Tiananmen Square Massacre - Report Captures Chilling Aftermath of Bloody Clampdown (1989)

On this day in 1989, ITN's David Smith reported from the Chinese capital of Beijing in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the brutal and bloody repression of the country's student-led pro-democracy movement by Chinese government forces. A climate of fear had descended on the campus of Peking University, with reports of state security agents rounding up students and intellectuals suspected of being involved with the popular and predominantly peaceful protests that for months had gripped the country and focused the world's attention on Beijing. Known in China as the June Fourth Clearing, the June Fourth Massacre, and the June Fourth Incident, the military clampdown of 4 June 1989 brought a violent end to the grassroots democratic movement that had been spreading through China since 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, free speech, and free press. Tiananmen Square, in the country's capital, became the symbolic centre of the movement, with over one million people gathering there at the height of the protests. 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 civilians as they went. The most credible estimates suggest that, across Beijing, somewhere between several hundred to one thousand people were killed. #TiananmenSquare #Tiananmen #China #Beijing #Peking #Protests #PeacefulProtest #Clampdown #Repression #1989 #TiananmenSquareMassacre #Massacre #Communism #Authoritarianism #Democracy #ColdWar #History #ChineseHistory #Students #Workers 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