1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre

• 1. Introduction

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  The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests ran in Beijing from the 15th of April to the 4th of June. Chinese speakers call them the June Fourth Incident. At their peak, on the 17th of May, roughly one million people had gathered in the square. Students and workers stood together, though each group came with its own grievances. The spark was the death of one former party leader, a small cause for a crowd that size. This documentary asks how that death set the capital in motion. It asks why the men at the top of the Communist Party could not agree on a reply. It asks what happened on the night of the 3rd of June. And it asks why the subject is still among the most heavily censored in China.

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• 2. The Iron Rice Bowl

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  Mao Zedong died in 1976, and the Gang of Four was arrested. The Cultural Revolution had left the country poor, with production slowed or halted. Deng Xiaoping proposed Boluan Fanzheng, meaning bringing order out of chaos, and launched a program called reform and opening up. Within several years, the push for ideological purity gave way to a push for prosperity. Deng placed allies in top posts. Zhao Ziyang became Premier in September 1980. Hu Yaobang became head of the party as General Secretary in 1982.

  By 1981, about 73 percent of rural farms no longer ran as collectives. Eighty percent of state enterprises could keep their earnings. Most people welcomed this. But the reforms also dismantled the iron rice bowl, the Mao-era promise of lifetime jobs and workplace benefits in state firms. Deng thought the guarantee cost too much for a country trying to modernize. Its loss fed unrest over layoffs and prices.

  Prices had been fixed at low levels since the 1950s. Early reforms created two tracks, with some prices frozen and others free to move. In a market of constant shortages, a person with connections could buy cheap at the fixed price and sell dear at the market price. The bureaucrats who ran the economy had huge incentives to play that game. Anger at corruption and favouritism among senior officials boiled over.

  At the 1988 summer retreat in Beidaihe, Deng's leadership agreed to shift toward market-based pricing. Word of looser controls sent people rushing to withdraw cash, buy goods and stockpile them across the country. Within two weeks the government cancelled the plan, but the damage lingered. Official figures showed Beijing's Consumer Price Index up 30 percent between 1987 and 1988. Salaried workers panicked about affording basic goods. Meanwhile, money-losing state firms were pressed to cut costs. That brought fear of xiagang, the Chinese term for layoffs, and with it the loss of job security, healthcare and subsidised housing.

  Graduates in Beijing faced their own squeeze. New universities opened and enrollment rose, yet the job market stayed thin, especially for students of social sciences and the humanities. Private firms no longer had to take students assigned by the state, and many well-paid posts went to relatives and favourites. With few prospects at home or abroad, students and intellectuals cared more about politics. Study groups such as the Democracy Salon and the Lawn Salon sprang up on campuses.

  Meanwhile the party's socialist label sat awkwardly beside its capitalist practices. Private business produced profiteers who exploited weak rules and flaunted their wealth before poorer neighbours. Greed, not skill, seemed to decide who succeeded. People wanted change, but only an unelected government could define "the correct path". Many intellectuals concluded that only democracy, backed by the rule of law, could heal the country.

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• 3. Two Camps at the Top

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  In 1978, reformist leaders hoped intellectuals would guide China through the changes. The plan went sideways. Intellectuals in the New Enlightenment movement championed democracy, humanism, human rights and even Total Westernisation, all of which challenged socialist doctrine. In 1979, Deng answered with the Four Cardinal Principles, designed to cap political liberalisation.

  Hu Yaobang led the reformers, nicknamed the right. Chen Yun led the conservatives, nicknamed the left. Hu's camp welcomed a variety of ideas as a safety valve for public discontent. Chen's camp believed reform had gone too far and wanted the state to tighten its grip for the sake of stability. Both camps needed Deng's backing before any major decision.

  On the 18th of August 1980, Deng addressed a full Politburo meeting. His speech, titled "On the Reform of the Party and State Leadership System", attacked bureaucracy, concentrated power and patriarchy, and floated term limits. The current constitution was adopted in December 1982. In September 1986, a five-man committee including Zhao Ziyang, Hu Qili, Tian Jiyun, Bo Yibo and Peng Chong began studying political reform. Deng wanted a leaner administration with a clearer split between party and government. He talked of democracy and law but kept reform inside the one-party system. He rejected Western-style constitutionalism.

  In mid-1986, the astrophysics professor Fang Lizhi came home from Princeton University and toured Chinese campuses. He lectured on freedom, human rights and the division of government powers, and recordings of his talks spread across the country. Fang spoke for intellectuals who blamed China's poverty and the Cultural Revolution on its authoritarian system and rigid command economy. Deng accused him of blind admiration for Western ways of life, capitalism and rival parties. Students took to the streets in December 1986, starting in Hefei, where Fang lived. The protests soon reached Shanghai, Beijing and other big cities. They demanded faster reform, and Voice of America broadcasts kept students informed.

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• 4. A Funeral Becomes a Movement

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  Hu Yaobang died of a heart attack on the 15th of April 1989. Many students linked his death to his forced resignation. Eulogy posters filled campuses, and within days they turned to corruption, democracy and press freedom. That same day, small gatherings formed around the Monument to the People's Heroes in Tiananmen Square. Students from Peking University and Tsinghua University trickled in.

  On the 17th of April, students at the China University of Political Science and Law made a wreath. More people showed up than organisers expected. At 5 pm, 500 of them arrived at the Great Hall of the People's eastern gate to mourn. Speakers addressed social problems until police urged the crowd to disperse, since it obstructed the hall's work. That night, 3,000 Peking University students marched on the square, and nearly a thousand from Tsinghua soon joined them.

  From that crowd came the Seven Demands. The students wanted the government to call Hu's views on democracy and freedom correct. They wanted it to admit that the campaigns against spiritual pollution and bourgeois liberalisation were mistakes. They asked for the incomes of leaders and their families to be made public. They asked for private newspapers and an end to censorship. They sought more education funding and better pay for intellectuals. They also wanted the limits on Beijing demonstrations lifted and fair treatment of students in state media.

  On the 18th of April, a few thousand students massed at Xinhua Gate, the entrance to the party leadership's compound at Zhongnanhai, and demanded talks. The next day they tried repeatedly to rush the gate, and police pushed them back. Elsewhere a banner reading "Freedom & Democracy Enlightenment" hung from the Monument beneath a huge portrait of Hu. On the 20th, police used batons on about 200 students still at the gate. Rumours of police brutality spread, and previously uninvolved students joined in. The Beijing Workers' Autonomous Federation also handed out two handbills that challenged the leadership.

  Hu's state funeral was held on the 22nd of April. On the evening of the 21st, about 100,000 students marched toward the square despite orders to keep it closed. The ceremony in the Great Hall was relayed live to them, and Zhao Ziyang read the eulogy. It lasted just 40 minutes. Three students, Zhou Yongjun, Guo Haifeng and Zhang Zhiyong, slipped through the police line. They knelt on the Great Hall steps with a petition and asked to see Premier Li Peng. Wu'erkaixi pleaded beside them for Li to come out. No leader appeared. Angry and let down, some students called for a classroom boycott.

  On the 23rd of April, about 40 students from 21 universities formed the Beijing Students' Autonomous Federation, known as the Union. They chose Zhou Yongjun as chair, and Wang Dan and Wu'erkaixi rose as leaders. The Union called a boycott of classes at every Beijing university. An independent body beyond party control alarmed the leadership.

  Trouble also flared elsewhere. Near dusk on the 22nd of April, serious rioting erupted in Changsha and Xi'an. In Xi'an, arson destroyed cars and houses, and shops near Xihua Gate were looted. At Xincheng Square, rioters disrupted a broadcast of Hu's memorial and tried to push into a provincial government compound. They smashed windows and set part of it on fire. Reports counted 20 houses and 10 vehicles destroyed and 130 police injured. In Changsha, 38 stores were ransacked. Over 350 people were arrested across the two cities, and Chinese television showed the damage.

  Zhao Ziyang convened the Politburo Standing Committee repeatedly. He urged three steps: send students back to class, use every necessary measure against rioting, and open dialogue at several levels. Premier Li Peng pressed him to condemn the protesters, but Zhao brushed that aside. On the 23rd of April, Zhao departed on a planned trip to North Korea.

  That left Li Peng in charge. On the 24th of April, Li and the committee met Beijing Party Secretary Li Ximing and mayor Chen Xitong. Those two described the protests as a plot against the political system and leaders such as Deng. On the morning of the 25th, Li Peng and President Yang Shangkun visited Deng at his home, and Deng backed a hard line. The meeting set the first official verdict on the protests and showed that Deng had the last word. On the 26th of April, the People's Daily printed a front-page editorial titled "It is necessary to take a clear-cut stand against disturbances". It cast the student movement as a revolt against the party and the government. Its language recalled the Cultural Revolution and the 1976 Tiananmen Incident, which was first branded a conspiracy and later rehabilitated as patriotic. The editorial backfired. Students read it as an accusation, and it stayed a sore point for the rest of the protests.

  On the 27th of April, some 50,000-100,000 students from every Beijing university marched to the square. They broke through police lines and won cheers from the public, particularly factory workers. The leaders softened their slogans to "anti-corruption" and "anti-cronyism", but "pro-party". Ironically, the editorial gave new traction to students who truly wanted the party gone. The march forced the government to bargain. On the 29th, State Council spokesman Yuan Mu met delegates from government-approved student groups. Independent leaders such as Wu'erkaixi stayed away, and little came of the talks.

  Zhao returned from Pyongyang on the 30th of April, convinced that hardball was failing. He asked that the press report favourably on the movement. In speeches on the 3rd and the 4th of May, he called the students' worries about corruption legitimate and their movement patriotic. That undid the editorial's message. On the 4th, about 100,000 students marched to mark the May Fourth Movement, but many felt satisfied. All Beijing universities except Peking University and Beijing Normal University ended their boycott, and most students lost interest. The two holdouts were not ready to let the movement fade.

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• 5. Hunger Strike and Summit

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  On the 1st of May, Zhao and Li Peng clashed in the Standing Committee. Li said stability mattered above all. Zhao said the party should back democracy and openness, and he pushed for dialogue. Student leaders formed a delegation for talks but hesitated to hand it control. The movement was losing steam, split by infighting and drawing fewer ordinary students. Wang Dan, Wu'erkaixi and a few other magnetic leaders saw the offer of dialogue as a stalling trick. They wanted a return to confrontation, and they planned a hunger strike for the 13th of May. Recruits were few until Chai Ling gave an emotional appeal the night before.

  The hunger strike began on the 13th of May, two days before Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev arrived for a state visit. His welcome ceremony was planned for the square, and the strikers hoped it would force the government to bargain. The strike also won broad public sympathy and gave the students moral standing. By that afternoon, some 300,000 people filled the square. Students in other cities began their own protests, and many travelled to Beijing. Daily marches from colleges stayed orderly, and the crowd sang the Internationale.

  Deng feared losing control and ordered the square cleared before the visit. Zhao tried a gentler path. He told subordinates to open talks at once, trusting the students' patriotism to prevail. On the morning of the 13th, Yan Mingfu of the party's United Front gathered student leaders and intellectuals. Among them were Liu Xiaobo, Chen Ziming and Wang Juntao. He promised immediate dialogue. He also revealed that the Tiananmen ceremony would be called off regardless of whether the students left. That erased the pressure they believed they held, and the student leadership fell into disarray.

  On the 14th of May, intellectuals led by Dai Qing won Hu Qili's permission to bypass censorship. They used it to print their views in the Guangming Daily and to urge students to leave the square. Many students assumed the intellectuals spoke for the government and stayed put. That evening, Yan Mingfu led government negotiators, while Shen Tong and Xiang Xiaoji led the student side. Yan called the movement patriotic and begged the students to withdraw. The session descended into chaos as rival factions made uncoordinated demands. It collapsed when students learned that the talks had not gone out on national broadcasts as promised. Yan went to the square himself and even offered to be held hostage. The next day he urged Li Peng to withdraw the 26th of April editorial and call the movement patriotic and democratic. Li said no.

  Gorbachev's welcome ceremony took place at the airport, because the students stayed in the square. The visit was the first Sino-Soviet summit in some 30 years and marked a normalisation of relations. The protests spoiled its smooth running, causing a major "loss of face" for the leadership and pushing many moderates toward a harder line. On the 16th of May, Gorbachev met Zhao. Zhao told him, and so the international press, that Deng remained the "paramount authority" in China. Deng suspected Zhao of shifting the blame onto him. Zhao answered that telling world leaders this in private was routine, and that Li Peng had told US president George H. W. Bush much the same in February 1989. Still, the remark opened a decisive rift between the country's two top leaders.

  Controls on the press loosened sharply. State media showed sympathetic footage of the hunger strikers. Marchers on the 17th and the 18th of May came from every walk of Beijing life. Soldiers, police officers and lower-ranking party officials joined them. Grassroots party and Youth League groups and government-run unions encouraged members to take part. Several non-Communist parties wrote to Li Peng in support. The Chinese Red Cross sent staff to treat the hunger strikers. Foreign journalists stayed on after Gorbachev left, and Western governments urged restraint.

  By the 17th of May, protests of various sizes were under way in some 400 cities. Students rallied outside provincial party offices in Fujian, Hubei and Xinjiang. Local officials, without a clear line from Beijing, were unsure how to react. With so many groups involved, each with its own complaints, nobody could say whom the government should negotiate with. Press control had already tightened elsewhere. On the 19th of April, editors of the World Economic Herald planned a tribute to Hu. It included an article by Yan Jiaqi praising the Beijing students. Jiang Zemin ordered it censored, and many copies went to press with a blank page. He suspended lead editor Qin Benli, and his firmness won the trust of conservative elders.

  Back in Beijing, the authorities watched student leaders closely. Traffic cameras watched the square, and phones in nearby restaurants and other student haunts were tapped. That surveillance later helped police identify, arrest and punish participants.

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• 6. Martial Law and a Fractured Square

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  The decisive meeting took place on the 17th of May at Deng's residence. Zhao Ziyang's strategy of concessions, which included retracting the 26th of April editorial, came under heavy criticism. Li Peng, Yao Yilin and Deng blamed Zhao's soothing speech to the Asian Development Bank on the 4th of May. They said it had exposed splits at the top and emboldened the students. Deng warned that "there is no way to back down now without the situation spiraling out of control". Troops would enter Beijing under martial law. Of the five committee members present, Zhao and Hu Qili opposed martial law. Li Peng and Yao Yilin backed it firmly, and Qiao Shi stayed neutral. Deng gave those last three the job of carrying it out. Zhao maintained until he died that the decision was Deng's.

  That evening, the committee met at Zhongnanhai to settle the plans. Zhao said he was ready to "take leave" because he could not bring himself to enforce martial law. The elders Bo Yibo and Yang Shangkun told the committee to follow Deng. Zhao did not treat the inconclusive vote as binding. Yang, as Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission, moved the army toward the capital anyway. On the 18th, Li Peng met students for the first time. The talks were tense, and student leaders once more insisted the editorial be withdrawn. They did gain prominent time on national television.

  At 4:50 am on the 19th of May, Zhao Ziyang walked into Tiananmen Square with Wen Jiabao, in what proved his political swan song. Li Peng also visited the square but left quickly. Through a bullhorn, Zhao urged the students to end their hunger strike. He told them they were still young, and he asked them not to sacrifice themselves without thought for their futures. Some applauded his emotional speech. It was his last public appearance.

  The government declared martial law on the 20th of May. It drew on at least 30 divisions from five of the seven military regions, with at least 14 of the 24 army corps contributing troops. As many as 300,000 soldiers headed for Beijing. Guangzhou's civil aviation authorities suspended airline travel to ferry military units. Crowds of protesters and ordinary residents blocked the army's entry in the suburbs. Finding no route in, the authorities ordered the army to withdraw on the 24th of May. All forces pulled back to bases outside the city.

  Support from abroad swelled in those weeks. The Chinese University of Hong Kong donated HK$10,000 by early May. The Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China took shape. The Chinese Alliance for Democracy, based in New York, supplied money and organised rallies in New York and Washington, D.C. Donors in the United States, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Australia and across Europe sent money too. On the 27th of May, over 300,000 people filled Happy Valley Racecourse in Hong Kong for the Concert for Democracy in China. The next day, 1.5 million people, a quarter of Hong Kong's population, marched on Hong Kong Island behind Martin Lee and Szeto Wah. The United States and Japan warned their citizens against travel to China.

  Inside the square, the movement was coming apart. Students passed the time with music, drinking and smoking, but the square was overcrowded and unsanitary. Hou Dejian proposed an open election for student leaders and met opposition. Wang Dan softened his stance and urged a temporary retreat to campus, but hardline factions wanted to hold the square. Control of the loudspeakers became a prize in a series of "mini-coups", since whoever held them seemed to lead. Rival groups accused each other of collusion with the government or of chasing fame. Some students even tried to kidnap Chai Ling and Feng Congde to force them out. Chai called it a "well-organised and premeditated plot".

  Chai seemed ready to let the movement end in violence. In a late May interview, she was blunt. "What we actually are hoping for is bloodshed, the moment when the government is ready to brazenly butcher the people. Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes." She felt she could not persuade her fellow students of this. She also said she had heard the idea from Li Lu rather than coming up with it herself.

  On the 1st of June, Li Peng sent every Politburo member a report titled "On the True Nature of the Turmoil". It claimed that a "tiny minority" had plotted the unrest and was treating the square as a staging ground for conflict. It also alleged ties to criminal elements and said foreign and domestic money had paid for better communications gear and weapons. The same day, Ministry of State Security chief Jia Chunwang sent a second report to the Politburo. Elders including Deng, Li Xiannian and Chen Yun received it too. It blamed Western influence, especially American, and called the Voice of America a tool of psychological warfare. It said a CIA agent at the US Embassy had nearly fifty contacts between 1981 and 1988. Fifteen of them were linked to the Economic Restructuring Commission. The report urged immediate military action and was seen as one of the strongest justifications for it.

  On the 2nd of June, newspapers called on the students to clear out of the square, and protests broke out in response. Many were especially angered by the Beijing Daily's article "Tiananmen, I Cry for You", written by a disillusioned student. Liu Xiaobo, Zhou Duo, Gao Xin and the Taiwanese singer Hou Dejian began a second hunger strike to rekindle the movement. That day, Deng and several elders met the three Standing Committee members who remained after Zhao and Hu Qili were ousted. They were Li Peng, Qiao Shi and Yao Yilin. The group agreed to clear the square as peacefully as possible, with force authorised if protesters refused. Troops from the 27th, 65th and 24th armies were quietly moved into the Great Hall of the People and the Ministry of Public Security compound.

  That evening, a jeep of the People's Armed Police mounted a sidewalk, killing three pedestrians and injuring a fourth. Fear spread that troops were about to advance, and student leaders ordered roadblocks at major intersections. On the morning of the 3rd, crowds at Xinjiekou stopped a busload of plainclothes soldiers and questioned them. Soldiers and Beijing security staff were beaten, and some were seized on their way to a hospital. At 1 pm, a crowd at Liubukou boarded another bus and held military helmets aloft on bayonets. At 2:30 pm, police used tear gas on a crowd, but rock-throwing demonstrators forced them back into Zhongnanhai through the west gate. Around 5:30 pm, thousands of troops waiting for orders started to withdraw from the Great Hall. The leaders spent the evening watching events.

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• 7. The Night of the Fourth

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  On the evening of the 3rd of June, the government told citizens to "stay off the streets and away from Tiananmen Square". Protesters answered with their own broadcasts across campuses, urging students and citizens to take up arms and gather at intersections and the square. At 8 pm, the 38th Army, under interim commander Zhang Meiyuan, set out from Shijingshan and Fentai in western Beijing. It advanced east along Chang'an Avenue's western extension. At 9:30 pm, a blockade at Gongzhufen stopped it, and the troops tried to break through. Protesters threw rocks and molotov cocktails. Troops in riot gear used rubber bullets, gas, electric prods and batons. Warning shots into the air had no effect.

  At 10:10 pm, an officer took up a megaphone and told the crowd to disperse. At about 10:30 pm, with rocks still raining down, the troops began shooting live rounds. The crowd, stunned, fell back toward Muxidi Bridge, about 5 km from the square. Another blockade halted the advance there. Protesters repelled an anti-riot brigade. Regular troops then moved forward and turned their weapons on the crowd, firing sometimes into the air and sometimes at people. The troops used expanding bullets, which are barred in warfare between nations but allowed for other purposes. Deaths were recorded all along Chang'an Avenue. The largest number came on the two-mile stretch from Muxidi to Xidan. There, 65 PLA trucks and 47 armoured personnel carriers were destroyed, and 485 other military vehicles were damaged.

  Demonstrators hit back with poles, stones and molotov cocktails. Jeff Widener reported seeing military vehicles set alight and soldiers beaten to death inside them. On one western avenue, protesters torched a column of over 100 trucks and armoured vehicles. They also took over an armoured personnel carrier and drove it around for fun. Chinese state television broadcast these scenes. On the 5th of June 1989, The Wall Street Journal reported that angry mobs shouting "Fascists" had dragged soldiers from trucks and beaten them. It described one soldier's stripped body hung from a bus and another's corpse strung up east of the square.

  In the square itself, the early hours of the 4th of June brought a different kind of fight. The first armoured personnel carrier rolled in from Chang'an West Boulevard. Demonstrators disabled it with a traffic divider and set it on fire. Accounts of the three men inside differ. Wu Renhua says students escorted them to a medic station. A Chinese-American reporter said two soldiers burned alive and a third was beaten to death. Larry Wortzel, then a military intelligence officer at the US Embassy, noted that the crowd's swarming tactics looked rehearsed. The first troops from the west reached the square around 1:30 am, and others soon sealed the main roads. Loudspeakers then blared a second announcement. "Citizens and students must evacuate the Square immediately so that martial law troops can successfully carry out their mission." By 2 am, only a few thousand people remained.

  At 3 am, Hou Dejian, Liu Xiaobo, Zhou Duo and Gao Xin decided to persuade the students to leave. Chai Ling insisted that "those who wish to leave may leave, and those who don't may stay." Hou spoke over the loudspeaker, urging the crowd to give up their weapons and go. He and Zhou Duo then took an ambulance to the Museum of Chinese History. Between 3:30 and 3:45 am, they met a regimental political commissar named Ji Xinguo. Ji passed their request for time and a way out to Martial Law Headquarters, which agreed and told them to leave by the south. Back in the square, Feng Congde called a voice vote on staying or leaving. The result was unclear, but Feng said the shouts to leave were louder. Students began marching out behind their school banners toward the southeast.

  At about 4:35 am, the square's lights came on and troops started forward. A squad of commandos rushed the monument and destroyed the students' loudspeaker with gunfire. Hou Dejian said tear gas was used. At 5:23 am, an armoured car rammed the Goddess of Democracy statue several times. After it fell, soldiers carried off its broken torch as a memento. The troops were then told to hand over their ammunition and given a rest from 7 am to 9 am. Debris from the occupation was burned in piles or bagged and flown away by military helicopters. Troops inside the Great Hall stayed confined for the next nine days. They apparently slept on floors and shared one packet of instant noodles among three men each day.

  Just past 6 am, a column of students who had left the square was walking west in the bicycle lane of Chang'an Avenue. Three tanks went after them, firing tear gas, and one drove into the crowd. It killed 11 students and injured scores. By dawn, smoke rose from the city centre and burned-out vehicles lined the streets. Some demonstrators regrouped and tried to get back into the square from the northeast, but gunfire drove them off. At 5 pm, a US State Department report to the US Embassy said the PLA was "mopping up isolated resistance". Public access to the square was barred for two weeks.

  On the 5th of June, a column of tanks from the 1st Armored Division left the square and rolled east along Chang'an Avenue. A lone man stood in the road ahead of them. Western media on the Beijing Hotel photographed the standoff. After the man returned to his spot in front of the tanks, a group of people pulled him aside. Charlie Cole of Newsweek said they were government agents. Jan Wong of The Globe and Mail thought they were worried bystanders. Contemporary sources and Timothy Brook's analysis name Tank Man as Wang Weilin. He was 19, the son of a factory worker, and received a ten-year prison term. His fate is not known. In 1990, Jiang Zemin said he doubted the man had been killed. Time later included him on its list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

  The city stayed in turmoil. A convoy of 37 armoured personnel carriers at Muxidi had to be abandoned among burned buses and military vehicles. Foreign news reports described fighting between rival PLA units. Meanwhile, 26 tanks and three armoured personnel carriers took defensive positions at the Jianguomen and Fuxingmen overpasses. Shellfire was heard through the night. A US Marine in the east reported seeing an armoured vehicle disabled by an armour-piercing shell. No copies of the People's Daily reached Beijing on the 5th of June. Many shops, offices and factories stayed shut, and public transit shrank to the subway and suburban buses.

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• 8. Counting the Cost

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  After order returned to Beijing on the 4th of June, some 80 other Chinese cities saw further protests. In Hong Kong, people again wore black, and many abroad wore black armbands. In Shanghai, students marched on the 5th and blocked roads and railways. When the city government tried to clear the rails on the 6th, crowds fought back fiercely, and several people died under a train. The situation was eased without deadly force, and Beijing's top leaders credited the city with averting an upheaval. In Chengdu, security forces violently crushed large protests on the 4th and the 5th of June, and eyewitnesses reported "300 to 400 people killed". In Wuhan, students shut the Yangtze River Railway bridge, and about a thousand staged a sit-in on the tracks. Residents there began a bank run and panic buying.

  At a news conference on the 6th of June, State Council spokesperson Yuan Mu said "nearly 300 people died". He counted soldiers, 23 students and others he called criminals or victims of mistakes. He put the wounded at 5,000 officers and soldiers and over 2,000 civilians. Military spokesperson Zhang Gong claimed that no one died in Tiananmen Square itself. On the 9th, Deng made his first public appearance since the protests began and praised the soldiers he called "martyrs". Other estimates range from several hundred to the low thousands dead, with thousands more wounded.

  The consequences came quickly. Western countries imposed arms embargoes on China, and Western media called the crackdown a massacre. The government put down protests elsewhere and carried out mass arrests, which spurred Operation Yellowbird. It tightly controlled Chinese and foreign-linked media and removed or demoted officials it saw as sympathetic. It also invested heavily in better riot police. Political reforms begun in 1986 halted, as did the New Enlightenment movement, and the liberalising policies of the 1980s slowed. Some resumed after Deng's southern tour in 1992. Market reforms then sped up under strong state direction, while political liberalisation stayed curtailed.

  The Chinese government has used many names for these events since 1989. At first it called them a "counter revolutionary rebellion", then a "riot", then "political turmoil" and "1989 storm". Today it uses the label "political turmoil between the spring and summer of 1989". Outside mainland China, and among critics inside it, the crackdown is called the June Fourth Massacre or the June Fourth Crackdown. English labels such as Tiananmen Square Massacre point to the square. Yet much of the violence took place on a stretch of Chang'an Avenue only a few miles long, especially near Muxidi. To slip past the Great Firewall, internet users coined other names. They wrote May 35th, VIIV for 6 and 4 in Roman numerals, and Eight Squared, since 8 squared is 64. The last, 8964, is simply the date with the year first, written as 89, 6 and 4.

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