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There is a photo taken on the morning of May 19, 1989 – just a few days before the tanks invaded – that shows a gray-haired man standing in Tiananmen Square with tears streaming down his face. It was Zhao Ziyang, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, and he had come to address the students.
“We came too late,” he told them, his voice broken. It was the last time he appeared in public. He was placed under house arrest and spent the remaining 16 years of his life in his home in Beijing, which has been erased from official history.
This moment, more than any other, reflects what Tiananmen Square really was: not just a confrontation between protesters and the state, but a fight within the state itself – a fight that the reformers lost.
Like so many fractures, it began with a death. When former Communist Party general secretary Hu Yaobang died in April 1989, students reacted violently. Most believed his death was related to his forced resignation. Hu had stood for something – accountability, openness, a policy that did not see his own people as a threat. The student movement was sparked by a desire to commemorate him, but once it began, the commemoration quickly evolved into a protest for far-reaching change.
The demands were not as revolutionary as the government would later claim. The students wanted freedom of the press, an end to corruption among party officials and a real dialogue with their leaders. In the weeks that followed, their demands garnered widespread public support, from retirees to veterans to farmers. Millions took part in peaceful demonstrations across China. Workers, journalists, intellectuals and even some government employees joined the students in the square. At one point, an estimated one million people gathered in Beijing alone.
At the top of the party, this spectacle caused not unity but panic – and a bitter internal division. In April and May, the Politburo and party leaders were sharply divided: reformers under the informal leadership of Zhao Ziyang pushed for dialogue and de-escalation, while hardliners under Prime Minister Li Peng advocated decisive repression. Zhao visited protesters on May 4 to listen to and acknowledge their concerns – an extraordinary act for a sitting party leader. On May 20, the day martial law was declared, Deng Xiaoping decided to remove Zhao as general secretary of the party. As Zhao later recalled in his smuggled memoirs, no one officially told him that he had been deported. Nobody contacted him about work either.
After the reformists were silenced, the hardliners had their moment. On May 20, Prime Minister Li Peng signed an order imposing martial law in parts of Beijing and hundreds of thousands of soldiers were mobilized toward the capital. The demonstrators held their ground for two more weeks.
Then came the night of June 3rd. Tanks and heavily armed troops advanced toward Tiananmen Square, opening fire on or crushing those who blocked their path. The worst killings did not occur in the square itself – the vast majority of deaths occurred in the western suburbs along Chang’an Avenue. People were shot on the streets near their homes. Some were crushed. Soldiers fired into crowds that had come just to watch or get in the way.
The death toll was never finally determined. Estimates range from a few hundred to over 10,000, and each number remains politically controversial. The Chinese government’s official figure of around 200 deaths is widely viewed as significantly too low. The true number may never be known — not because there is no evidence, but because the state has spent three and a half decades burying it.
Tiananmen Square and the 1989 crackdown remain an officially taboo subject in China. There is no official death toll. Attempts to discuss, commemorate or demand justice were violently suppressed and public discussion was not permitted. Even references as vague as “May 35th” or emojis of a tank next to a man are deleted from China’s domestic internet. The Tiananmen Mothers – families of the dead – have compiled their own list of deaths for decades and called on the government to take responsibility despite severe threats and intimidation.
Zhao Ziyang remained under house arrest until his death from a stroke in January 2005. His secret memoirs were smuggled out and published in 2009, but his life remains censored in China. In the end, he was another victim of June 4th – not shot on the street, but quietly disappearing from history.
The international reaction was loud and then muted. Sanctions were imposed. Convictions were pronounced. Then trading resumed. The logic of economic engagement – and the vast Chinese market – proved more compelling than the logic of accountability. This calculation, quietly made in law firms around the world, told Beijing something it would not forget: that mass repression had a price and the world would eventually stop collecting it.
The consequences lasted for decades. Any hope for political reform and liberalization in China was an additional casualty of Tiananmen. Reformers within the party were sidelined and attempts to move China’s political system toward democracy have since failed. Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong – each in its own way became a sequel to 1989. The template was set: dissent would be absorbed, suppressed or erased, and the world would find a way to move on.
The students who filled Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989 were not trying to overthrow their government. They wanted things to get better. The response they received—tanks, bullets, decades of enforced silence—reveals everything about the system they were up against.
In the end, Zhao Ziyang also knew it. “We came too late,” he said. He was right, but not in the way he meant it.
