The 36th Anniversary of June Fourth: What Are We Really Remembering
Luna Tian
Introduction
On the night of June 3rd, 1989, the Chinese government launched a violent military crackdown on peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Armed troops opened fire on unarmed civilians—many of them students—who had gathered to demand political reform, freedom of speech, and an end to corruption. To this day, the exact death toll remains unknown. Estimates range from hundreds to thousands.
What followed was not only the suppression of a movement, but the systematic erasure of its memory. In China, the massacre is censored from textbooks, news reports, search engines, and public discourse. Words like “Tiananmen,” “June Fourth,” and even images of a man standing in front of a tank have been scrubbed from the internet. Commemoration is illegal. Public mourning is criminalized.
Yet despite the state’s effort to erase the past, the memory persists—carried in silence, encrypted in dreams, encoded in fragments of resistance.
This essay is not a comprehensive account of the 1989 massacre. It is not a historical analysis, nor a political manifesto. Rather, it is a personal reflection—on memory, on grief, on silence, and on the quiet forms of resistance that still endure when history is forbidden.
For those who grew up without knowing, for those who only later learned to remember, and for those who still live in the shadow of unspoken truth—this is a tribute to what remains.
Five Minutes in a Film
I was born in the late 1990s. I never lived through that night.
To me, “June Fourth” isn’t a single event. It’s a scent, a tone of voice—a texture that emerges from the silence of my elders, from the static in old video footage. It was never fully explained to me, but it has always lingered, faint yet persistent.
My first real awareness of that day came from a film. It was Lan Yu, a story about the love between two men set in late-1980s Beijing. Midway through the movie, there’s a very brief scene of chaos—people running, smoke in the air, gunshots ringing out. The protagonist searches for his lost lover on the street, his steps frantic, his face pale. Nothing is explicitly explained. The camera doesn’t linger. It comes and goes—just like history itself, appearing abruptly and vanishing even faster.
I remember sitting up straight in my seat. I felt something split open inside me.
That wasn’t the first time I had heard of June Fourth. As a child, my parents would mention it in passing—saying things like “we also went out on the streets back then” or “your aunt didn’t come home.” It was said as casually as one might talk about cold weather or the need for a jacket. I didn’t understand at the time. Not until one day, I found an old photo at home—a young woman with her hair tied back, a defiant look in her eyes. I asked my mother who she was. She fell silent for a moment, then simply said: “Your aunt. Muxidi. A bullet.”
After that, I tried to understand. I watched documentaries, read articles, and scrolled through posts that were deleted and reposted time and again. Sometimes, I would dream of strange scenes—tanks rolling down an empty street, someone shouting, someone running. I’d be chasing a figure from behind. I never saw their face, but I knew they had something to do with me. Maybe they were the ones who didn’t make it back that night. Maybe they were my family. Or maybe they were just images I had constructed in my own mind.
I’ve been to Tiananmen Square—more than once. Each time, the square was full of tourists, flags, and the ground was spotless. I would stand apart from the crowd and quietly scan the wide-open space. It was so open it felt unsettling. I always thought of the wind in June. It wasn’t stronger than now, but it carried something unsaid. When it brushed against my face, it left behind a faint sting.
That film mentioned the unrest for only five minutes. But those five minutes marked my first direct encounter with this history. In all the years since, what I’ve tried to understand isn’t just what happened that night—but why we are not allowed to remember. And who, and when, decided where the boundaries of memory lie?
By the time I was born, everything had already become “the past.”
But in the time I’ve lived, that past has never truly gone away.
Compressed Memories
For our generation, “June Fourth” is an incomplete sentence.
Growing up in China, learning to forget was part of our education. The knowledge system we were raised with skipped entire years, skipped entire words. In our history textbooks, 1989 is a blank space. A search for “Tiananmen incident” online points instead to 1976. The photo of the “Tank Man” was never even close to the margins of our curriculum. And so, memory became a puzzle with its most essential pieces missing—those about truth, about death, about the people.
My first serious attempt to know what happened came when I was just old enough to access the internet. It was a time before social media was fully controlled. Late at night, foreign videos and articles could still be opened quietly. The footage was grainy, the voiceovers tense, the street scenes shaky. I remember one clip of a mother crying out in the crowd, “I’m looking for my son!” That moment made something click: this wasn’t merely a political confrontation. It was a collective bereavement.
But even at home, this knowledge felt dangerous. I learned to save files in encrypted folders, to password-protect my phone, to store memories in the cloud—as if guarding some kind of personal taboo.
Maybe that’s why, when words can no longer be spoken, memories retreat into dreams.
I often dream of blurry but recurring scenes. Sometimes it’s the Tianjin port explosion—fiery blasts and shrapnel replayed like fireworks in my sleep. Sometimes I’m standing in a quiet park, the ground paved clean, everything unnaturally still—and I suddenly realize there should have been a monument here.
But there isn’t.
And I always wonder: why is this city, this country, so good at building towers, yet so incapable of building memorials?
The question never makes it out of my dreams. But it echoes the moment I wake up.
I dream of the Goddess of Democracy, long vanished, hastily erected in the dark, then hastily toppled. I dream of young people raising blank sheets of paper, of citizens laying flowers outside the Southern Weekly building. The expressions on their faces aren’t mournful, but strangely calm—as if they knew they would be silenced, and still chose to speak.
These dreams and the memory of June Fourth have fused. I can’t separate them anymore. Sometimes I lose track of the year, the city—was it Beijing? Shanghai? Ürümqi? Or just some imagined version of China I’ve invented in my mind?
I’ve come to understand: these memories are compressed not only because they are suppressed, but because they are too heavy to carry in full. We cannot build monuments in public squares, so we recognize each other through coded messages on social media. We cannot hold public vigils, so we pass emotions through numbers, verses, and symbols. Memory has been forced to become weightless—like a balloon, floating not for joy, but to escape the crushing pull of gravity.
And beneath that weightlessness lies an even deeper compression: the loss of language itself. How do we speak of events we never witnessed? What words can we use to describe wounds we’ve never physically endured but that continue to shape us? When a generation can’t name its own history, it loses the right to speak for the future.
I believe some memories don’t vanish. They are simply compressed into smaller, quieter forms—a sentence, a blurred photo, a midnight search history, or a dream that plays again and again.
That Evening, That Year
The first images I ever saw were of tents. It was May in Beijing, not yet hot, and the students pitched tents across the square, forming a kind of mobile city. They sat on the ground—some writing slogans, some reading declarations into megaphones, some lying down with books in hand. They chanted: “Down with corruption,” “Freedom of the press,” “Democratic reform.”
They said they weren’t rebels—they were patriots.
In a fleeting shot, a boy was seen washing his face at the center of the square. His movements were practiced, his gaze bright. Next to him, a cardboard sign read: “I love this country, that’s why I refuse to stay silent.”
In the distance stood the Great Hall of the People. Ahead was the portrait of Chairman Mao. The square was vast and open, like a stage built for waiting.
Then came the hunger strike.
The students stopped eating. They lay on the ground, pale, wearing signs that said: “Using life to awaken conscience.” Medical students brought their own IV drips. Volunteers offered water and salt.
They said, “Our bodies are weak, but our hearts are strong.”
Crowds gathered—citizens packed the square. Bus drivers came. Teachers, workers, street vendors, even children.
Some handed out bread. Some held signs. Some said nothing at all—just stood there.
Then came the wind.
Some say the wind that day in Beijing was strong. Others say the wind wasn’t from the sky, but from a shift in the atmosphere.
People began to feel uneasy—TV broadcasts started showing the military “maintaining order.”
Whispers spread. Some wanted to leave. Others couldn’t bear to go.
Then came the night.
In the late hours of June 3rd, the army began to advance into the city. Convoys rolled in from the western suburbs—soldiers in camouflage, armed with live ammunition. Muxidi was the first to hear gunshots.
The bullets weren’t fired into the air—they were aimed at people. A civilian threw himself in front of a student, taking the bullet. His friend later said, “He did it willingly.”
The camera shakes. Screams fill the frame. Someone shouts: “Don’t shoot!” Someone raises their arms to show they are unarmed. The bullets don’t stop. Some hide in flowerbeds. Some fall by their bicycles. Some run into the alleys—and never come out.
By dawn, tanks had entered the square. Some students stayed. Others were preparing to leave.
Rumors spread—some said, “The troops will be reasonable.” Others whispered, “There will be blood.”
Around 4 a.m., a group of students met with the last remaining faculty representatives, hoping for a peaceful withdrawal. Someone began to sing The Internationale. The voices were soft, but in unison.
By morning, the square was emptied. At daybreak, order was restored. The ground had been washed. The tents were gone. The flags were burned. The slogans erased.
Only two photographs remained.
One showed a man in a white shirt standing before a column of tanks. The other showed a mother in a hospital corridor, sitting beside her son’s body, her eyes hollow.
No one knows the true death toll. Some say hundreds. Some say thousands. The government claimed, “No one was killed.” The truth, like the square, was scrubbed clean. But people remembered. Through whispered conversations, hidden diaries, and the mothers who still stood up decades later—they remembered. Even if the words couldn’t be spoken, the memories weren’t deleted. They were simply stored deeper—in dreams, in bodies.
Sometimes, I feel like I was there. Not because I’ve seen the documentaries. Not because I’ve read too many articles. But because something in me is connected to them—the way they ran, the way they fell, the look in their eyes right before they could finish their sentence.
This connection doesn’t require lived experience. And it has never been severed.
I often think: no matter where I end up in this world, by this shared memory, I will recognize all who are like me. I will recognize us.
Erased Memories
Memory is supposed to be free. But under authoritarian rule, it becomes something that must be planned.
In our context, memory doesn’t flow naturally—it is curated and censored. What can be remembered, what must be forgotten, what may be mourned, and what must be celebrated—all of it is predetermined.
Memory is no longer a personal choice, but a political outcome.
This kind of “memory management” isn’t always violent. In fact, it’s often subtle, even quiet.
For example:
You’re allowed to remember the war against Japan, but not the mourning of April 5th, 1976.
You can recall the volunteer spirit during the Wenchuan earthquake, but not the documentary by Ai Weiwei.
You may remember the square itself, but not that it was once occupied—once stained with blood.
Memory is wrapped in layers, like files labeled and archived by the state.
Hong Kong used to be an exception.
It was once the only place in China where June Fourth could be publicly mourned.
Every June, tens of thousands of candles lit up Victoria Park.
The song “Glory to Freedom” played on the radio, and people sang softly—not like chanting slogans, but like offering prayers. Some held banners that read “End One-Party Rule.” Some brought their children. Some just stood there, quietly. Even those who had never set foot in Tiananmen could remember, together, in that shared night.
It was through Hong Kong that I first learned: “So June Fourth could be publicly mourned.”
That was over a decade ago. I sat on the grass in Victoria Park, surrounded by a sea of people.
A young woman stood on stage, reading the names of the dead.
Her voice trembled, but remained clear. Some in the crowd cried. Some applauded. Some closed their eyes. As the camera panned across the candles, I felt a strange sense of grief—not for history, but for a possibility.
The possibility that: we could have remembered together.
But that night is gone. Since 2020, Victoria Park no longer lights its candles. The vigil organizers were disbanded. The memorial museum was shut down. The leaders were arrested. The government stopped using “pandemic control” as a pretext and instead invoked the National Security Law. Commemoration became a crime.
To remember became a risk.
One year, the park was repurposed for a family carnival—balloons, cotton candy, giant screens to block the view. As if entertainment could erase memory. As if children’s laughter could replace the names of mothers.
The lawn is still there. But it is no longer that lawn.
I know this isn’t just a story about Hong Kong. It reflects a broader strategy— To privatize public memory. To turn history into a program schedule. To convert sites of remembrance into real estate—or “national security risks.”
In the end, authoritarian control of memory isn’t just about deleting a year, an entry, or a photo.
It deletes the space where people can share emotions and memory. It makes you feel that to remember is to be alone— And to forget is the safer choice, the collective one.
I always think of that night in Victoria Park— The wind rustling the trees, the candles unmoving, tens of thousands singing in stillness. Not rage, but resolve. A gentle strength in silence.
It was one of the last remaining spaces for collective memory. Now it is gone. But I still remember that it once existed.
Memory as Resistance
In a totalitarian society, forgetting is policy—and remembering becomes a risk.
You cannot casually mention a date—“June 4th, 1989.” You cannot explicitly name a place—“Sitong Bridge in Beijing.” You cannot say the full name of a man—the one who held a banner and was swiftly taken away. These people are not gone. They have simply been erased from the language of memory—intentionally, precisely.
On October 13, 2022, in broad daylight, a man stood atop Sitong Bridge in Beijing. His name briefly appeared on the internet—then vanished. He unfurled banners that read:
“We want food, not PCR tests.
We want freedom, not lockdowns.
We want dignity, not lies.
We want reform, not a Cultural Revolution.
We want votes, not a leader.
We are citizens, not slaves.”
He lit smoke flares. He played a recording. The city fell into an eerie stillness. People stopped and looked up. Within hours, it was all wiped clean:
The bridge’s name was blocked online, searches returned nothing, the state issued no response.
Sitong Bridge became a place that officially no longer existed.
But we remembered.
What we remembered was the burning bridge, the banner’s words, the sound of his voice—clear and defiant in the streets of Beijing, a city that rarely allows a single voice to rise. He spoke aloud what a generation had been holding in silence.
That act reverberated across the country. In a season with no warning, people began to respond. Someone stood beside a sidewalk with a blank sheet of paper. In university campuses, students staged silent gatherings. On subway trains, someone read aloud the Constitution.
There were no leaders. Leaders are always the first to be taken. What remained were actions—and memory—flowing between people like current through wire.
The blank page became a symbol that said everything by saying nothing. It represented our lost right to language—and our refusal to surrender it.
We remember the girl in Chengdu holding up a white sheet, her hands trembling, but her gaze unwavering. We remember someone in Guangzhou being dragged away, and the crowd shouting: “Let her go!” We remember students at Tsinghua University writing handmade posters that read: “Democracy.” “Rule of law.” “Don’t let fear become the norm.”
These moments were never broadcast. They vanished from social media within minutes. But they left their mark—like the scorched edges of paper. You touch them, and it hurts. But they cannot be wiped away.
Some say these were just the emotions of the young. But I believe something deeper was awakening: A memory that had no name, beginning to stir again.
These scattered acts connected not because anyone gave orders, but because we all remembered something—even if we couldn’t say it out loud. Tiananmen Square. The silenced journalists. The disappeared poets and lawyers. The banners on Sitong Bridge. The edited editorials.
All the things compressed, sealed away, withdrawn, removed, shut down— they never died.
They are merely dormant, waiting for their next flash of light.
How Memory Resists
Resistance doesn’t always mean confrontation. Sometimes, it’s just standing still in silence.
It’s the act of handing over a blank sheet of paper. It’s an unsent draft on Weibo. It’s an article you read and then deleted in the middle of the night. It’s not a declaration of war, but a refusal to forget.
Each time you choose to remember,
Each time you refuse to treat lies as truth—
That is a form of resistance.
I often think of that song—
The one sung year after year beneath thousands of candles in Victoria Park.
“But there’s a dream that will not die—remember it!”
“No matter how hard the rain falls, freedom still will bloom.”
These lyrics echoed through Hong Kong and quietly planted something in our hearts,
Even for those of us who never stepped foot in the park,
Even for those of us who never dared to sing out loud.
Maybe it was a belief.
Maybe just a stubborn, half-formed hope.
They can erase a date, an address, a name—
But they cannot erase what lives inside human hearts.
As long as we are alive, our memory is a form of resistance.
Epilogue: Why We Must Resist Forgetting
Sometimes I ask myself:
If remembering hurts so much, why not just forget?
Forgetting is easier.
It means fewer dreams of gunfire and smoke.
Fewer instinctive silences in public.
Fewer thoughts you can’t even begin to articulate.
Forgetting lets you move faster, lighter—
And in a world that’s always pushing you to “move on,” it seems like the sensible choice.
But I can’t do it.
I cannot watch history be erased from our maps and our language without saying something.
I cannot hear someone dismiss it with “That was so long ago” and feel nothing but cold.
We must remember—because these memories don’t only belong to the past.
They live in our everyday lives:
In a dream, a melody.
In a sentence that was never posted.
They settle in our blood like minerals,
And on quiet nights, they shine.
We must remember—because history is never just “a page turned.” It is a continuous thread.
June Fourth is not a single point in time, but a long shadow— Stretching from 1989 into our present lives:
Censorship.
Lockdowns.
Arrests.
Exile.
And all the wounds we have not yet learned to name.
We must remember—because we don’t want to remain silent at the next crossroads. Because we don’t want the next banner, hung from the next bridge, To vanish like it never existed. Because we don’t want the next generation to piece together this country’s truth. Only in dreams.
Memory is not a burden, It is a form of dignity.
It tells us:
Some things did happen, even if there’s no monument.
Some people did stand up, even if their names were never spoken.
Some dreams still live,
Even in storm and rain.
And in our time, memory carries another task: to resist division.
We live in an era of exhaustion and distrust.
People are fleeing—
From countries,
From reality,
From one another.
We no longer easily trust what others say—
Not even those who seem to share our beliefs.
We question each other’s motives.
We fear betrayal.
We fear being used.
Time and again, we place our defenses before our conversations, we sharpen our words before we even speak, we grow thorns in our language, until even approaching each other becomes a struggle.
But this mistrust is not our fault.
It is the outcome of decades of authoritarian rule— A system that weaponizes speech, makes sincerity a liability, and turns solidarity into a crime.
We live cautiously, not because we are cold, but because we know too well— Trust is fragile.
Yet even in such a time, To remember June Fourth allows us to truly meet each other—if only briefly.
It is not a political performance, Nor an emotional outlet. It is a collective gaze— At the past, and at one another.
What we remember is not an abstract “democracy movement,” But a group of people who believed, who stood up, who once shouted: “The People.” “Freedom.”
They might be our parents, our lost relatives, or the man who raised a banner on Sitong Bridge—and was never seen again.
What we remember is not only death—But possibility.
That people can connect, can overcome fear, can stand side by side.
This memory may hurt, but it is never lonely.
Because it brings together people from all over the world—with different faiths, different backgrounds. It reminds us that despite everything that’s been taken, we have not given up.
When we remember June Fourth, we are saying: We are not each other’s enemy.
Our enemy is the system that silences, that spreads fear, that rewards betrayal, that turns truth into rumor, and justice into “picking quarrels.”
But we— We are the ones still learning how to live, still learning how to remember.
Every year in June, what we do is more than mourn the dead— It is to make space.
Space for speech, space for trust, space for coming closer.
And if we can still gather, to mourn what cannot be named, to light a candle for a date that no longer exists in books—
Then maybe this era is not entirely lost.
Because as long as we remember, we are still resisting the world that wants us divided and suspicious of one another. Because as long as we can recognize each other, we can still light each other’s way.
Because—
“No matter how hard the rain falls, freedom still will bloom.”