Tiananmen Square and the night of June 4
The pro-democracy spring of 1989, the tanks, and a date the state has spent decades erasing.
What happened
By the spring of 1989 students and workers had filled Tiananmen Square for weeks, mourning the reformer Hu Yaobang and demanding press freedom, an end to corruption, and dialogue. The Party declared martial law, and on the night of 3–4 June sent the army and tanks to clear central Beijing by force, firing on crowds in the surrounding streets. The next morning a lone man stopped a column of tanks on Chang'an Avenue — the century's most famous image of defiance, and one almost no one in China under forty has been allowed to see.
The results
The death toll is contested and was deliberately obscured. The Chinese government put it near 300, including soldiers; the Chinese Red Cross count is usually given as around 2,600; declassified US and British cables span several hundred to a few thousand, with one British cable's "at least 10,000" now widely regarded as an outlier. What is certain is that the state then set out to erase the event itself: "6/4" is among the most heavily censored dates in China, scrubbed from the internet each anniversary and unknown to a generation.
Why it happened
This was the political half of Deng's bargain enforced in a single night (see Deng's bargain). The economy could open; the monopoly on power could not be questioned. A one-party state can tolerate markets, foreign investment and private wealth — but not a square full of citizens asking to choose their rulers, because that is the one demand that, if granted, ends the arrangement. So it was answered with tanks, and then with forgetting.