December 23, 2022
Part 5: Aftermath (The morning of June 4 onwards) June 4, 1989, 6:00am – Morning commuter is greeted by an army at south end of Tiananmen Square. June 4, 1989, 6:00am – Local residents in western Beijing commute through a still-burning war zone. June 4, 1989, 6:00am – Beijing residents show spent bullet casings from […]
December 23, 2022
Clear the Square (May 30 – June 4) May 30, 1989 – Plainclothes policeman warns students protesting at Beijing police HQ they are violating martial law. May 30, 1989 – Pro-democracy demonstrators wave from bus windows in Beijing. May 30, 1989 – Student tells New York Times: “Tiananmen Square has become a symbol of democracy […]
December 23, 2022
Part 3: Attempts to Impose Martial Law (May 20 – May 30) May 20, 1989 – New York Times front page: May 20, 1989 – In early morning hours, troops successfully sweep hunger strikers from Shanghai’s People’s Square. May 20, 1989 – Crowds of unarmed citizens block army troop convoys from entering Beijing to enforce […]
December 16, 2022
Part 2: Attempts at Reconciliation (May 5 – May 19) May 5, 1989 – China was mainly quiet in the wake of the large marches in multiple cities the day before, to commemorate the May 4th Movement of 1919. Western newspapers, including the New York Times, reported on the previous day’s protests. May 6, 1989 […]
December 16, 2022
In the spring of 2014, on the 25th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Protests, I began a project of live-tweeting the events and images of the protests and crackdown, day by day, moment by moment. The tweets that followed, over the next month and half, provide an interesting sense of how events ebbed and flowed […]