Thirty seven years on: What happened at Tiananmen Square?

June 4, 2026, marks the anniversary of one of the most significant and heavily suppressed events of the 20th century. For those who have never heard of it, this is the story.

To understand Tiananmen, you have to understand China in the 1980s. After the chaos of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, which devastated the country’s economy and social fabric, paramount leader Deng Xiaoping began opening China to market forces in the late 1970s. Farming was decollectivised, private enterprise was permitted, and foreign investment was welcomed.

The results were spectacular and destabilising. China grew rapidly, but the benefits were uneven. Government corruption became rampant. A dual-pricing system allowed well-connected officials to buy goods at fixed state prices and sell them at higher market rates, enriching those with political connections. Inflation surged. Between 1987 and 1988, consumer prices in Beijing rose by around 30 per cent, leaving ordinary wage workers unable to afford basic goods.

For students and intellectuals, the frustration ran deeper still. Universities were expanding, but graduates found that good jobs went to those with the right connections, not the right qualifications. The Communist Party continued to restrict political expression while pushing an economic system that was abandoning its socialist principles without offering any democratic accountability in return.

By the mid-1980s, the cracks were showing. Student protests flared across several cities in 1986, calling for political reform, the rule of law, and greater freedoms. The general secretary of the Communist Party at the time, Hu Yaobang, was regarded as sympathetic to the students. He was forced to resign in January 1987, blamed for handling the protests too softly. He remained popular among students, intellectuals, and reform-minded members of the Party.

On April 15, 1989, Hu Yaobang died of a heart attack when he was 73.

For students who admired him, his death was a blow. Many believed his forced resignation had contributed to his decline.

Within hours, students began gathering at Tiananmen Square, the vast public plaza in the heart of Beijing, directly in front of the gate to the imperial Forbidden City, to mourn.

What began as a memorial evolved quickly into something larger. Within days, thousands of students from Beijing’s universities were in the square. Posters appeared calling not just for Hu’s rehabilitation, but for broader change: an end to corruption, transparency from officials about their income, freedom of the press, and the right to peaceful assembly.

By April 22, the day of Hu’s state funeral, over 100,000 students had gathered in the square. The government held the ceremony inside the Great Hall of the People on the western edge of the square, keeping protesters outside. Three students knelt on the steps of the hall, presenting a petition and demanding to speak with Premier Li Peng.

No official emerged to meet them, and the snub deepened the anger.

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Through late April, the protests continued to grow

Demonstrations spread to cities across China, eventually reaching around 400 in total. Workers joined students, voicing their own grievances about inflation, corruption, and the erosion of the welfare system that had once guaranteed housing, healthcare, and job security.

The Communist Party leadership was divided. General Secretary Zhao Ziyang urged a conciliatory approach, arguing that the students had legitimate concerns and that dialogue was the only way forward. Premier Li Peng took the harder line, calling the movement a conspiracy aimed at subverting Communist Party rule.

On April 26, the People’s Daily, the Party’s official newspaper, published a front-page editorial declaring the student movement a planned act of rebellion, and the language echoed that of the Cultural Revolution. Rather than frightening students, it infuriated them and gave the movement a sharper edge.

The following day, around 50,000 to 100,000 students marched through Beijing’s streets toward the square, breaking through police cordons and receiving cheering support from factory workers and onlookers along the route. It was one of the largest unauthorised demonstrations in the history of the People’s Republic. The government, shaken, agreed to hold talks with student representatives.

The talks produced little, and the student leaders demanded that the dialogue be broadcast live, but the government refused.

The hunger strike

On May 13, two days before Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s scheduled arrival in Beijing for a historic state visit, students launched a hunger strike in the square. Their timing was deliberate: they knew Gorbachev’s visit would bring an international press corps, and that the government would not want the world to see a crackdown while foreign dignitaries were present.

The hunger strike dramatically shifted public sentiment. By afternoon on May 13, some 300,000 people had gathered around the square. Across the city, millions more came out in solidarity. Workers, journalists, civil servants, and even lower-ranking Communist Party officials joined marches in support. The government appeared paralysed.

Zhao Ziyang made his last public appearance on May 19, visiting hunger strikers in the square in the early hours of the morning. Speaking through a megaphone, he told the students that they were young and had a long life ahead of them, and urged them to protect their health. He was visibly emotional. It was a remarkable moment and his political farewell. He was stripped of all positions and placed under house arrest, where he would remain until his death in 2005.

With Gorbachev’s visit concluded and the protests showing no sign of ending, Deng Xiaoping made his decision. On May 20, the State Council declared martial law in Beijing. The People’s Liberation Army began mobilising. Eventually, around 300,000 troops were ordered toward the capital from regions across the country.

The first attempt to move troops into the city was blocked. Ordinary Beijingers, many of them factory workers, poured into the streets and physically surrounded army vehicles, preventing them from advancing. Soldiers were handed food by crowds and did not force their way through. After two days, the troops withdrew to the outskirts.

For a moment, it seemed as though the movement might extract a concession. But the leadership had not changed course. It had merely paused.

The protests continued through May, though they became increasingly disorganised. By late May, weeks of occupation had taken a toll. The square was overcrowded, and its sanitation was deteriorating. Student leaders argued amongst themselves. Some wanted to leave and regroup; others insisted on staying. A vote was taken, its result unclear. The students stayed.

The night of June 3 to 4

On the evening of June 3, 1989, the government broadcast emergency announcements telling citizens to stay off the streets. At the same time, student radio networks at university campuses were calling people to gather at the square.

Just after 10pm on June 3, troops from the 38th Army, moving along Chang’an Avenue from the west, opened fire with live ammunition on crowds blocking their path. It was not rubber bullets or tear gas. Soldiers used ammunition illegal under international law for an interstate conflict. Bodies fell not in the square itself but on the streets and pavements leading to it, with the heaviest toll in the neighbourhood of Muxidi, several kilometres to the west of the square.

Armoured vehicles moved into Tiananmen Square itself in the early hours of June 4. Many protesters, exhausted and frightened, had already begun to leave. Student leaders negotiated with military commanders, and by around 4am an agreement was reached: those remaining in the square would be allowed to leave peacefully through the south-eastern exit. At 5.23am, soldiers destroyed the Goddess of Democracy, a large sculpture resembling the Statue of Liberty that students had erected in the square days earlier.

The violence did not end at the square. As the column of retreating students moved west along Chang’an Avenue, reports emerged of soldiers firing into the crowd. Violence continued in the streets of Beijing throughout the day of 4 June. Residents caught in their own homes and on balconies were caught in the gunfire.

The man who stopped the tanks

On the morning of June 5, as a convoy of tanks rolled east along Chang’an Avenue, a lone man stepped out into the road and stood directly in front of the lead vehicle.

The tank stopped. The man moved to block it as it tried to steer around him. They repeated this several times. Then, without explanation, the man was pulled away by bystanders.

His identity has never been established, and his fate remains unknown. Asked about him in 1990, Jiang Zemin, who had by then replaced Zhao Ziyang as China’s top leader, said he did not believe the man had been killed. Nothing further has ever been confirmed.

The photograph, taken from an upper floor of the Beijing Hotel by Western photographers, became one of the most recognised images of the 20th century. Inside China, it is suppressed from all search engines, deleted from social media, and unknown to most people under 40.

The Chinese government’s initial figures put the number of dead at around 300, including soldiers. An internal party report compiled in June 1989 put the civilian death toll at 218, plus 36 student deaths.

Other estimates have ranged far higher, as the Chinese Red Cross initially announced 2,600 deaths before quickly retracting the figure. A Swiss diplomat estimated 2,700. A compilation of Beijing hospital records documented at least 478 confirmed deaths and 920 injuries. Amnesty International estimated several hundred to nearly 1,000 dead.

The Tiananmen Mothers, a group of bereaved families who have spent decades documenting individual cases, had verified 202 deaths by 2011, acknowledging their count was almost certainly incomplete given the difficulty of conducting such research under constant government surveillance.

The true figure has never been independently established. No investigation has ever been permitted.

Arrests, exiles, and a political purge

Within weeks, a wave of arrests swept across China. Tens of thousands were detained. A list of 21 most-wanted student leaders was publicised on state television, with photographs and biographical details. Seven of them managed to escape abroad, helped by Western intelligence services and Hong Kong activists in an operation known as Yellowbird. The remaining fourteen were eventually caught and imprisoned.

Leaders of the student movement faced varying fates. Some, like Wang Dan, spent years in prison. Others, like Wuer Kaixi and Chai Ling, made it to the West and have spent decades in exile, unable to return.

Zhao Ziyang, stripped of all positions, spent the final 16 years of his life under house arrest in Beijing. He secretly recorded his memoirs onto audio tapes, which were smuggled out of China and published internationally after his death under the title Prisoner of the State.

Inside the Party, those who had shown sympathy for the students were purged at Tiananmen Square. Jiang Zemin, the Shanghai party chief who had suppressed the 1989 protests there without bloodshed, was elevated to general secretary of the Communist Party and later became China’s paramount leader.

The United States, the European Community, and Japan imposed economic sanctions and arms embargoes on China. The arms embargo imposed by the European Union remains in effect to this day.

Thirty-seven years later, the Tiananmen massacre continues to shape Chinese politics in ways that are almost never discussed openly inside the country.

The event has been effectively erased from public consciousness within China, and school textbooks contain virtually no reference to it. Internet searches for related terms return nothing or are blocked. Social media posts using associated phrases are automatically deleted.

On the anniversary each year, security services deploy heavily around the square. Anyone who pauses too long, photographs the wrong thing, or holds up even a blank piece of paper is likely to be quietly removed.

The Tiananmen Mothers, now led by elderly women in their seventies and eighties, continue their documentation work under constant surveillance. They have written open letters to the National People’s Congress every year since the early 1990s. They have received no formal response.

In Hong Kong, the situation changed dramatically in recent years. For three decades after 1989, tens of thousands gathered each year at Victoria Park for a candlelight vigil, one of the world’s largest annual commemorations of the event. After Beijing imposed the National Security Law in 2020, the vigils were banned, the organising group disbanded, and the June 4th Museum was forced to close. Several of its organisers were arrested.

In Taiwan, the Tiananmen crackdown is frequently cited as evidence of what awaits democratic societies under mainland Chinese control.

What the Chinese government says about Tiananmen Square

The official position of the Chinese Communist Party has not materially changed in 37 years. The crackdown was necessary to prevent chaos, restore order, and protect the economic development that subsequently lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty. Officials have consistently described the 1989 movement as a “counter-revolutionary riot” encouraged by foreign interference.

At an international security forum in 2019, China’s defence minister defended the crackdown as a correct policy that had secured the stability enabling China’s subsequent rise.

Privately, some former officials expressed regret. Chen Xitong, the Beijing mayor who read out the martial law declaration, said shortly before his death in 2013 that he was sorry for the deaths of innocent civilians. The former party elder Yang Shangkun reportedly told his physician before his death in 1998 that 4 June had been the worst mistake the Communist Party had ever made.

None of these private admissions has led to any official reassessment. The Party’s position, and its enforcement of silence on the subject, remains unchanged.

The Tiananmen Square protests were not simply a student demonstration that went wrong. They were a mass movement involving workers, intellectuals, journalists, and ordinary citizens across hundreds of Chinese cities, all demanding something that the Communist Party was unwilling to grant: accountability.

The response to martial law, military force, mass arrests, and decades of enforced amnesia established the terms under which China has been governed ever since. It settled, at least for a generation, the question of whether rapid economic development and political liberalisation could coexist in China. The answer the Party chose was that they could not.

Today, the square is open and busy with tourists. The portrait of Mao looks out from the gate of the Forbidden City, and officers move quietly through the crowds.

The man who stood before the tank has never been identified. The families of those killed have never received an apology. The students who survived have grown old in prison, in exile, or in a country where they cannot speak about what they lived through.

“Without memory,” the artist Ai Weiwei wrote on the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, “there is no civilised society or nation. Our past is all we have.”

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