Soldiers Fire on Tiananmen: Protests Crushed in Blood

Tanks rolled down Chang’an Avenue toward Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3-4, 1989, and soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on civilians. After seven weeks of pro-democracy protests that had drawn over a million people into the streets of Beijing, the Chinese government chose massacre over negotiation. The official death toll remains unknown. Chinese Red Cross initially reported 2,600 dead before retracting the figure under government pressure. Independent estimates range from several hundred to several thousand. The protests began in April after the death of Hu Yaobang, a reformist Communist Party leader who had been purged for sympathizing with student demonstrators in 1986. Students gathered in Tiananmen Square to mourn Hu and demand political reforms: freedom of the press, government accountability, dialogue with Party leaders. Workers, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens joined them. By mid-May, the movement had spread to over 400 cities. The government declared martial law on May 20, but troops initially could not enter Beijing because residents blocked the roads. When the army finally advanced on the night of June 3, soldiers fired indiscriminately into crowds along the western approach roads. Armored personnel carriers crushed barricades and, according to multiple eyewitness accounts, some of the people behind them. The worst violence occurred not in the square itself but on the avenues leading to it, where unarmed residents confronted columns of armed troops. By dawn, the square was cleared and the streets around it were littered with the dead. The crackdown succeeded in ending the democracy movement. Thousands were arrested. Leaders who escaped faced decades of exile. China’s government has never acknowledged the killings, and all mention of June 4 is censored within the country. The photograph of a lone man blocking a column of tanks became one of the most recognized images of the twentieth century, seen everywhere in the world except the country where it was taken.