308. When Beijing’s streets flowed with blood
Today marks the day in 1989 when the bloody crackdown on peaceful protesters took place around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and in 400 cities across China. It is known as the June Fourth Incident.
The protests were sparked by the sudden death of former pro-reform Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang on 15 April 1989.
Students believed his death was connected to his forced resignation. Numerous posters mourning Hu appeared on university campuses. Spontaneous memorial gatherings began on 15 April around Tiananmen Square, and students from Peking University and Tsinghua University gradually joined the crowds there.
Common complaints of the time included inflation, corruption, and limits on political participation, along with demands for reforms such as restoring iron rice bowl jobs and for democracy, freedom of the press, and free speech.
At the height of the protests on May 17, about one million people gathered in the square.
As crowds of protesters, smiling and holding banners demanding freedom and democracy, gathered, chaos erupted. Soldiers fired their machine guns randomly, sometimes shooting the ground and sometimes shooting toward the sky.
It was a massacre not only of hundreds of students and thousands of unarmed protesters by the Chinese army but also of the hope for democratic reforms in the country.
The news trickled in, yet not many details have emerged even after 37 years. The Tiananmen Square massacre remains one of the most sensitive issues in China. Almost all references to it have been removed from both physical and online spaces within the country.
Since that day, censorship controls inside China have tightened further, with state-sponsored amnesia intensifying under Xi Jinping's rule.
Even individuals who attempted to commemorate the event face harassment or imprisonment.
China Unofficial Archives, a grassroots nonprofit established in 2023 in the US, is dedicated to preserving censored and suppressed Chinese history. It holds a range of materials about the protests, including the diary of a soldier who protested against the massacre.
Its website is blocked in China and can only be accessed using a VPN that bypasses censorship firewalls.
I read somewhere that Stanford University’s Hoover Institution holds the diaries of Li Rui, a senior official, regarded as vital artifacts of modern Chinese history. Li, who passed away in 2019, documented his experiences in detail, including his account of 4 June 1989, which he observed from a balcony overlooking Tiananmen Square.
The diaries were transferred there by Li’s daughter because her father wanted them kept in the US, as they would likely be destroyed or concealed in China.
Another such incident occurred in Hong Kong. In September 2021, Hong Kong authorities raided the city’s Tiananmen massacre museum. The June 4th Museum, which for two years displayed information and historical items related to the massacre, was run by the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China. The museum has since been shut.
Every year on this day, the image I saw on the front page of the Indian Express flashes in my mind, and I feel really bad to see how communism has been distorted by almost all countries practicing it.