The Gathering Storm: Tiananmen Square in Photos Before the Tragic Crackdown of 1989

On April 15, 1989, former Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang died of a heart attack. Hu had been a champion of political reform before being forced out of office in 1987. His death lit a fire. Within days, students in Beijing began gathering to mourn him — and then to demand the changes he had stood for. What started as candlelight vigils quickly became one of the most significant protest movements in modern Chinese history.

Just weeks before the protests erupted, U.S. President George H.W. Bush had visited Beijing. He waved to crowds from the roof of his car as he passed through Tiananmen Square, with the iconic portrait of Mao Zedong watching over the entrance to the Forbidden City behind him. At that moment, the square was calm. That would not last long.

By April 18, students had moved from mourning to demanding. Crowds staged sit-ins in front of the Great Hall of the People, with student leaders reading aloud lists of political demands. They called for press freedom, dialogue with government officials, and an end to official corruption. The government refused to meet them.

The night of April 18 into April 19 saw the tension jump sharply. Students marched from Tiananmen Square to Zhongnanhai — the heavily guarded compound that serves as Communist Party headquarters. Some attempted to storm the gate and were pushed back by security forces. At the gate, a young woman was seen weeping as guards gently but firmly tried to move her away.

As April 21 arrived, the square filled to a level that stunned observers. Tens of thousands of students and ordinary citizens packed around the Monument to the People’s Heroes. The following morning, students who had stayed overnight linked arms at dawn, defying government warnings against demonstrations. They were there to be present for Hu Yaobang’s state funeral, held inside the Great Hall of the People on April 22.

Students marching into the square on April 22 carried banners with blunt, striking messages. One banner from Beijing University of Engineering read “Democracy, Bathed in Blood” — a phrase that, in hindsight, carried an awful weight. After the funeral, the protests did not wind down. They intensified.

By late April, students were running their own printing operations and posting news sheets on street poles near university campuses. Residents stopped to read them, hungry for information that official state media was suppressing. On April 26, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily, published an editorial calling the protests “turmoil” and a threat to stability. Rather than scattering the students, the editorial drove them back into the streets.

On April 27, students from dozens of Beijing universities marched toward Tiananmen Square in direct defiance of the government ban. Police tried to hold them back, but the marchers pushed through blockade after blockade. When they reached the square, some jubilant protesters surrounded and stopped army trucks. The mood was triumphant. Students believed they had won a battle.

May 4 marked the 70th anniversary of China’s original May Fourth Movement of 1919 — a historic wave of student nationalism. The 1989 students were keenly aware of the symbolism. On that date, approximately 100,000 students and workers marched toward Tiananmen Square. Police were overwhelmed. Students shouted slogans as they broke through police lines, while crowds of ordinary Beijing residents cheered from the sides of the road.

On May 13, students escalated with a hunger strike. Thousands sat in the square, refusing to eat until the government agreed to meaningful dialogue. The hunger strikers vowed to remain until Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in Beijing for a historic state visit on May 15 — the first Sino-Soviet summit in thirty years. The timing was deliberate. Students knew the world’s press would be watching.

By May 16, the hunger strike was in its fourth day. Some students symbolically bound themselves in cardboard boxes to show they were unable to eat. Central China Television employees showed up in the square that night, flashing their press credentials as they joined the protesters — a sign that even state media workers were breaking with the official line. Passersby handed money through fences to help sustain the strikers.

On May 17, up to a million people flooded the streets of Beijing in one of the largest demonstrations China had ever seen. Youth rode on car rooftops heading toward the square. Elsewhere in China, protests were spreading — in Shanghai, demonstrators raised an effigy of the Statue of Liberty in front of city government offices. The movement had grown far beyond the campuses.

On May 18, police and students worked side by side to manage the enormous crowds pouring toward the square. The following day, Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang made a personal visit to the hunger strikers, speaking directly to them in an emotional appeal to end the strike. “We came too late,” he told them. It was his last public appearance. Zhao was removed from power shortly after and placed under house arrest, where he would remain until his death in 2005.

The government declared martial law on May 20. Troops began moving toward Beijing. Residents and students flooded into the streets to block them. On May 21, a massive convoy of People’s Liberation Army soldiers was stopped cold when protesters used a bus to barricade the road. Citizens surrounded the convoy. Meanwhile, back in the square, donations poured in — a restaurant owner and a Buddhist monk together contributed over $53,000 worth of food to the protesters.

By late May, the protest camp showed signs of strain. Tents were tattered. Students who had been in the square for weeks looked exhausted, sleeping in piles on the pavement. On May 22, a young couple danced together in the morning hours — a brief, almost surreal moment of lightness amid the tension. On May 23, three men splattered paint across the famous portrait of Mao Zedong that hangs above the entrance to the Forbidden City. Student leaders, fearing the act would harm their cause, handed the men over to police.

Student leader Wang Dan — one of the most recognizable faces of the movement — was still calling for marches on May 27. A former political prisoner visited the square the following day, telling his story directly to the remaining students. Numbers in the square were falling. Some students had returned to their classrooms. Others stayed, sleeping under torn canopies and on open ground, determined to hold the square.

In the first days of June, a fragile, almost eerie calm settled over the square. Children danced. A woman soldier moved among the protesters, singing. Police and military personnel mixed into the crowd in an apparent attempt to keep things from escalating. But outside the square, the situation was different. On June 3, residents and students moved to block soldiers advancing toward Tiananmen. Citizens surrounded military vehicles and confronted troops directly, demanding to know what they planned to do with the weapons on board.

Late on the night of June 3, the Chinese military moved with live ammunition through the streets of Beijing toward Tiananmen Square. Troops shot through residential neighborhoods, killing people in the streets and in their homes. By dawn on June 4, soldiers had retaken the square. Hundreds died. The exact number has never been confirmed by the Chinese government, which has suppressed all public discussion of the event ever since. The photos taken in those final hours — a PLA soldier sitting alone with his weapons after his convoy was stopped, protesters gripping rifles taken from soldiers — show how completely the situation had transformed from protest to confrontation.