“They won’t let us go to Wan’an Cemetery.” Days before the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre, members of the Tiananmen Mothers were informed by the Beijing Municipal Security Bureau that they would be barred from visiting the graves of loved ones killed in 1989.
For over three decades, Wan’an Cemetery served as the sole sanctioned space where grieving families could mourn together each June 4 – though always under heavy police surveillance. When I showed footage of the cemetery grounds to my Harvard freshman class 15 years ago, my students were stunned to see surveillance cameras deliberately installed over the burial sites of Tiananmen victims. Even the headstones told a story of fear: many originally omitted “June 4” as the date of death, with families adding it only years later.
Many of the student protesters who survived are now parents themselves, but the repression has only intensified. After allowing these heavily monitored cemetery visits for more than 30 years, the regime that killed their children is now depriving the Tiananmen Mothers of even this final act of remembrance.
In spring 1989, the sudden death of Hu Yaobang – the reformist Communist Party general secretary who had been purged for his sympathetic stance toward the 1986-87 student movements – sparked massive protests across China. Students, joined by workers and citizens nationwide, took to the streets demanding democratic reform and an end to corruption. The peaceful demonstrations, highlighted by college students’ hunger strike in Tiananmen Square, ended on June 4 when the regime deployed over 200,000 People’s Liberation Army soldiers, equipped with tanks and machine guns, to assault its own people in the capital.
Even today, the full scale of the massacre – including the death toll – remains unknown. The mother of Yuan Li, a 29-year-old engineer who had been accepted to graduate school in the United States, searched 44 hospitals and saw over 400 bodies before finding her son at the Navy General Hospital. In her testimony, she described the day Yuan Li was cremated: she saw two large plastic bags emanating terrible smells, filled with corpses. “If death tolls are ever counted in the future,” she testified, “these poor children will remain nameless bodies.” Yuan Li is buried in Wan’an Cemetery.
The fear created by the massacre is best illustrated by a story shared by Professor Cui Weiping, the Chinese translator of Vaclav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless.” After one family’s 28-year-old son was killed, the victim’s sister was abandoned by her boyfriend after he learned about her brother. When she later entered a new relationship, that man also left her upon learning about her family’s history. She and her mother made a painful decision: she would never mention her brother to anyone she planned to date. She eventually married and had a son. Neither her husband nor her child knows about the death – or even the existence – of this brother-in-law and uncle.
Knowing the delegitimization the massacre would bring, the regime constructed an official version of the 1989 events in the immediate aftermath of the military crackdown, even as arrests and purges continued nationwide. Massive efforts were undertaken to imprint this account into national memory. The official justification claims the military crackdown quelled a riot that would have otherwise threatened the country’s stability and prosperity.
Information collected by the Tiananmen Mothers, however, reveals that many victims had never joined the protests and never confronted the troops. Ma Chengfen, a veteran of the People’s Liberation Army, was shot and killed while sitting on the steps of her building chatting with neighbors. The youngest known victim, 9-year-old Lü Peng, was shot in the chest. The oldest, age 66, was killed inside a hutong while visiting relatives.
Massacre maps created based on information provided by the Tiananmen Mothers – pinpointing where victims died and where bodies were found – reveal that the Tiananmen Massacre was not confined to Tiananmen Square. State violence took place across central Beijing.
Two locations saw especially heavy casualties. At Muxidi, soldiers opened fire on crowds as troops entered the city. At Liubukou, tanks chased down students who had already peacefully evacuated the square and were heading back to their universities. Among them was Fang Zheng, a senior at Beijing Sports College, whose legs were crushed by a tank as he tried to push a freshman student walking beside him to safety.
The Tiananmen Mothers have been demanding truth and justice, resisting the official accounts imposed on them. In 2006, the group called for “truth and reconciliation.” The mother of Ya Aiguo, shot in the head and killed at age 22, questioned: “”Why did you use real guns and bullets on your people? Even if you kill a chicken or a lamb, you should apologize and compensate, right? Such a big China, such a big CCP – you killed my son, but you didn’t even say sorry. Are we citizens not allowed to say a word?”
In 2012, her husband, Ya Weilin, hanged himself in an empty parking lot near Tiananmen Square, days before June 4. After waiting from age 50 to 73, this father made his final appeal for justice in a note: “My son Ya Aiguo was shot and killed by the Martial Law soldiers in 1989. Now 23 years later, still no justice. I use death to fight.”
Tiananmen is a battle over historical facts, but more importantly, it’s also a battle over values. The CCP’s suppression and manipulation of memory worked for decades as the world, both domestic and international, was mesmerized by the wealth and power produced by the “China Model” of state capitalism combined with authoritarianism. To rescue its legitimacy, the post-Tiananmen regime constructed a narrative portraying the movement as a Western conspiracy to weaken and divide China, justifying the military crackdown as necessary for stability and prosperity. In other words, human lives and human rights could be “sacrificed” for economic growth and national power.
Then COVID-19 hit, and a White Paper Generation emerged three decades after Tiananmen, despite the elaborate Patriotic Education Campaign in post-1989 China that gave rise to “wolf warrior” nationalism. Shielding their faces in public with white papers in defiance of the official “correct memory” imposed on them about COVID-19, these young men and women collectively created an indelible image of their generation – not as dramatic as that of the Tank Man near Tiananmen Square, but a new image of courage: courage amid fear, everywhere. After witnessing firsthand how the accounts of China’s COVID-19 experience that they had personally lived through were being reconstructed into a distorted official version of national memory, this new generation wanted to know what else they had been deceived about.
For decades, the CCP barely tolerated the Tiananmen Mothers’ quiet grief, allowing them limited space to mourn once a year while suppressing all public memory. But this fragile status quo shattered when a six-hour video of Major General Xu Qinxian’s 1990 secret military trial was recently leaked. Xu, commander of the 38th Army, had refused to deploy his troops to crush the 1989 protest movement. For this act of conscience, he was court-martialed, imprisoned for five years, and expelled from the CCP. His trial revealed what the regime had long concealed: that even within the military, there had been opposition – and that the supposed “consensus” about June 4 was enforced through punishment and fear.
The leak represented a dangerous crack in the official memory. The Tiananmen Mothers, with their persistent documentation and annual commemorations, suddenly posed a greater threat to a regime whose legitimacy rests on lies. They were not only grieving parents but keepers of a counter-memory that could now connect to evidence of elite resistance.
Zhang Xianlin, co-founder of the Tiananmen Mothers who lost her 19-year-old son during the massacre, has been monitored since May 28 this year by two police officers stationed outside her building. On June 3, the day before the anniversary, the police chief himself joined them to keep watch over this 89-year-old mother. Earlier this year, the Tiananmen Mothers were also banned from attending their annual Chinese New Year dinner gathering.
In Hong Kong, organizers of the annual candlelight vigils in Victoria Park – commemorating the Tiananmen Massacre for three decades – were recently tried under the National Security Law imposed by Beijing in 2020. Charged with inciting subversion, they face up to 10 years in prison. During closing statements, government-appointed judges barred Chow Hang-tung, president of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, from mentioning the Tiananmen Massacre. When Chow referred to the crackdown as the “June 4 massacre,” the judge corrected her: “June 4 incident…The court will not allow you to make political statements.”
Victoria Park, a space of light and remembrance, will be taken over by a pro-Beijing carnival this week. But the tens of thousands who gathered across six soccer fields each year proved that there is something that cannot be crushed by guns, tanks, or propaganda machines: the human longing for truth and justice.
The regime can stop the Tiananmen Mothers from visiting Wan’an Cemetery. They can criminalize remembrance. They can deny work visas and fire associate professors like me from positions in Hong Kong because of our work on Tiananmen. But they know their legitimacy rests on lies and fear.
In the early 1990s, when I was a college student, on each June 4 my friends and I would light candles behind closed doors and shuttered windows. They cannot extinguish the candlelight in our hearts.
“People will one day put you on trial.” In 1989, this banner hung from the top of a major building at Renmin University of China. Those who ordered the massacre will not only be tried by the people, but also by the history they tried to suppress with power.
History is on our side.
