1989 Tiananmen Square protests 1989 Tiananmen Square protests The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, commonly known in mainland China as the June Fourth Incident (Chinese: , "liùsì shìjiàn"), were student-led demonstrations in Beijing (the capital of the People's Republic of China) in 1989. More broadly, it refers to the popular national movement inspired by the Beijing protests during that period, sometimes called the '89 Democracy Movement (Chinese: , "bājiǔ mínyùn"). The protests were forcibly suppressed after Chinese Premier Li Peng declared martial law. In what became known in the West as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, troops with automatic rifles and tanks fired at the demonstrators
Reactions to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests accounts refer to. As Louisa Lim notes in her book, "The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited", many young Chinese know almost nothing of the Tiananmen Square protests. In an informal survey, Lim showed the iconic photo of Tank Man to 100 Chinese university students; only 15 correctly identified it as being an image of Tiananmen Square. Perry Link, a Chinese language and literature scholar, writes, "The story of the massacre is banned from textbooks, the media, and all other public contexts." In 2014, Gu Yimin, a Chinese activist, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for attempting to hold