四五运动April Fifth Movement
Background and course: Zhou Enlai died on January 8, 1976, in the tenth year of the Cultural Revolution. The authorities restricted mourning at every level: no spontaneous memorial halls, no black armbands, no travel to Beijing to pay respects, while newspapers ran endless articles about “criticizing Deng and beating back the right-deviationist wind.” In March, Nanjing moved first: students at Nanjing University posted big-character posters defending Zhou's memory, and the slogan “Whoever opposes Premier Zhou shall be overthrown” was painted on passing trains and carried across much of China — the “Nanjing Incident.” From late March, Beijing citizens began going on their own to Tiananmen Square, laying wreaths and posting poems at the Monument to the People's Heroes. Most were ordinary workers, residents, students and office staff, many in the name of their factory, school or work unit. On April 4, the Qingming festival, the square reached its peak: wreaths piled up around the monument's base and poems covered the pedestal and the pine fences. By participants' accounts and later estimates, some two million people passed through the square.
The trigger: The anger first erupted over a newspaper. In early March 1976, Shanghai's Wenhui Daily, reprinting Lei Feng's diary, deleted Zhou Enlai's inscription from it and ran a series of articles insinuating against Zhou. Teachers and students at Nanjing University were the first to post big-character posters demanding answers from the paper, and painted large slogans on walls around Nanjing railway station. Once the slogans were painted onto train carriages, word of Nanjing traveled the railways across China. By later counts, more than 2,000 wreaths were delivered to the monument between late March and April 4; many couplets were signed not by work units but simply “an old worker” or “a few shop assistants.”
In the ten days from late March to April 4, a self-organized world formed around the monument. People queued to deliver wreaths; someone set up a makeshift registry in the pine grove north of the monument, logging each wreath by work unit or individual. Poems covered the pedestal, fixed down with tape and paste against the wind. By day there were spontaneous speeches and debates, listeners packed ring within ring; by night, volunteers took turns guarding the wreaths and poems, sitting on the steps wrapped in padded coats. They came from every walk of life: master workers bringing their apprentices, doctors coming off night shifts, schoolchildren copying poems into notebooks to pass around at school. They did not know one another; what held them together was a shared conviction — the Premier had been wronged, and someone had to say so. Participants recalled that order in the square was remarkably good; not a single pickpocket was caught.
Ten li of farewell: To understand the mood of April's square, go back to January. On January 11, 1976, as Zhou Enlai's body was carried to Babaoshan for cremation, the hearse passed along Chang'an Avenue lined with citizens who had come on their own — by contemporary reporting and later recollection, a million or more, many waiting from early morning until deep into the night: the famous “ten-li avenue farewell to the Premier.” The downgraded funeral arrangements, and Deng Xiaoping's sidelining in the anti-Deng campaign right after delivering the eulogy, gave public discontent a concrete target. In March, the Wenhui Daily affair ignited Nanjing and its slogans rode the trains; in Beijing, workers and students began quietly talking among themselves about laying wreaths at Qingming “for the Premier.” The movement's mass base formed in this accumulation of suppression: what people wished to mourn was both a man, and a way of life they had hoped for.
The clearing and the clashes: Late on the night of April 4, the Politburo met and labeled the square gatherings a “counter-revolutionary incident.” That night, trucks hauled away every wreath and poem, and the square was swept clean. On the morning of April 5, people arriving to lay flowers found everything gone. An angry crowd gathered outside the east gate of the Great Hall of the People, chanting “Return our wreaths, return our comrades,” demanding to be received and to be given an explanation, and scuffled with militia and police on duty. In the confusion, a loudspeaker van and several cars parked by the square were set on fire. That evening, some 10,000 capital militia, five battalions of garrison troops and 3,000 police charged into the square with wooden clubs; many people were beaten and injured, and more than 200 were taken away.
The people: The movement had no leaders; ordinary people stood at the front. In the wreath-laying crowds were whole work teams from factories, residents who came by bicycle, middle-school students who copied poems neatly into exercise books. Some stayed up all night guarding the wreaths against theft; others copied poems and carried them back to workshops and offices for colleagues to read. Of the more than 200 seized on April 5, the great majority were workers and ordinary citizens. Worker Han Zhixiong was arrested for speaking in the square and leading the delegation to the Great Hall's east gate; after rehabilitation he was honored as one of the “April Fifth heroes.” After the clearing, the purge widened: anyone who had copied a poem, posted one, or talked about the events at work faced investigation at best, prison or labor camp at worst. Sixteen teachers at Beijing Second Foreign Language Institute, at real personal risk, compiled the poems they had hidden away into Tiananmen Poems, signing themselves “Tong Huaizhou” — “together cherishing Zhou.”
Original demands (sourced): The square's poems were later collected as Tiananmen Poems (People's Literature Publishing House, December 1978). Widely copied works included Li Xianhui's “Petitioning the Premier” and Bai Xiaolang's “Mourning the Premier.” The best-known couplet read: “The people's Premier is loved by the people; the people's Premier loves the people” — mourning Zhou on its face, and beneath the surface aimed squarely at the Gang of Four. Another couplet was blunter: “Whoever opposes Premier Zhou shall be overthrown.” The poems were condemned as “reactionary” in the People's Daily editorial of April 8, 1976. (Sources: Tiananmen Poems, 1978; People's Daily, April 8, 1976)
Echoes across the country: Beijing was not alone. After the Nanjing Incident, commemorations and big-character posters appeared in Zhengzhou, Hangzhou, Xi'an, Taiyuan, Chengdu and other cities — varying in scale, similar in content: mourning the Premier, insinuating against the Gang of Four, demanding a hearing for the wronged. In Xi'an, crowds posted large slogans around the Bell Tower; in Hangzhou, someone set up a mourning altar by West Lake. Most of these local actions were suppressed and their organizers investigated. Scholars have since observed that the April Fifth Movement was the only spontaneous, nationwide political expression to appear simultaneously in many cities during the Cultural Revolution's ten years — and that it peaked in Beijing because the wreaths had found in the monument a symbol belonging to the whole country.
The purge: After the clearing came the purge. Central directives ordered an investigation into the “backers of the counter-revolutionaries” and the sources of the Tiananmen poems. Every work unit set up an investigation team and everyone had to account for themselves: those who had been to the square in early April had to register; those who had copied poems there had to confess; those who had kept copies had to surrender them. Institutions such as Beijing Second Foreign Language Institute came under special rectification, and people who had preserved manuscripts were interrogated again and again. The investigated were made to write self-criticisms and accept discipline at best; at worst they were sentenced for “counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement” or sent to labor farms. The purge lasted more than two years, winding down only with the rehabilitation of 1978. That is why Tiananmen Poems, when finally published, still used a collective pen name — at the end of 1978 its editors could not be sure the purge's accounts would not be reopened.
Aftermath: On April 7, Deng Xiaoping was named the incident's “chief backer” and stripped of all Party and state posts. After Mao's death and the fall of the Gang of Four, calls to rehabilitate the movement grew. In November 1978, the Beijing Party Committee declared the Tiananmen incident “entirely a revolutionary action”; those arrested were rehabilitated and released. See: April Fifth Movement (1976)
How rehabilitation came: Rehabilitation was not accomplished in a day. After Deng Xiaoping returned to office in 1977, calls inside and outside the Party to reverse the verdict on the Tiananmen incident kept rising, and Hu Yaobang, who ran the Party's Organization Department, made redress for the April Fifth victims a priority in clearing up unjust cases. In November 1978, delegates to the Central Work Conference jointly demanded rehabilitation; on November 14, the Beijing Party Committee announced that the 1976 Tiananmen incident had been “an entirely revolutionary action,” and that everyone arrested or investigated over it was rehabilitated and restored in honor. The Third Plenary Session in December endorsed the conclusion. Over the following two years, people across the country who had been sentenced, sent to labor camps or disciplined over the movement were rehabilitated and compensated; confiscated manuscripts and notebooks were returned where they survived — many had already been destroyed in the purge.
The poems and their authors: Among the works collected in Tiananmen Poems, the most widely circulated lines come from a signed poem: “I would grieve, but hear ghosts wail; I weep, and jackals laugh. We shed tears for the fallen hero; brows raised, swords drawn.” Twenty characters that turned mourning into a declaration of war; in the square of 1976 they were copied out countless times, though the author's true identity is still given differently in different accounts. Li Xianhui's “Petitioning the Premier” is written as a series of questions about the fate of the Four Modernizations; another author, Bai Xiaolang, interrogates those in power directly. Nearly all these authors were ordinary people: workers, shop clerks, PLA soldiers, schoolteachers. Their tools were ballpoint pens and exercise books; their page was the stone wall of a monument. When the collection was edited into a book, most authors still used pen names, and the correspondence between real names and manuscripts can in part never be recovered — a gap built into this archive itself.
Cases within the purge: What the purge felt like at the level of a single life can be read in the later rehabilitation files. One person, having copied three poems in the square, was isolated and investigated by his work unit for eight months and wrote dozens of self-criticisms; another hid copied poems in a ration-coupon box, had them found in a search, and was given a demerit and a pay cut for “preserving reactionary poems”; a PLA soldier who had signed his real name to a mourning poem was ordered demobilized back to his village. Most of these punishments never reached a court and produced no judgment — only disciplinary decisions slipped into personnel files, affecting promotions, Party membership and housing allocation for years afterward. When rehabilitation came in 1978, such sanctions were revoked in batches, and many people, seeing their April Fifth files for the first time, wept on the spot. A rehabilitation document can annul a punishment; it cannot annul two years of living in fear.
What it left behind: The most tangible legacy is the book Tiananmen Poems — verse written by ordinary people, published as a collection for the first time, and read as a political awakening by a generation after the Cultural Revolution. The deeper legacy is the example itself: citizens with no organization and no leader showed they could state a political position in a public square with wreaths and poems. The 1978 rehabilitation paved the way for the loosening of minds at the Third Plenary Session that followed; thirteen years later, in the spring of 1989, another generation walked into the same square, again carrying wreaths.
Commemoration: When Tiananmen Poems was formally published by People's Literature Publishing House in December 1978, it swept the country through repeated printings and became one of the year's best-selling books. Every Qingming since, people still lay flowers at the monument. In official language the movement is fixed as the “April Fifth Movement” and written into middle-school history textbooks — but the textbooks keep only the conclusion. The names of the ordinary people who guarded wreaths through the night, copied poems, and took the clubs in the square have, for the most part, not survived.
Figures and sources: No complete official archive of the April Fifth Movement's casualties and victims has ever been made public. Arrests on the night of April 5 are put by published accounts at between two and four hundred; injuries during the clearing were never tallied, and published records report no deaths that night. The total number of people implicated nationwide during the two-year purge was never announced; judging by the scale of the rehabilitation work, it can only be inferred to run into the tens of thousands. This entry rests mainly on Tiananmen Poems (1978), the inadvertent testimony of the People's Daily editorial of April 8, 1976, the rehabilitation reporting of 1978, and participants' memoirs published over the following decades. Where accounts conflict, this site follows the version on which most sources agree and flags what remains in doubt.
The chain of decisions: The chain of orders behind the handling of April Fifth was pieced together over the years from participants' recollections. During April 4, as the square's crowds peaked, Beijing reported to the center; that night the Politburo met in the Great Hall of the People under Hua Guofeng and reached two conclusions: the events were a “counter-revolutionary incident” manufactured by a minority, and the wreaths and posters were to be cleared overnight. The meeting was reported through Mao Yuanxin to the gravely ill Mao Zedong, who assented. After the April 5 clearing, the Politburo on April 7 adopted two resolutions — Hua Guofeng as Premier, and Deng Xiaoping stripped of all posts inside and outside the Party while retaining membership — both approved by Mao and announced by broadcast that night and in the next day's papers. On April 8, the People's Daily editorial “What Does the Tiananmen Square Incident Show?” fixed the movement's label as a product of “Deng Xiaoping's right-deviationist wind.” This chain — meeting, instruction, editorial — shows the suppression was no loss of control in the moment but a decision approved level by level; that is why this site files April Fifth also as a persecution record.
State of research: Published material on the April Fifth Movement consists mainly of memoirs and studies of the poems; official archives remain essentially closed. Participants' recollections are scattered through the press of the early 1980s and later web archives, and they differ on many details; this site relies on cross-corroboration between sources. Key documents — the record of the April 4 Politburo meeting, the chain of orders for the clearing — have never been published, and the narrative can only be reconstructed from participants' later accounts. This site states the limitation plainly: April Fifth is the earliest entry in these Resistance records and one of those with the largest archival gaps; its incompleteness is itself a relic of that era's information control.
Where the wreaths went, and the echo of the 1980s: The wreaths and manuscripts cleared away on the night of April 4 were, by contemporary rumor and later recollection, trucked to the Babaoshan area and burned — a claim no published document confirms, recorded here as such, though it matches participants' shared memory of that night: by morning the square was clean, as if nothing had happened. What is material can be burned; poems copied into notebooks cannot. Around the 1978 rehabilitation, hand-copied Tiananmen Poems circulated again in factories and schools, and the published book became a line of memory parallel to scar literature. Through the 1980s, elderly people still laid flowers at the monument each Qingming. In April 1989, when Beijing students entered the square to mourn Hu Yaobang, many reread those poems — across thirteen years, the memories of two squares joined end to end, and the older generation said: that year, we began the same way.
The name “April Fifth”: The movement is named for its date by those who came later — people in 1976 spoke only of “the Tiananmen business.” After 1979, the name “April Fifth Movement” settled in the press, echoing “May Fourth” and, deliberately or not, placing it in the genealogy of modern Chinese protest: May Fourth, April Fifth, 1989 — separated by years, all located around Chang'an Avenue. Han Zhixiong is among the few participants to leave systematic testimony under his real name; after rehabilitation he gave many interviews, from the wreaths in the square to the clubs at the clearing, and into old age still sat for researchers' questions on the movement's details. In 2016, at the fortieth anniversary, participants and scholars in Hong Kong and overseas held commemorative seminars, projecting the poems on a wall and reading them aloud one by one. The movement's commemorative history thus forms a contrast: in the city where it happened, it sits in textbooks with a conclusion and no names; outside that city, people face a projection and read the names out loud.
Editions of the poems: The 1978 first edition of Tiananmen Poems collected several hundred poems and couplets; later printings added and dropped pieces — some editions removed the fiercest works, others added newly recovered ones. The differences between editions have themselves become a subject of study: the traces of editing record exactly how each era received the movement. Selected translations appeared abroad in several languages, and English selections brought the “Tiananmen poems” into world-literature anthologies. This site quotes the square's poems from the 1978 first edition; where later additions or deletions matter, they are noted separately in the individual case pages.
The night of rehabilitation: By several participants' recollections, when the rehabilitation was announced in November 1978, Beijing citizens returned spontaneously to Tiananmen Square — some laying fresh wreaths, some standing in silence or taking photographs before the monument, most simply standing, as if to stand back the hours they had not been allowed to finish in April 1976. Rehabilitation brought more than honor: the expelled were reinstated, sentences were annulled with back pay, and confiscated manuscripts and notebooks were returned where they survived — those destroyed in the purge could only be certified as destroyed by one's work unit. In April 1979, at the movement's third anniversary, Beijing's press published batches of memoirs, and poems appeared in the square once more — this time, no one who posted them had to fear a midnight clearance. The measure of how complete a rehabilitation is lies not in its documents but in whether people dare return to the same place and do the same thing.
The broadcast on the night of the clearing: On the evening of April 5, Wu De, first secretary of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee, delivered a broadcast speech declaring that what was happening in the square was the work of a tiny handful of class enemies, and demanding that the revolutionary masses leave at once. After the speech, the Capital Workers' Militia Command issued a notice setting a deadline for the crowds to disperse that night. Then the clearing began: militia pushed from the edges of the square toward its center, beating with wooden clubs those still gathered around the monument, and it lasted deep into the night. The text of that broadcast has been cited by researchers ever since, because it lays out the procedure of that night in full: first the label, then the broadcast, then the deadline, then the clubs. Only after the people in the square had been stripped of the name of the masses in words could the clearing proceed as procedure. For decades afterward, whenever something happened in that square, the broadcast and the notice always came first — the formation was set on this night.
The inscription on the book: The 1978 collection Tiananmen Poems carried its title inscribed by Hua Guofeng, then Party Chairman and Premier. In the political vocabulary of the time, the nation's top leader inscribing the title of a book of poems by ordinary people was itself a declaration of rehabilitation. A selection had circulated internally for months before publication; once published, queues formed at Xinhua bookstores, the book was reprinted again and again, its printings ran into the millions, and it was translated into several languages — one of the first popular Chinese texts to reach the world after the Cultural Revolution. Decades later, the book's fate mirrors the movement it records: the poets were investigated and their manuscripts confiscated, and in the end the same machinery of power personally delivered the book to the shelves — by which time the people standing at the counter were a different generation.
Nanjing's account: When the bills for the April Fifth Movement were settled, Nanjing was often written off as a mere prelude, but the price Nanjing paid was not light. After April 1976, Jiangsu province investigated the Nanjing Incident across the province: students and workers who had posted posters or painted slogans were registered and examined one by one; some were held in isolation for months, others were sent back down to the countryside. Nanjing had lit the fuse, but once the fire caught, Beijing's square became the center, and Nanjing's participants were dealt with over the following two years as separate local cases. When rehabilitation came in 1978, the Nanjing Incident was declared a revolutionary action together with the Tiananmen events, and those who had been punished were restored. Two cities, north and south, joined that spring by the side of a passing train, settled their accounts separately in the reckoning — another key to how nationwide this movement was.