Tiananmen Square, June 4th 1989. That’s all it takes to get over 1 billion people banned from seeing this video.
On that day, in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, the Chinese government brutally suppressed a weeks-long protest against the failures of its regime. While many in the West have heard of it, or will recognize its iconic images, few understand what it was all for or how it all ended so tragically.
Today on A Day In History, we will tell the story of the protest China wants erased from history. Why is started, how it escalated, and the brutal end that China is desperate to keep secret. If that sounds interesting to you, then be sure to like and subscribe to keep up with more videos like this one.
The Causes of the Protests
The late 1980s were a bad time for Communism. The USSR was on its last legs and Eastern Europe was throwing off the shackles of Soviet oppression, while the capitalist West was stronger than ever. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was the world’s largest Marxist-Leninist party, and before long it would be the only one still in control of a major nation.
Within China, the dubious legacy of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution had disillusioned many, while Chairman Deng Xiaoping had embarked upon economic liberalization to roll back state control and allow more capitalistic elements into China’s economy. But China’s economy still lagged heavily behind other major nations in complexity, technology, and quality of life, with sharp wealth inequality between classes and regions.
It is no surprise that the 80s were a decade of simmering discontent then, especially as technology and mass media made Chinese people more aware of the outside world than ever before. Western prosperity and democratic attitudes had an illuminating influence, especially students, who saw China as a stagnating and stifling place, where corruption and nepotism were the only paths to success.
The roots of Tiananmen can be found in the student protests of 1986 to 87. Thousands of students had protested against economic stagnation and state intrusion upon student life and student politics. The protests had broken out across China’s universities between December 1986 and January 1987, in one of the largest signs of popular discontent against the CCP since the Revolution. There were no dramatic scenes of violence, although many people ranging from government ministers to academics were dismissed for their perceived softness or encouragement of the protests.
Among these was Hu Yaobang, the General Secretary of the CCP, who was dismissed from his post in January 1987 for being too sympathetic to the protestors. Hu became something of a hero to China’s discontented students. Minor protests simmered away through 1987 and 1988, keeping the issues alive, but it was Hu’s death in April 1989 that would trigger the conflagration of Tiannamen,
Protests Erupt
Hu Yaobang died on April 15th 1989. Although the party had sidelined him, he was still a major official and there was no stopping the public mourning for him. His death triggered an outburst of grief and anger from the students who had seen him as one of the few CCP officials who might have listened to them. One poem found at Beijing University read: “The honest man is dead, the hypocrites live on, the enthusiasm is dead, indifference buried him.”
A memorial was held for Hu in Beijing on April 17th, but it quickly became a demonstration. By noon, some 10,000 students and protestors had arrived, reigniting the causes of anti-corruption and pro-democracy that Hu had been sympathetic to back in 87. Hu’s death was “really just a pretext,” one protestor said, “We came here because we have something to say. I don’t think we’ll achieve anything, but it’s better to do something than nothing.”
#Tiananmen #china #ccp #history
Sources:
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Kate Merkel-Hess, ‘Tiananmen and its Aftermath, 1989-1999’, in Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China, (2016)
Jonathan Fenvy, The Penguin History of Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850-2009, (2008)
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