Tiananmen Square (1989 event).
Tiananmen Square was a student-led popular demonstration in Beijing that received broad support from city residents and exposed deep splits within China's political leadership but were forcibly suppressed by hardline leaders who ordered the military to enforce martial law in the country's capital. The crackdown initiated on June 3–4 became known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre as troops with assault rifles and tanks inflicted thousands of casualties on unarmed civilians trying to block the military’s advance on Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing, which student demonstrators had occupied for seven weeks. The scale of military mobilization and the resulting bloodshed were unprecedented in the history of Beijing. Officially, the Chinese government condemned the protests as a "counterrevolutionary riot", and has prohibited all forms of discussion or remembrance of the events within China.The protests were triggered in April 1989 by the death of former Communist Party General Secretary, Hu Yaobang, a liberal reformer, who was deposed after losing a power struggle with hardliners over the direction of Chinese economic and political reforms. University students who marched and gathered in Tiananmen Square to mourn Hu also voiced grievances against inflation, limited career prospects, and corruption of the party elite. They called for government accountability, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and the restoration of workers' control over industry. At the height of the protests, about a million people assembled in the Square
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