committee consisting of the top leadership of the Communist Party of China.
They agreed to bring in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to clear the protesters out of Tiananmen Square by force.
Tienanmen Square
The morning of June 3, 1989, the 27th and 28th divisions of the People’s Liberation Army moved into Tiananmen Square on foot and in tanks, firing tear gas to disperse the demonstrators.
They had been ordered not to shoot the protesters; indeed, most of them did not carry firearms.
The leadership selected these divisions because they were from distant provinces; local PLA troops were considered untrustworthy as potential supporters of the protests.
Not only the student protesters but also tens of thousands of workers and ordinary citizens of Beijing joined together to repel the Army.
They used burned-out buses to create barricades, threw rocks and bricks at the soldiers, and even burned some tank crews alive inside their tanks. Other soldiers were hurt, hung, or killed .
Sen Zhou, who was there at the time, answered the question : How did the police/military at Tiananmen Square feel when they shot their own people (young students)?
Well, I was personally in Beijing at NanLishi Road when all the things happen in 1989. Secondly, I personally know some of the soldiers from Beijing Military Region. So I guess I can answer this question. …
Let’s start from the ‘massacre’ at Muxidi, 2~3 miles to Tiananmen. some of the citizens and students built their blockades at Muxidi.
At first, they advanced, shouted “people’s liberation army should protect the people”, and surrounded the army who was ordered to march to Tiananmen square. Thus the troop could not really move.
One of my acquaintance who used to be in Tiananmen square as a soldier (not sure if he experienced Muxidi thing), once and for only once, explained to me about what soldiers thought at that time:
‘what would you feel if you see your fellow soldiers, who sleeps in the same room and dines at the same table with you, is being hanged in front of you, and you happen to have a gun in your hand?’
‘What if people are beating you, trying to grab your gun, and you have a gun in your hands?’
‘Do you think we can really use orders to stop those soldiers, who have tasted their first blood at that time?’
So basically, things go out of control. And to be honest, once you kill a person, something in your mind falls apart immediately, you won’t care about killing more people, at that very moment.
As for how the soldiers feel, years later?
The truth is, soldiers who went to Tienanmen, got medals when their mission was over.
Nobody I know, has ever mentioned this medal once or really emphasize it, in their biography.
Actually, they avoid to talk about all these things.
So I basically believe they are kind of haunted by what have happened and just want to let it go.
As for regret?
I believe as human beings, they may regret some details of killing some people; but if it is for the whole thing,…of marching to Tiananmen square, I am not sure.
Fortunately, student leaders who stayed until the last moment, wanted to prevent things getting worse, so they gathered the guns and surrendered them, and led the last bunch leave the square before sun rise.
IMHO, these are the true leaders of students, unlike some of the other famed ‘student leaders’ who abandoned their fellow students, days before their retreat and fled to other countries.
Here are judgement and truth,.. I prefer to believe based on my own hearing from the soldiers, along with facts from documentation videos.
Since the question itself, is not that objective, it is hard to really pull my own opinions away from my answer. -But hope it helps.
Thus, the first casualties of the Tienanmen Square Incident, were actually soldiers.
The student protest leadership now faced a difficult decision.
Should they evacuate the Square before further blood could be shed, or hold their ground?
In the end, many of them decided to remain.
Contrary to popular belief, the bulk of the violence took place in the neighborhoods all around Tienanmen Square, rather than in the Square itself.
Throughout the night of June 3 and early hours of June 4, the troops beat, bayoneted, and shot protesters.
Tanks drove straight into crowds, crushing people and bicycles under their treads.
By 6 a.m. on June 4th, 1989, the streets around Tienanmen Square were cleared.
A survivor recounts:
While some in Tiananmen Square had gathered there in sincere protest, few could have imagined how brutal the end would be.
We anticipated that we’re going to be brutalized, but could not foresee the use of live ammunition or tanks running over people -we just couldn’t have imagined it.
However, he states, ” [the] spirit of resistance did not die in defiant acts or bravery, one man would become the symbol of the Tienanmen Square protests.
That heroic man was able to turn the tank around and stop it.
Why then, facing so many students prior, even while peacefully retreating?
The other tanks never stopped or slowed down, but instead charged at us and caused so much damage.”
Despite the beatings, blood loss, prison sentences and deaths, one man was the icon of the movement, as he stood in front of charging tanks, defiantly.
His image of Tank Man quickly became a powerful symbol of both the bloody events of 4 June 1989 and of non-violent resistance.
No one knows his name or his fate, but there are theories :
1. He was a student
The Sunday Express went on to identify him as 19-year-old student Wang Weilin and quoted his friends as saying they feared he had been put to death.
However, then General Secretary Jiang Zemin denied having nay knowledge of his arrest or even of the name.
2. He was pulled away to safety
Witnesses recall the man climbing up onto the first tank, in the column and speaking to the person inside.
Jan Wong, the former Toronto Globe and Mail Beijing correspondent, remembered seeing tanks repeatedly attempting to drive around him, before switching off their motors.
The man then climbed into the tank.
She told Frontline: “After a while the young man jumps down and the tank turns on the motor and the young man blocks him again.
[…] I started to cry because I had seen so much shooting and so many people dying that I was sure this man would get crushed
“But he didn’t. … I think it was 2 people from the sidelines who ran to him and grabbed him – not in a harsh way, almost in a protective way. I think that the people who took the Tank Man away, were concerned people.”
But other accounts contradict this however, with many claiming he was pulled away by security agents and arrested.
3. He is still alive
American TV journalist Barbara Walters confronted Jiang a year after the crackdown with a photo of Tank Man and the question:
“Do you have any idea what happened to this young man?”
A flustered Jiang reportedly stressed that Tank Man had not been executed by the Government or run over.
He highlighted the fact that the tanks in the picture were still and had not attempted to drive at him as indicative of his fate, and said:
“The people in the tanks didn’t want to run over the people standing in the way.
“I think …never killed”.
Others claim police were never able to locate the man, after he was pulled away from the crowd .
One government official was quoted as saying, “We can’t find him. We got his name from journalists. We have checked through computers but can’t find him among the dead or among those in prison.”
It was difficult for ambulances to get through.
4. He escaped mainland China
A report cited a professor in Hong Kong, claimed Tank Man was an archaeologist and his friend who had come from Changsha to Beijing to join the protests.
The professor claimed he escaped to Taiwan and was employed by the National Palace Museum but the museum allegedly denied this report.
The Yonhap news agency in South Korea also reported that he had escaped the massacre by fleeing to Taiwan.
5. He was executed
Bruce Herschensohn, a former deputy special assistant to former US President Richard Nixon, told the President Club in 1999 that Tank Man was executed 14 days later.
Others claim he was later put to death by a firing squad a few months after the protests. Many, however, remain hopeful Tank Man is still alive, and may have no idea of the intrigue his picture has created thanks to China’s strict censorship of the image.
To remember, citizens post candles to commemorate the dead, they call for a silent vigil to pay respect to that day and honor the memory of that year.
They ask citizens to wear black and take a walk. They call the massacre in Beijing a wound in history and remind one another to never forget these weeks that were the end of spring and the beginning of summer, a night when the empire besieged the city, and the end of an era.