A Brief History
On June 4, 1989, an estimated tens of thousands Chinese military troops opened fire on perhaps a million Chinese protestors at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the capital of China. While numbers of troops, protestors, and casualties are only estimates, because historically, governments cannot be counted on to provide accurate accounts of embarrassing events, as many as 10,000 or more of the peaceful protestors may have died in the massacre.
Digging Deeper
Not only were hundreds or thousands of people shot, but many others were also trampled in the rush to avoid the gunfire or crushed under the weight of military vehicles sent to clear the square. The Tiananmen Square Massacre may well be the bloodiest massacre of protestors in history.
In typical government fashion, the Chinese authorities reported about 200 protestors and a few dozen riot police were killed, referring to the peaceful protestors as “counterrevolutionaries.”
Question for students (and subscribers): Should governments ever use deadly force on peaceful protestors? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
If you liked this article and would like to receive notification of new articles, please feel welcome to subscribe to History and Headlines by liking us on Facebook and becoming one of our patrons!
Your readership is much appreciated!
Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Gokhale, Vijay. Tiananmen Square: The Making of a Protest. HarperCollins India, 2021.
Langley, Andrew. Tiananmen Square: Massacre Crushes China’s Democracy Movement. Compass Point Books, 2009.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by Masur of a Monument in Memory of Chinese from Tiananmen in Wrocław, Poland, has been released into the public domain worldwide by the copyright holder of this work,.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.
