What actually was the Tiananmen Square Massacre?

we left last week by looking at china's economic growth during the early 1980s but by the second half of the decade china was facing trouble by 1986 a number of protests broke out against corruption in the ccp and against the government's handling of its inflation crisis general secretary who yao bang took the hit and became the scapegoat for the protests offering self-criticism who had long sympathized with the more democratic tradition and the unofficial leader deng xiaoping accused him of only having opposed mao's leftism and not western rightism as well who was removed as the official leader of the party and was replaced with jiaoziang who we also met last week there were nine resignations from the politburo and lee pong stepped forward to take the position of premiere of the state council in a big government restructure you can actually learn all about the government positions in the ccp by checking out this video here however inflation continued to get worse and 150 000 ccp members were actually expelled for corruption and come 1989 china declared martial law on tibet to deal with rioting in lhasa and there were 11 prison riots in xinjiang with a number of prison guards being killed and the prisons being burned down too and any hopes the protests dying down were dashed in april of 1989 when who himself the face of the more democratic wing of the polar bureau suddenly died of a heart attack china was about to explode hello there okay so today we're obviously going to be looking at the tiananmen square massacre and really we're going to see that it's a case of a lot going wrong at once to create something of a perfect storm firstly huyabang's death coincided with the visit of soviet leader mikhail gorbachev who was scheduled to come to visit china a couple of weeks afterwards in may now hold on to that detail because that would be really important so the day after his death on april the 17th ten thousand demonstrators mainly students lion tiananmen square now it's really important to note that students have a history of creating change in china in imperial china the students were the watchdogs of the mandate of heaven in 1919 they began the may the fourth movement and they served as mao's red guards during the 60s and 70s and so on the next day april the 18th students sat in the great hall of the people and made a list of demands there were many but the main ones were the ccp on a huge pursuit of increased democracy better pay for intellectuals and for private newspapers to be able to function too students see out a chance such as yabang shall not die and down with the corrupt government these demonstrations spread to wuhan nanjing and shanghai and it's important to note that anti-corruption was a very important part of these initial protests and so a couple of days later up to 100 000 people gathered in and around the square in silence for yabang's ceremony and the pressure was really heating up for the government this problem wasn't going away anytime soon as the politburo debated what action should be taken dung used poland as an example for inaction contesting that the more concessions communist poland made to the people the more that poland actually demanded of the government dung feared that relenting to the demonstrators would not placate them at all dung insisted that the square needed to be cleared for gorbachev's arrival and that resuming cyano-soviet relations after it split in the 50s was too important for china to mess up however the protesters knew that they were in a position of strength because many foreign journalists came to report on the meeting and the world's eyes were on beijing for the month of may demonstrators started to up the pressure by going on hunger strike and publishing their posters in english for journalists to report on when gorbachev actually arrived he had to use a side entrance to get into the great hall of the people to meet dongxiao ping and having now occupied tiananmen for a month on may the 17th dung decided to issue martial law against the demonstrators the party boss jiaozi yang actually asked to resign because he felt unable to carry out the order and two days later dung gave the official martial lauder or was zhang zamin becoming the new party boss the third general secretary within three years although martial law had been in place for two weeks by the start of june the government was yet to take any repressive action and with the demonstrations having gone for over a month the demonstration leadership started to become pretty divided the leader wang han wanted to evacuate because he felt as though enough of a statement had been made but this was really unpopular with the protesters and he actually resigned as the leader there were also issues of the demonstration funds being funneled into the hands of some key leaders and so the demonstrators became quite a factional group as the army was preparing for action a police jeep crashed into travelling at high speed and killed two people now this really flared tensions between the people and the government some unarmed soldiers were beaten and kidnapped in response and with tensions at north time high at 9pm on june the 4th the military operation to clear the streets of beijing started now although it's called the tiananmen square massacre most of the killing actually came a couple of miles west in guangzhou friend as armored vehicles crashed through buses blocking the road and shot on crowds mostly killing ordinary citizens rather than protesters it was brutal demonstrators who wouldn't clear both the streets in the square were shot and run over by the tanks however the hundreds of thousands demonstrating were far from a monolith and while many were valiant non-violent demonstrators that we see in footage such as tank man it is important to remember that many were extremely violent british journalist john simpson actually described the demonstrators he was around as being like dogs as they beat soldiers to death and then ripped their skin off molotov cocktails were also thrown at soldiers many of which were unarmed journalists risked their lives to capture the footage and unlike the massacres in the cultural revolution the chatham incident was broadcast around the whole world now we don't know exact casualties china's official position is that around 300 people died but in all likelihood it's probably in the low thousands the demonstrations also spread across china to 63 other cities too and george bush senior and the eu vowed to stop selling weapons to china with the world bank actually stopping their loans to china as well really this was mostly optics to maintain the appearance of being tough on terror because they kept their diplomatic relations but the whole world saw what had happened and they started to respond jiaoziang also offered self-criticism but it was to nowhere near the same extent the previous ccp decisions such as dunk himself had offered before and he refused any responsibility for the demonstrations getting out of hand as a result he was placed under house arrest and his credibility was destroyed his decision to not support martial law is often held in china as his fall from grace though the west largely use him as a hero for refusing the order and so unlike poland china showed that it wasn't going to take any dissent and showed that demonstrators would be met with the full force of the state with a demonstrator scattered and with the world condemning the middle kingdom it was once again time for china to rebuild thanks for watching make sure to tune in next week as we see the beginning of zhang jin min coming in as the new general secretary and as we also see the end of xiaoping's time as the leader of china we thank you for watching this episode and we can't wait to see you for our next time for our next venture into a fascinating part of history