University of California, Los Angeles. Center for Chinese Studies

For seven extraordinary weeks in the spring of 1989, China came alive. Emboldened by the example set by university students in Beijing, millions of ordinary Chinese citizens began to express themselves openly and spontaneously in ways never before witnessed in the forty-year history of the People's Republic of China. The Chinese student demonstrations of spring 1989 represented the culmination of a remarkable decade of economic reform and social change. With the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the rise to power of Deng Xiaoping two years later, China's new leaders recognized the urgent need to jump-start their country's stagnant, centrally controlled economy and to restore the badly flagging confidence of the Chinese people in the wisdom, virtue, and beneficence of the Communist Party. Martial law was declared in Beijing on the evening of May 19, 1989. On June 3, 1989, China's chaos-averse senior leadership, fearful of losing political control, made a fateful decision: to use deadly force to clear demonstrating students and their nonstudent supporters from Tiananmen Square, center of the 1989 people's movement. The assault came on June 3, in the form of a pincer movement of more than 100,000 infantry troops and armored corps, converging on Tiananmen from several directions. Unlike the army's earlier, failed attempt on May 20 to reach the square, this time the PLA troops were in full battle dress, with weapons fully charged. The crackdown continued long after June 4, as the Chinese government relentlessly pursued those deemed to have played a significant role in fanning the flames of popular unrest or perpetrating acts of violence against the government or the army. Sporadic incidents of violence were widely reported in several Chinese cities, including Shanghai, Xi'an, and Changsha, both before and after the June 3-4 massacre. On the whole, however, the overwhelming, deadly force brought to bear on civilian protesters by government troops in Beijing served as a sobering reminder of the extremely high cost of civil disobedience in China. Thenceforth, there was to be no repetition of the Beijing students' fateful decision to challenge governmental authority. Today, years later, historical memory of the "Beijing Spring" of 1989 has begun to fade, which is why it seemed of critical importance to preserve, as accurately as possible, historical memory. This archive was compiled towards that goal.