Tiananmen Square Massacre - Raw Footage Captures Prelude to June Fourth Crackdown (1989)

On 4 May 1989, ITN’s cameras in China’s capital of Beijing captured one of the largest demonstrations yet of the Tiananmen Square protests, also known as the 1989 democracy movement. The grassroots democratic movement began spreading through China after the death of the reformist general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Hu Yaobang, in April that year. Over a period of months, students and workers across the country came out to protest a range of issues including government corruption, economic inequality, social security, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press. Aligning themselves with China’s political tradition of mass mobilisation, the student movement chose to march on the 70th anniversary of the student protests that gave their name to the May Fourth Movement of 1919. ITN followed students as they marched from the campus of Peking University to Tiananmen Square, confronting and pushing past the state’s security forces on their way. Student leader Örkesh Dölet, commonly known by his pinyin name, Wu'erkaixi, features prominently in the footage recorded by ITN. Exactly one month after the historic May Fourth demonstrations, China’s democratic spring came to a brutal and bloody end. With the world watching Tiananmen, the ruling Chinese Communist Party labelled the demonstrators terrorists, counterrevolutionaries, and agents of Western subversion. Military forces moved in to clear the square, killing protesters and non-participating civilians as they went. During the Tiananmen Square Massacre (also known as the June 4th Clearing), somewhere between several hundred to one thousand people were killed. The exact figure remains unknown, largely due to the Chinese state's continued secrecy on the subject. #TiananmenSquare #Tiananmen #Beijing #Peking #China #Chinese #CCCP #Students #Protests #Communism #Democracy #Democratic #FreedomOfSpeech #Demonstration #Riot #USSR #ColdWar #SovietUnion #Soviet #SovietWave To license the footage featured in this clip, follow the link below: https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/search/... To search the ITN Archive collection on Getty Images, follow the link below: https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/footage... 🎥 Subscribe to our YouTube channel (tap the bell icon and stay up to date with all the latest ITN Archive videos!) -    / @itnarchive   🎥 Follow us on Twitter -   / itnarchive   🎥 Like us on Facebook -   / itnarchiveitnp   🎥 Check out our TikTok -   / itnarchive1955