This Day in History: 1989-06-04

Tienanmen Square protests advocating democracy in China  are crushed by the army on this day in 1989, with a death toll estimated from hundreds to thousands. The protests (and the repression) called into question the legitimacy of Communist Party rule, and the incident is still one of the most widely censored political topics  in China.  Perhaps the most iconic moment is the confrontation between the “tank man” and a column of tanks in an AP photo by Jeff Widener. “Tank man” has never been identified.  However, a new group of  photos of the protest, taken by David Chen, have been released recently. China’s democracy movement had been encouraged by the government’s increasing tolerance of environmental debate at the time, especially the book Yangtze! Yangtze! by Dai Qing, which questioned the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, published in February of 1989. This tolerance of environmental debate also took place in Russia during the 1980s following the Chernobyl disaster but was also eventually crushed by the dictatorial government there.