On the night of June 3-4, 1989, Chinese troops violently crushed the largest pro-democracy demonstrations in the history of the communist regime. In this extraordinary collection of hundreds of internal government and Communist Party documents, secretly smuggled out of China, we learn how these events came to pass from behind the scenes. The material reveals how the most important decisions were made; and how the turmoil split the ruling elite into radically opposed factions. The book includes the minutes of the crucial meetings at which the Elders decided to cashier the pro-reform Party secretary Zhao Ziyang and to replace him with Jiang Zemin, to declare martial law, and finally to send the troops to drive the students from the Square. Just as the Pentagon Papers laid bare the secret American decision making behind the Vietnam War and changed forever our view of the nation's political leaders, so too has The Tiananmen Papers altered our perception of how and why the events of June 4 took the shape they did. Its publication has proven to be a landmark event in Chinese and world history.

THE TIANANMEN PAPERS, which contains documents unearthed from the guarded core of the Chinese Politburo, is the most important book on China published in decades. It reveals the highest-level processes of decision-making during the tumultuous events surrounding the terrible massacre in Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989. Drawn from about 2,000 documents, THE TIANANMEN PAPERS have been compiled and edited as part of an extraordinary collaboration between America's most prominent China scholars and a handful of Chinese people who have risked their lives to obtain them. The Chinese pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 were the longest lasting and most influential in the world. THE TIANANMEN PAPERS exposes the desperate conflict during the period among a few strong leaders, whose personalities emerge with unprecedented vividness. Its revelations of the most important event in modern Chinese history will have a profound impact not only in China, but in every country in the world that deals with China.

Collects hundreds of internal government and Communist Party documents to reveal the circumstances leading up to the Tiananmen Square events, including the division between the ruling elite, the rise of Jiang Zemin, and the declaring of martial law. Reprint.

The events of the Beijing Spring of 1989 were amongst the most momentous of China's tumultuous 20th century. What began as a peaceful memorial demonstration following the death of a popular reform leader, soon developed into a massive pro-democracy movement with Tiananmen Square as the focal point. As hundreds of thousands of students and workers poured onto the Beijing streets, the Chinese government responded first by declaring martial law and then, on 4th June, fatefully sending in the People's Liberation Army to crush the protesters forcefully.

A narrative history, told from the point of view of student demonstrators, of the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident and events leading to it incident in Beijing, China.

In the spring of 1989 over 100,000 students in Beijing initiated the largest student revolt in human history. Television screens across the world filled with searing images from Tiananmen Square of protesters thronging the streets, massive hunger strikes, tanks set ablaze, and survivors tending to the dead and wounded after a swift and brutal government crackdown. Dingxin Zhao's award-winning The Power of Tiananmen is the definitive treatment of these historic events. Along with grassroots tales and interviews with the young men and women who launched the demonstrations, Zhao carries out a penetrating analysis of the many parallel changes in China's state-society relations during the 1980s. Such changes prepared an alienated academy, gave rise to ecology-based student mobilization, restricted government policy choices, and shaped student emotions and public opinion, all of which, Zhao argues, account for the tragic events in Tiananmen.

"One of the best analyses of the impact of Tiananmen throughout China in the years since 1989." --The New York Times Book Review