The Tiananmen Square massacre or the June Fourth Incident was a series of protests and demonstrations in China. These student-led demonstrations reflected the anxieties that young people had about the country’s future, regarding the issues of rapid economic and social change. These protestors would do things like going on hunger strikes, sit-in or occupy public spaces. They did all of this so they could achieve their goals of “A Communist Party without corruption”, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and democratic reform. While the Tiananmen Square massacre was well-documented, there were around 400 other protests happening nationwide. At night, on the 3rd of June 1989, Chinese authorities …show more content…
They sent in troops with assault rifles and tanks to kill anyone who tried to block the government’s advances towards Tiananmen Square. Along with there being several hundred dead protestors, the number of civilian deaths has been estimated to be anywhere between hundred and thousands. China’s use of force was widely condemned by the Western world, they imposed sanctions and an arms embargo on China. Initially, the Chinese government just thought of these protests as counter-revolutionary riots, but during the aftermath of the massacre, the government arrested protestors and their supporters, they expelled foreign journalists and they strictly controlled coverage of the incident. As well as this, China’s police and internal security forces were strengthened, but all those who were sympathetic towards these people were demoted or purged. The Tiananmen Square massacre temporarily stopped the policies of liberalisation in the 1980s, and this issue still remains as one of the most sensitive issues in China because its memory is widely