This June 4 marks 25 years since the military crackdown on student protestors in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing, following months of demonstrations. This resource page includes links to our recently published pieces and to our archived stories on the Tiananmen Protests, Democracy and the Democracy Movement, Dissidents and Activists, Reform, and more.
Recommended From the ChinaFile Archives
Media
06.07.12
An Absent Presence
In Chan Koonchung’s dystopian science fiction novel The Fat Years, set in China in 2013, the whole month of Feburary 2011 has disappeared from people’s memory. In reality, the month that is closest to being spirited away is the month of June 1989...
Conversation
06.04.13
How Would Facing Its Past Change China’s Future?
David Wertime:The memory of the 1989 massacre of protesters at Tiananmen Square remains neither alive nor dead, neither reckoned nor obliterated. Instead, it hangs spectre-like in the background, a muted but latently powerful symbol of resistance...
The NYRB China Archive
08.10.06
‘June Fourth’ Seventeen Years Later: How I Kept a Promise
from New York Review of Books The weekend of June 3, 2006, was the seventeenth anniversary of the Beijing massacre and also the first time I ever received a summons. It happened, as the police put it, “according to law.” Twice within twenty-four hours Deputy Chief Sun Di of...
Media
06.04.13
On Eve of Tiananmen Anniversary, China’s Prominent Weiborati Speak Out
“Don’t worry about forgetfulness—at least the Sina censors remember,” tweeted Jia Zhangke, a film director.Like 2013, 1989 was the year of the Snake on the Chinese calendar. It was also a year that Chinese authorities prefer not to remember. On the...
NYRB Archive
Our New York Review of Books China Archive holds an excellent collection of pieces on the Tiananmen protests, dating back to before 1989. Here are some highlights:
The NYRB China Archive
06.29.89China’s Spring
from New York Review of Books To stand, in early May, atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace, which guards the entrance to the Forbidden City, and look across the vast crowd of people jammed into Tiananmen Square was to have a historically new sense of what Mao called “the broad masses...
The NYRB China Archive
11.09.11
My ‘Confession’
from New York Review of Books From reading Henry Kissinger’s new book On China,1 I have learned that Mr. Kissinger met with Deng Xiaoping at least eleven times—more than with any other Chinese leader—and that the topic of one of their chats was whether Fang Lizhi would confess...
The NYRB China Archive
07.20.89
The End of the Chinese Revolution
from New York Review of Books When Deng Xiaoping suppressed the Beijing Spring last month, he thought he was putting down a new Cultural Revolution. Pirated notes from a Party meeting in late April quoted him as telling his colleagues:This is not an ordinary student movement. It...
The NYRB China Archive
06.29.89The Chinese Intellectuals and the Revolt
from New York Review of Books The Beijing revolt of 1989 has caught the world’s attention, but the malaise that led to the emergency is broader and deeper than any of its conspicuous slogans can suggest. For foreigners like myself who live in Beijing, it was already clear nine...