The Tiananmen Square Massacre: What Really Happened on June 4, 1989

Jun 4, 2023
6 min read

Graphic about Tiananmen Square massacre with tanks, Mao illustration, Chinese emblem, and protest crowd; title text on June 4, 1989.

On the night of 3 June 1989, Chinese troops and tanks rolled into Beijing. By the early hours of 4 June, hundreds of unarmed protesters were dead. The Tiananmen Square massacre remains one of the most significant and most actively suppressed events in modern history. Thirty-seven years on, the Chinese government still won't acknowledge it, millions of its own citizens don't know it happened, and the man who stepped in front of a column of tanks has never been identified.

This is what we know.

Tiananmen Square a year before the protests and massacre

How It Started

The spring of 1989 had been building towards something. Under Deng Xiaoping, China had spent the previous decade opening up economically, but political reform had stalled. Inflation was running high, corruption was rampant, and a growing number of students and intellectuals were frustrated that market reforms hadn't brought any meaningful freedom of expression.

The spark came on 15 April 1989, when Hu Yaobang died of a heart attack. Hu had been the General Secretary of the Communist Party until 1987, when he was forced out for being too sympathetic to student protesters. Students began gathering in Tiananmen Square to mourn him, and those mourning crowds quickly became something else: a full-blown pro-democracy movement calling for an end to corruption, a free press, and genuine political reform.

Within weeks, the protests had spread to over 400 cities across China. At their peak, more than a million people filled Tiananmen Square alone.

The Goddess of Democracy

One of the most striking moments of the entire protest period came on 30 May 1989, when art students from eight Beijing institutions erected a ten-metre-tall sculpture in the centre of Tiananmen Square. They called it the Goddess of Democracy.

The statue was built from foam and papier-mache over a metal frame, constructed in just three days and transported to the square in pieces on three-wheeled carts, under cover of darkness, during martial law. It was deliberately positioned to face directly towards the portrait of Mao Zedong that hangs over Tiananmen Gate, roughly 300 metres away. The students made it as large as they possibly could, calculating that the government would either have to destroy it in full public view or leave it standing.

It stood for five days before the tanks came.

Martial Law and the Decision to Crush the Protests

On 19 May, Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang visited the hunger strikers in the square. In what became one of the most haunting political speeches ever recorded, he told the students: 'We came too late. We are sorry.' He was fighting back tears. Zhao was the last senior leader to oppose a violent crackdown; within 24 hours he was under house arrest, where he would remain until his death in 2005.

Premier Li Peng declared martial law on 20 May. Initial attempts to move troops into Beijing were blocked by ordinary citizens who surrounded military vehicles and refused to let them pass. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) spent nearly two weeks regrouping before making its decisive move.

Deng Xiaoping made the final call. The protests were declared a 'counterrevolutionary riot', and the order was given to clear the square by any means necessary.

The Night of 3-4 June

Soldiers began moving in during the evening of 3 June, equipped with tanks and armed with live ammunition. The killing didn't take place primarily inside the square itself but in the streets and hutongs (alleyways) surrounding it, where civilians tried to block the military's advance. Soldiers beat, bayoneted, and shot protesters. People were crushed under tank tracks. Doctors and ambulance drivers who attempted to reach the wounded were shot at. Parents who came looking for missing sons and daughters were turned away at gunpoint.

By around 6am on 4 June, the square had been cleared. The Goddess of Democracy was demolished. Soldiers attacked it with metal bars until it collapsed.

The scene was one that echoed other moments when governments turned violently on their own people. The Beslan school siege and the Thammasat University massacre in Thailand share something of this same terrible logic: states choosing violence over accountability, and then spending decades trying to bury the memory of it.

Tank Man

The following morning, as a column of Type 59 tanks moved east along Chang'an Avenue away from the square, a lone man in a white shirt stepped into the road and stood directly in their path. He was carrying shopping bags.

Multiple military tanks lined up on a wide, marked road.

When the lead tank tried to manoeuvre around him, he moved to block it. When it tried the other way, he moved again. After several minutes, he climbed onto the tank itself. Witnesses said he spoke to the crew through a hatch, though what he said has never been confirmed. Eventually he was pulled away by bystanders and disappeared into the crowd.

Four photographers captured the image from hotel balconies overlooking the boulevard: Jeff Widener of the Associated Press, Stuart Franklin of Magnum Photos, Charlie Cole of Newsweek, and Manuel Rivera-Ortiz. The photo became one of the most reproduced images of the 20th century.

The identity of Tank Man has never been established. The Chinese government has claimed he was never arrested, but his fate remains completely unknown.

The Death Toll: A Number Nobody Agrees On

The exact number of people killed on 3-4 June 1989 has never been confirmed, and may never be. The Chinese government initially floated a figure of around 200-300, including soldiers. The Chinese Red Cross estimated 2,600 deaths before retracting the figure under government pressure.

A British diplomatic cable declassified in 2017 put the figure at approximately 10,000 dead, though historians have widely disputed this as too high. Most Western human rights organisations place the toll at several hundred to over a thousand. A 2019 survey by the universities of Toronto and Hong Kong found that more than 3,200 search terms related to the massacre had been censored on China's domestic internet.

Beyond those killed, tens of thousands were arrested across China in the weeks that followed. Many faced lengthy prison sentences. The leaders of the protest movement who weren't imprisoned were forced into exile.

Bodies lay in the street after the massacre

China's Silence and the World's Memory

The Chinese government has never issued an apology, acknowledged the scale of the violence, or released a full accounting of those killed. Public discussion of the events is banned inside China. The subject is scrubbed from textbooks, filtered from the internet, and erased from social media. Many young Chinese people today have little or no knowledge that it happened.

Outside China, the response was significant. President George H.W. Bush suspended military sales and high-level diplomatic exchanges. The European Union imposed an arms embargo that remains technically in place to this day.

In Hong Kong, before the National Security Law came into force in 2020, the Victoria Park candlelight vigil attracted tens of thousands every year on the anniversary. It was one of the world's largest regular commemorations of a political event. The vigil was effectively banned in 2020 and the group that organised it, the Hong Kong Alliance, was dissolved under pressure in 2021.

Zhao Ziyang, the leader who wept at the protesters' bedsides and refused to sanction the crackdown, spent the last 15 years of his life under house arrest. He secretly recorded his memoirs on cassette tapes, which were smuggled out of China and published posthumously in 2009 under the title Prisoner of the State. It remains banned in mainland China.

Why It Still Matters

Tiananmen is a masterclass in state-sponsored erasure. The Chinese government didn't just suppress the protests. It spent the following three and a half decades suppressing the memory of suppressing the protests. That kind of sustained, systematic censorship is worth understanding, not just as a historical footnote, but as an example of how regimes work to control not just what people do, but what they know.

The protests themselves grew from something recognisable: a generation of people who'd been told reform was coming, and were tired of waiting. Their demands weren't particularly radical. They wanted accountability, a free press, and an end to corruption. What they got instead is one of the most documented atrocities of the 20th century, and one of the least discussed.

The man with the shopping bags standing in front of the tank is still out there somewhere, or he isn't. Nobody knows.