Reflection on the 1989 Tiananmen Incident

Audrey Wang

In April 1989, the unexpected death of Hu Yaobang led to a massive student-led protest that later

became known as the Tiananmen Incident. The protest began as a good-natured, patriotic call for

political changes, peaked with a hunger strike on Tiananmen Square involving thousands of

protestors, and ended in a military oppression by the People’s Liberation Army. The incident lasted

a total of six weeks, almost turning Beijing into a state of anarchy. Despite being listed as a

forbidden topic by the Chinese government, the Tiananmen Incident was a defining moment for

modern China. In this reflection, I will explore the escalation of the incident, the ideologies and

sentiments of the protestors, and the responses from the Party. I argue that the student protestors

carried heavy influence from the Cultural Revolution and Confucianism. The incident revealed a

nation-wide need for recovery from the trauma of the Cultural Revolution. It defined the Chinese

Communist Party’s rhetoric towards protests and altered the landscape of the Chinese Constitution.

The initial outburst of student protest began as the students hailed Hu Yaobang as the “Soul of

China” and took the opportunity of mourning Hu to call for political improvement (Dietrich 281).

The student protestors had a goal of national salvation in mind, much like their 1919 counterparts

(Calhoun & Wasserstrom 244). They demanded action on corruption, education, and civil rights

(Dietrich 281). It is important to note that initially the students had no intention of questioning the

legitimacy of the CCP rule, nor did they demand the resignation of Party leaders. However, their

stance and demands shifted as they experienced backlash from the government.

The protest witnessed its first turning point on April 26. That day, the Party announced the

protest to be a “counterrevolutionary turmoil”, where “an extremely small number of people were
trying to destroy the democratic legal system” (Dietrich 282). The students, upon being dismissed

as counterrevolutionaries, felt humiliated and took the protest further. They began their hunger

strike starting May 11, which evoked the declaration of martial law and eventually ended in blood

shed on June 4.

The Tiananmen Incident took place only 23 years after the end of the Cultural Revolution. With

memories of the Red Guards still fresh in mind, the old Party officials feared for the defiant youth.

They saw in the protest only chaos, chaos that resembled the Cultural Revolution (Schell 23).

China was a nation in need of recovery from that disaster, but the Tiananmen Incident ripped its

Band-Aid off. Despite efforts from certain Party members to protect the students, the CCP as a

whole was unwilling risk their hard-earned stability (Schell 27). With the pro-student leaders

(including the General Secretary, Zhao Ziyang) peripheralized, the CCP’s strong rhetoric against

protests was set not only for the Tiananmen Incident, but for any future mass movement in the

coming decades. Since 1989, the CCP grew only the more intolerant of mass dissent and the fonder

of stability.

In addition to setting the CCP’s rhetoric for protests, the Tiananmen Incident changed the

meaning of Constitution for modern China. Assuming that the Tiananmen Papers are credible,

Deng Xiaoping violated the Constitution as he appointed Jiang Zemin to be the next General

Secretary (Chan & Nathan 194). The violation was so painless that it almost seemed legal. In

addition, the 1982 Constitution distributed the powers across three people, the General Secretary,

the Premier, and the Central Military Commission Chairman. In the aftermath of Zhao’s purge and

Li Peng’s collusion during the Tiananmen Incident, powers of the General Secretary, Central

Military Commission Chairman, and the President were consolidated. The mark that the

Tiananmen Incident left on the Constitution may have even allowed for the frictionless revision of
the Constitution in 2018, where the term limits for the President and the Vice President were lifted.

Whether this comment is an overstatement certainly remains open to debate, but it should be

brought to our attention that the Party’s frivolousness with the Constitution could be related to the

historical chapters of 1989.

According to Dietrich, the Tiananmen Incident produced in certain party leaders “a contempt

against student protestors” and an “inability to imagine that they deserved respect and a hearing”

(Dietrich 283). I disagree with the statement because the party did allow students much more

freedom to rebel than the Party did the workers. As for the contempt, it was not unrelated to the

students’ naivety. I by no means look to justify the government’s action, but I would like to delve

into some analysis of the student protestors.

The students were romantic revolutionaries who wanted changes but lacked a strategic mindset.

They believed in a bottom-up account of legitimacy, which was a legacy from Mao’s teaching

during the Cultural Revolution (Calhoun & Wasserstrom 250). The students demanded democracy,

while they led the protest in an ironically non-democratic way: student leaders would obstruct the

less revolutionary students from going back to school and force them to participate in the protest

(The Gate of Heavenly Peace). As Liu Xiaobo put it, the students understood democracy “as the

passion and bravery of sacrifice, as a lot of soaring passions, a grand spectacle of large crowds, a

profusion of slogans” (Calhoun & Wasserstrom 251). To me, it almost seemed like the students

did not know what they wanted. They only knew what they did not want: corruption, the lack of

voting rights, the censorship of speech, and the unequal distribution of economic resources. Their

petition was a rundown of their dissatisfactions, with no solutions provided. Although it is no

responsibility of the protestors to provide any solutions at all to the problems they identify, the

1989 students falsely believed their petition to be more than just complaints, but a route to national
salvation (The Gate of Heavenly Peace). This belief prevented them from taking a moderate

approach towards political reform.

While the students’ faith in revolution was much influenced by Maoist thoughts – “to rebel is

justified”, the way they appealed to the government was intriguingly Confucian. It was an iconic

moment when three students knelt down on the steps to the Great Hall, holding their petition. The

students hoped that the government rhetoric would soften up because of the kneeling. As Wuer

Kaixi said in the interview, “We were even willing to kneel! What do they want?” (The Gate of

Heavenly Peace). However, kneeling was anything but a modern approach to making a request. In

the Confucian cultural architecture, it is a sign of highest reverence for the Emperor. What

implications should then be drawn from their kneeling to the CCP? Did the students think of the

CCP leaders as some variation of an old Emperor, despite all the revolutions that modern China

experienced in the twentieth century? Nonetheless, to criticize the students for immature and non-

strategic presentation of their petition is unfair. At the time, China lacked a mechanism to

propagate communication between those who were governed and those governing. Such a

mechanism was central to the “dialogue” that the students requested (Barme 83). It was perhaps

also critical to the long-craved democracy that China struggled to define.

To summarize the analysis, the 1989 Tiananmen Incident was a decisive moment in modern

Chinese history where the CCP chose stability over political reform. With that choice, military

forces were employed to suppress student protests. Constitution was overridden to pave the way

for a strong future Party leader. Freedom of speech, freedom of protest, and other human rights

were placed secondary to centralized, absolute Party power. These decisions highlighted for

modern China its key values today: stability, order, prosperity, consent, or at the very least, silent

dissent.
 Works Cited

Alfred L., Chan, and Andrew J. Nathan. The Tiananmen Papers Revisited. London: Cambridge

University Press on behalf of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2004.

Barmé, Geremie, and Linda Jaivin. New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices. New York,

N.Y: Times Books, 1992.

Calhoun, Craig, and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom. Chinese Cultural Revolution Reconsidered: Beyond

Purge and Holocaust. Edited by K. Law. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Richard, Gordon, and Carma Hinton, director. The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Tiananmen

Square Massacre. Independent Television Service (ITVS), 1995.

Schell, Orville, Perry Link, Liang Zhang, and Andrew James. Nathan. The Tiananmen Papers.

New York, N.Y: PublicAffairs, 2002.