History News Network

Tiananmen Square

Originally published 06/06/2014
5 Things You Should Know About the Tiananmen Square Massacre

TIME went back in history to pull out the details, context and feelings of those grim days from their own coverage at the time.

Originally published 06/05/2014
Hong Kong's Huge Vigil For Tiananmen Square

Organisers said Hong Kong had a duty to light a candle in remembrance "when the whole of China is being silenced."

Originally published 06/05/2014
The Ghosts of Tiananmen Square

Is it an act frozen in time, awaiting its true recognition and denouement in some vague future?

Originally published 06/05/2014
The Tiananmen Massacre: 25 Years Later, Three Students Tell What They Saw

Jonathan Chan, Kenneth Lam and Liane Lee were eyewitnesses to the bloody events of June 4, 1989. Now a quarter-century later, the former Hong Kong activists and student supporters of the Tiananmen protests share their painful memories.

Originally published 06/04/2014
"I Think It's Already Been Forgotten"

How China's millennials talk about Tiananmen Square.

Originally published 06/04/2014
Dissident tells leaders to stop honoring Chinese leaders until they admit Tiananmen Massacre

Despite all the economic progress in China, there has been little political reform in the past 25 years, he said.

Originally published 06/04/2014
Chinese Military Was Split over Bloody Suppression of 1989 Student Protests, US Intelligence Believed

The National Security Archive is posting 25 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) records relating to the event and its aftermath.

Originally published 06/03/2014
13 Photos of the Tiananmen Square Massacre That China Wants the World to Forget

While the iconic image of an unarmed man standing before a row of tanks on a road leading to Tiananmen Square stays firmly planted in the world's collective memory, Chinese authorities have gone to great lengths to scrub the protests, the massacre and that scene from its history.

Originally published 06/03/2014
China, the world remembers Tiananmen massacre

It's 2014, but the pro-democracy, pro-rights sentiments that manifested across China as demonstrations in 1989 are still alive and well.

Originally published 06/03/2014
Tiananmen and the erasure of history

College texts denounce the protests as a foreign-controlled plot to crush Chinese socialism.

Originally published 06/02/2014
25 Years Later, Details Emerge of Army’s Chaos Before Tiananmen Square

In 1989, a Chinese general refused to take part in violence against protesters, sending tremors through the Communist Party establishment, documents and interviews show.

Originally published 05/22/2014
25 Years Later: What Have We Learned About China Since the Tiananmen Square Massacre?

How human rights and democracy have become elements of conflict in Sino-American relations.

Originally published 05/02/2014
Q & A: Jeffrey Wasserstrom on History, Dissent and the Power of May 4 in China

"The 1989 protesters identified strongly with the May Fourth Movement of 1919, a student-led patriotic popular struggle that is as celebrated in the Chinese educational system as, say, the Boston Tea Party is in the American one."

Originally published 06/07/2013
Jeffrey Wasserstorm: Looking Back at the June 4 Massacre, Twenty-Four Years On

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine. He is co-editor (with Angilee Shah) of Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land (University of California Press, 2012) and also a short anthology, China Stories, published as an ebook by the Los Angeles Review of Books.Late last year and early this year, I worked with Maura Elizabeth Cunningham on creating the second edition of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, a short book with a question-and-answer format whose first edition came out in 2010. Given how quickly China has been changing, there were many things that needed updating, especially in chapters that come late in the book. Since work on the first edition was completed late in 2009, Liu Xiaobo and Mo Yan won Nobel prizes, the microblogging platform weibo took off, and there was a dramatic uptick in environmental protests—to name just a few recent developments that Maura and I needed to address in the 2.0 version. Today, though, I am thinking with sorrow of a section in a chapter titled “From Mao to Now” that I wish we needed to revise, but didn’t—the answer to the following question: “Why Hasn’t the Chinese Government Changed Its Line on Tiananmen?”...

Originally published 03/28/2013
China's First Lady was crooner to troops who suppressed Tiananmen Square protests

BEIJING — A photo of China’s new first lady Peng Liyuan in younger days, singing to martial-law troops following the 1989 bloody military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, flickered across Chinese cyberspace this week.It was swiftly scrubbed from China’s Internet before it could generate discussion online. But the image — seen and shared by outside observers — revived a memory the leadership prefers to suppress and shows one of the challenges in presenting Peng on the world stage as the softer side of China.The country has no recent precedent for the role of first lady, and also faces a tricky balance at home. The leadership wants Peng to show the human side of the new No. 1 leader, Xi Jinping, while not exposing too many perks of the elite. And it must balance popular support for the first couple with an acute wariness of personality cults that could skew the consensus rule among the Chinese Communist Party’s top leaders....

Originally published 01/18/2013
Gen. Yang Baibing Dies at 93; Led Tiananmen Crackdown

BEIJING — Gen. Yang Baibing, a military strongman who carried out the violent suppression of student-led protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and was later purged because of fears that he was accruing too much power, died here on Tuesday. He was 93.His death was reported by the official Xinhua news agency. A statement issued by the party’s Central Committee provided the sort of terse homage typically reserved for a disgraced political figure, saying, “He was a seasoned loyal Communist fighter and a proletarian revolutionist.”