Immediately south of the three-hundred-year-old Forbidden City is the relatively new Tiananmen Square conceived and built by Mao Zedong in the 1950s to showcase the scope and power of the communist party which had recently come to power. It is the largest urban plaza in the world. Over the years, Tiananmen Square has been home to many key events in modern Chinese history. To the western mind, the most famous is probably the prodemocracy crack down of June, 1989.My Chicago classroom is chocked full of artifacts from around the world. Hanging high and prominently in the back of my classroom is a poster of the iconic photograph of Tank Man –the unidentified, lone protestor who stood before a column of sixty Red Army tanks and silently used his body to say “If you want access to these protestors, you are going to have to roll over my body.” It hangs in my classroom year round.
I use this poster as Exhibit A when telling my students the story of the events of late spring 1989 that led to the June 4 crackdown. Triggered by their desire to mourn the death of the relatively tolerant former General Secretary Hu Yaobang, Chinese students gathered in Tiananmen Square. Then things gained momentum. In the spirit of Gandhi and King, students used non-violence and civil disobedience to call for more freedoms. A movement took shape.
Chinese students poured into Tiananmen Square by the bus load from around the country to join the month-long demonstrations. Students went on hunger strikes. The demonstrators were joined by factory workers and eventually farmers. Art students made a papier-mâché statue of the Goddess of Democracy. When one student leader realized that others wanted to speak out but were afraid to do so, he had them write down what they wanted to say, pass it forward, and he read it out on their behalf. At its peak, the crowds swelled to hundreds of thousands of people. One couple got married in the Square. When the Chinese army started to move toward Tiananmen Square in early June, local Beijing residents moved trucks and wagons into the street in an attempt to block the army’s access to the protestors. Smaller demonstration were held in factories and on campuses around China. Hope had sprung that spring.
While the protests were going on in Beijing, 1.5 million Hong Kongers participated in an organized march in support of the students in Tiananmen Square. 1.5 million: that’s one fourth of the population of Hong Kong at the time!
When I am telling this story to my students, I usually have to pause several times to compose myself. That stark image of Tank Man in the back of my room gets to me every time.
The demonstrations in the spring of 1989 are generally referred to as prodemocracy demonstrations. But at their core, they were so much more than just a call for democratic processes. They were fundamentally a collective expression of the yearning for autonomy and a modicum of control over one’s life. It was a flexing of the natural desire to be able to gather together with like-minded people and express yourselves without fear of reprisal. Essentially, the demonstrations were a longing to be free from oppression. It was one of the most organic, beautiful, and ultimately tragic expressions of the desire for freedom the world had seen in modern times.
But then, on June 4, 1989, the tanks rolled in and while the world watched the Chinese government turned its guns on its own people. The official government estimate is that several hundred protestors die, but several international organizations put the death toll in the thousands.
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