About June Fourth Incident

First introduction

◆The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 culminating in the Tiananmen Square Massacre were a series of demonstrations in and near Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the People's Republic of China (PRC) beginning on April 14.

◆Led mainly by students and intellectuals, the protests occurred in a year that saw the collapse of a number of communist governments around the world.

◆ 100,000 people had gathered on the Tiananmen square. In the Chinese language, the incident is most commonly known as the June Fourth Movement the June Fourth Incident or colloquially, simply Six-four (June 4)

Purpose

★The protests were sparked by the death of pro-market, pro-democracy and anti-corruption official, Hu Yaobang, whom protesters wanted to mourn. By the eve of Hu's funeral, While the protests lacked a unified cause or leadership, participants were generally

1)against the government's authoritarianism

2) voiced calls for economic change

3) democratic reform within the structure of the government.

Result
The movement lasted seven weeks from Hu's death on 15 April until tanks cleared Tiananmen Square on 4 June. In Beijing, the resulting military response to the protesters by the PRC government left many civilians dead or severely injured.

The number of deaths
It is not known and many different estimates exist. There were early reports of

1)Chinese Red Cross sources giving a figure of 2,600 deaths.

2) The official Chinese government figure is 241 dead, including soldiers, and 7,000 wounded

Following the violence,
the government conducted widespread arrests to suppress protesters and their supporters, cracked down on other protests around China, banned the foreign press from the country and strictly controlled coverage of the events in the PRC press. Members of the Party who had publicly sympathized with the protesters were purged, with several high-ranking members placed under house arrest, such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protest caused widespread international condemnation of the PRC government.