~CHINA~
Tiananmen Square
ABOUT THESE PHOTOS:
Photographs Taken By Molly Rush
Taken during the course of her visit to China with the Enck Family in Summer, 2013.
TIANANMEN SQUARE
Tiananmen Square is a large city square in the center of Beijing, China, named after the Tiananmen Gate (Gate of Heavenly Peace)
located to its North, separating it from the Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square is the third largest city square in the world (440,000 m² -
880m by 500m or 109 acres - 960 by 550 yd). It has great cultural significance as it was the site of several important events in Chinese history.

Outside China, the square is best known in recent memory as the focal point of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, a pro-democracy
movement which ended on 4 June 1989 with the declaration of martial law in Beijing by the government and the death of several hundred
or possibly thousands of civilians.
The Tiananmen Gate to the Forbidden City was built in 1415 during the Ming Dynasty. Towards the demise of the
Ming Dynasty, heavy fighting between Li Zicheng and the early Qing emperors damaged (or perhaps destroyed)
the gate. The Tiananmen square was designed and built in 1651, and has since enlarged four times its original size
in the 1950s.
TIANANMEN SQUARE MASSACRE
The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, also known as the June Fourth Incident in Chinese, were student-led popular demonstrations
in Beijing which took place in the spring of 1989 and received broad support from city residents, exposing deep splits within China's
political leadership. The protests were forcibly suppressed by hardline leaders who ordered the military to enforce martial law in the
country's capital. The crackdown that initiated on June 3–4 became known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre or the June 4 Massacre as
troops with assault rifles and tanks inflicted thousands of casualties on unarmed civilians trying to block the military’s advance on
Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing, which student demonstrators had occupied for seven weeks. The scale of military mobilization
and the resulting bloodshed were unprecedented in the history of Beijing, a city with a rich tradition of popular protests in the 20th century.

The protests were triggered in April 1989 by the death of former Communist Party General Secretary, Hu Yaobang, a liberal reformer,
who was deposed after losing a power struggle with hardliners over the direction of political and economic reform. University students
who marched and gathered in Tiananmen Square to mourn Hu also voiced grievances against inflation, limited career prospects, and
corruption of the party elite. They called for government accountability, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and the restoration of
workers' control over industry. At the height of the protests, about a million people assembled in the Square.
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