The Massacre China Still Can’t Bury
Thirty-seven years after Tiananmen Square, the most powerful surveillance state on earth is still afraid of a date, a photograph, and a number.
By Brian Bullock | Everyone Knows | brianbullockwriter.com
This week, the Chinese government stopped a man from holding a balloon. It turned parents away from their children’s graves. It scrubbed a number off the internet before most of its people could see it. The number was 8964. June 4, 1989.
China calls the Tiananmen Square massacre a faded historical event the country has moved past. Thirty-seven years later, it spends every June proving the opposite.
How It Started
It began with a funeral. Hu Yaobang, a reformer pushed out of the party leadership in 1987, died on April 15, 1989. Students who saw him as a symbol of a more open China gathered in Tiananmen Square to mourn. The mourning became a movement.
By mid-May, hundreds of students had launched a hunger strike in the square. Crowds swelled past a million. The timing could not have been worse for the government. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev arrived for a state visit on May 15, and the world’s press came with him. Instead of a tidy summit, they filmed a million Chinese citizens demanding democracy in the heart of Communist power.
On May 19, the reformist party chief Zhao Ziyang walked into the square at dawn. “We came too late,” he told the students, and asked them to go home. It was the last time he was seen in public. He spent the rest of his life, roughly fifteen years, under house arrest. The next day, Premier Li Peng declared martial law. On May 30, the students answered with a ten-meter statue called the Goddess of Democracy, modeled on the Statue of Liberty, facing the giant portrait of Mao.
The Night
On the night of June 3, the army moved into Beijing. Around 200,000 troops had been brought in to retake the city. Soldiers from the 27th Army, chosen because they would follow orders without question, advanced through the western suburbs, where the heaviest killing happened, around Muxidi, before reaching the square. Armored personnel carriers opened fire on the crowds and then drove over the people in front of them. Students were given an hour to clear the square. By the British ambassador’s account, the carriers attacked after five minutes.
The Number They Buried
China says 241 people died. The Chinese Red Cross put the figure near 2,700 the morning after. Both were almost certainly low.
In 2017, Britain declassified a cable written by its ambassador, Sir Alan Donald, on June 5, 1989, one day after the killing. His source was a member of the Chinese State Council. The last line read: minimum estimate of civilian dead, 10,000. A separate US intelligence file released in 2014 cited a Chinese figure of 10,454. The cable described wounded students bayoneted where they lay and human remains hosed into the drains.
The real toll is still unknown, because the government that did the killing controls the count.
What Came After
The crackdown did not end on June 4. In the weeks that followed, the government broadcast the faces of its 21 most-wanted student leaders on national television. The man at the top of the list, 20-year-old Wang Dan, was caught and sent to prison. Others, including Chai Ling and Wu’erkaixi, were smuggled out through Operation Yellowbird, an underground Hong Kong network that moved about 150 dissidents to safety with safe houses, forged disguises, and cash.
The students mostly got prison or exile. The workers got worse. Human rights groups documented 50 to 100 executions in the months that followed, some for crimes as small as burning a police motorcycle or photographing tanks. Around 15,000 to 20,000 people were detained. More than 100,000 fled the country.
One of the dead was Jiang Jielian, a 17-year-old shot in the back on the night of June 3 after climbing out a bathroom window to join the crowds. His mother, a philosophy professor named Ding Zilin, spent the next three decades writing down the names of the victims and demanding an accounting. Her group, the Tiananmen Mothers, has been watched and harassed ever since. She is nearly 90 now. Her husband died in 2015. Neither ever got an answer.
The Great Forgetting
The killing was step one. Erasing it was step two, and China has been better at the second than the first.
June 4 is not taught in Chinese schools, and it does not appear in the textbooks. The internet scrubs it in real time, policed by the Great Firewall and an army of censors numbering in the millions. The bans go well past the obvious: candle emojis, the phrase “May 35,” a hand of playing cards laid out 8, 9, 6, 4, even a photo of a swan facing down a truck, because it looks too much like the image of a man facing down a line of tanks. This year the censorship reached the country’s AI chatbots, trained to say nothing at all.
It works. In her book on the cover-up, journalist Louisa Lim showed the Tank Man photo, the most recognized image of the massacre on earth, to 100 students at one of Beijing’s top universities. Fifteen knew what it was.
This Year
On the 37th anniversary, Chinese police told the families of the dead they could not visit a Beijing cemetery. In Hong Kong, where a candlelight vigil once drew as many as 180,000 people, there was nothing. The vigil has been banned since 2020 under the national security law. The group that organized it disbanded in 2021. Victoria Park, where the crowds used to gather, hosted a pro-Beijing carnival instead.
Police in Hong Kong stopped two performance artists the day before the anniversary. One had held up a balloon shaped like a question mark.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, days after standing beside President Trump on a state visit to Beijing, marked the date in writing. No amount of censorship, he said, can erase the past. China’s foreign ministry called it a smear. The largest remembrances now happen in Taiwan, where crowds gathered at Liberty Square in Taipei to do the thing that is no longer allowed on Chinese soil.
No Apology
China has never apologized for June 4, and when the party speaks of it at all, it defends it. On the eve of the 30th anniversary, the Communist Party’s English-language Global Times called the massacre a “vaccination” that immunized the country against future unrest, and dismissed it as a faded event the nation had already moved past. Days earlier, China’s defense minister, Wei Fenghe, told a security forum in Singapore that crushing the protests had been the “correct policy.” The official position has not changed since 1989. In Beijing’s telling, it was a riot, and stopping it was the right call.
The record complicates that account. The protesters were unarmed, and their demands were political reform and an end to corruption, not violence. What Beijing calls immunity is silence, enforced by censorship, surveillance, and fear rather than agreement, a point the survivors have made for years. And the prosperity the Party credits to its own decision came largely from outside its borders. Western sanctions faded within a few years of the massacre. The United States renewed China’s trade privileges through the 1990s, made them permanent in 2000, and backed its entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. The growth that followed was built on that market access, along with forced technology transfers, the theft of foreign intellectual property, and goods sold abroad below cost.
The man who stood in front of the tanks on June 5, 1989, was never identified. No one knows his name or what became of him. Beijing has spent thirty-seven years making sure no one inside China ever asks. This week, that meant a cemetery gate and a man with a balloon.
bY Brian Bullock / Everyone Knows Podcast | Starborne Studios | brianbullockwriter.com | @EveryoneKnws1