六四工人与市民June Fourth Workers & Citizens
What they did: In the protest wave of spring 1989, workers entered the movement later than the students but carried no less weight. On May 19, the Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation (BWAF) was formally proclaimed in Tiananmen Square — the first workers' organization since 1949 to declare itself independent of the official union. Its founders were ordinary workers: Han Dongfang, 25, was an electric-locomotive repair electrician with the Beijing Railway Bureau. The federation set up a broadcast station on the square's west side, airing news and commentaries daily; Lu Jinghua, herself of worker background, became its best-known voice. The BWAF also organized worker pickets to keep order in the square and protect the students on hunger strike.
From mourning to martial law (timeline): On April 15, 1989, former General Secretary Hu Yaobang died, and Beijing students began mourning that quickly turned to demands for press freedom and disclosure of officials' assets. On April 26, a People's Daily editorial branded the movement “turmoil,” bringing a hundred thousand students into the streets until the editorial line was softened. On May 13, on the eve of Gorbachev's visit, students began a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square, backed by hundreds of thousands of citizens. It was in those days that workers entered in force: factory worker pickets brought students water and food, kept order, and began discussing an organization of their own. In the small hours of May 19, Zhao Ziyang came to the square to urge the students to leave — his last public appearance. That evening, Li Peng announced martial law in parts of the capital. The BWAF's founding declaration was posted on the very day the martial-law order came down: the workers said the students were hunger-striking against corruption, and workers could not stand by and watch.
Workers and students: Within the 1989 movement, the relationship between workers and students changed over time. During the student marches of late April, workers mostly watched from the roadside, applauding and pressing money and water into students' hands. The turn came after the hunger strike began on May 13: workers made up a visibly growing share of the crowds sitting through the night in the square, and some raised a banner reading “The working class is the leading class” — support, and also a reminder: the constitution says the working class leads everything, and now the workers intended to speak. Workers brought more than numbers; they brought organizational experience — pickets, logistics, broadcasting, negotiation were factory skills. Student leaders were initially wary of an independent workers' organization, fearing it would hand the authorities a pretext, but by late May the BWAF broadcast station had become one of the square's information centers. On the night of June 3, those who first confronted the troops along West Chang'an Avenue, and paid the heaviest price, were precisely these workers and the citizens watching beside them.
Martial law and the blockades: Late on May 19, the authorities declared martial law in parts of the capital. In the days that followed, Beijing residents came out in force: intersections were blocked with buses, dumpsters and barricades, and many people simply stood in the roadway, stopping troop trucks with their bodies. Housewives carried kettles of water to the soldiers, repeating: “You are the people's soldiers — you must not shoot the people.” Units entering the city were held for days around Fengtai and Liuliqiao, unable to advance or withdraw. By the end of May the students had largely left the square; those who stayed to the end were mostly workers and citizens. On the evening of June 3, word spread that plainclothes soldiers ferrying weapons near Xidan had been discovered and surrounded, and the mood along Chang'an Avenue turned suddenly tense. That night, martial-law troops advanced on Tiananmen from every direction and opened fire on citizens blocking their path around Muxidi, Xidan and Fuxingmen. According to lists later compiled name by name by victims' families and to hospital records, the great majority of the dead were ordinary workers, office staff and residents — many shot below their own apartment blocks or on the way to carrying the wounded to hospital.
The night of the shooting: Along the troops' routes of advance, the killing was heaviest around Muxidi and West Chang'an Avenue. After the shooting began, residents along the route carried the wounded to nearby hospitals — on pedicabs, flatbed carts and bicycles — until hospital corridors were filled with the injured. Some residents dragged shot strangers into stairwells while troops were still firing. After the army reached the square and cleared it before dawn, the students withdrew peacefully, while the roads leading to the square were left stained with blood. Once the troops pulled back from the city center, residents around Muxidi laid out photographs of the dead and bloodied clothing in silent display for several days.
The BWAF's daily work: The federation had no dues and no office; its headquarters sat beneath the reviewing stand on the square's west side, its members calling themselves the “Workers' Movement Speech Center.” Its work was concrete: the broadcast station aired three times a day, reporting troop movements and reading out telegrams of support from around the country; worker pickets manned the square's entrances, checked suspicious persons, and escorted vehicles carrying food and medicine; a donation box stood by the broadcast station, into which citizens stuffed banknotes — one retired worker gave a full month's pension. The BWAF formally submitted requests for dialogue to the NPC Standing Committee and the State Council, asking to be recognized as lawful. The Beijing Federation of Trade Unions refused to recognize it throughout, and official newspapers called it an “illegal organization.” By early June its registered members numbered in the thousands, and actual participants were more.
Original demands (sourced): The BWAF advocated the right of workers to form independent unions, and demanded dialogue with the government, action against corruption, and press freedom. Its leaflets and broadcasts are documented in Han Minzhu (ed.), Cries for Democracy (Princeton UP, 1990) and Walder & Gong (1993). No single complete manifesto has been located.
The people: After the clearing, Han Dongfang — now on a wanted list — turned himself in, hoping to trade himself for the safety of his fellow workers. He was held 22 months without trial, contracted tuberculosis in prison and had part of a lung removed, and was released on medical parole in April 1991. In 1993, returning from medical treatment in the United States, he was refused re-entry to the mainland and was forced to remain in Hong Kong, where in 1994 he founded China Labour Bulletin, which has documented Chinese workers' strikes and rights struggles ever since. Lu Jinghua, also wanted, escaped to the United States and never returned, supporting herself with jobs and union work. Ordinary BWAF members were sentenced, expelled from their jobs, or lived for decades unable to speak of what they had done — some of their children never learned what their parents did in 1989.
The dead have names: The dead are not numbers. On the lists the Tiananmen Mothers have verified over thirty years is Wang Nan, a 19-year-old school student: late on June 3 he was shot in the head around the south end of Nanchang Street; his mother, Zhang Xianling, became one of the earliest founders of the families' group. There are post-office clerks, shop assistants, factory workers on night shift, a peddler who had been delivering watermelons to students by bicycle. Many were shot a few hundred meters from home. Families were told to “consider the overall situation,” to cremate remains quickly and keep silent, while work-unit leaders took turns doing “thought work” on them. For decades, Zhang Xianling and the others have kept their sons' photographs, bloodied clothes and bullet fragments, retelling to every visitor the route of that night — at which intersection the shots were heard, in which hospital the body was found.
Aftermath: The trials that followed fell hardest on ordinary people: student leaders mostly drew three to seven years for “counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement,” while workers and citizens accused of burning military vehicles or attacking soldiers were in many cases sentenced to death. In Shanghai, after a stranded train was set on fire by a crowd on June 6, workers Xu Guoming, Bian Hanwu and Yan Xuerong were sentenced to death and executed on June 22 — sixteen days from incident to execution. In Beijing, the first death sentences, suspended death sentences and life terms likewise fell mostly on workers and the unemployed, and many more received ten years or longer. Foreign reporting at the time put arrests in Beijing alone at roughly 20,000; the true figure has never been verifiable. On June 8, the BWAF was declared an illegal organization. Estimates of the death toll diverge widely: the Chinese government says some 200–300 including soldiers; Amnesty International estimated close to 1,000; later declassified diplomatic files contain higher figures still. See: June Fourth
The speed of the trials: The judicial handling after the crackdown was notable for its speed. From mid-June, courts in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere sat in continuous session, with several cases going from arrest to verdict in days. In late June, Beijing carried out its first executions of condemned “rioters”; Amnesty International kept case-by-case records of many of them. The Chinese Red Cross briefly gave an outside figure of some 2,600 deaths in Beijing, then retracted it. In the thirty-plus years since, the authorities have never published a list of the dead and have banned public mourning; against that silence stands the list of names the victims' families have compiled themselves, year by year.
International response and Hong Kong: After the crackdown, the United States and the European Union imposed arms embargoes and sanctions on China, some still in force. Exiled student and worker leaders organized abroad; BWAF broadcaster Lu Jinghua, after reaching the US, joined the labor movement and recounted 1989 at international labor forums for years. A thousand kilometers from Beijing, Hong Kong took up the memory: from 1990, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements held a candlelight vigil in Victoria Park every June 4, drawing tens of thousands — at times over a hundred thousand — for thirty years, the only large public June Fourth commemoration on Chinese soil. In 2020 the vigil was banned on epidemic grounds; in 2021 the Alliance disbanded and its leaders were arrested. Since then, every June 4, Victoria Park is sealed and Hong Kong's streets hold only patrolling police — public mourning is history across all of China, continuing only at gatherings in Taipei, London, New York and other cities abroad.
A bereaved mother, Su Bingxian: Another core figure of the families' group is Su Bingxian. Her son Wu Xiangdong, a worker at a Beijing timber factory, was shot dead around West Chang'an Avenue in June 1989, in his twenties. In her later years Su made it her work to seek out bereaved families and record the circumstances of deaths, writing a great deal. In one essay she recorded a detail: on the night her son was killed, she stood outside a hospital morgue until dawn; when a staff member asked at daybreak if she was family, she could not speak and only nodded. The families' group holds hundreds of such records. The annual memorial essays of the Tiananmen Mothers, drafted or dictated over the years by Ding Zilin, Zhang Xianling, Su Bingxian and others, have not changed their content in thirty years: publish the list, assign responsibility, render justice. They say: we are old and our memories are failing, so while we still remember, we write the names down one by one.
The distribution of sentences: Sentencing after June Fourth followed a pattern noted by many human rights organizations: the more ordinary the defendant, the heavier the sentence. Student leaders such as Wang Dan received, across two sentences, a combined eleven years (four in 1991, eleven in 1996, before medical parole to the US) — among the heaviest for students. Among ordinary workers and citizens, sentences of ten years and more came in batches, and death and suspended death sentences fell almost entirely on this group. By human rights organizations' incomplete contemporary counts, from June to the end of 1989 at least several dozen people nationwide were sentenced to death and executed on June Fourth-related charges, most of them workers, the unemployed, and so-called “rioters.” The judgments of courts such as Beijing's No. 1 Intermediate Court were never systematically published; most of these names survive only in the memory of families and fellow prisoners. This site's Persecution archive records the verifiable portion of them, and continues to add more.
What it left behind: The most stubborn legacy of the workers and citizens of 1989 is the Tiananmen Mothers. Jiang Jielian, the 17-year-old son of Renmin University teacher Ding Zilin, was shot near Fuxingmen on the night of June 3 — an ordinary middle-school student. Ding and her husband Jiang Peikun joined more than a hundred other bereaved families and have spent over thirty years locating and recording, one by one, the names, ages, jobs and places of death of the victims, demanding a published list of the dead, accountability, and consolation for families. Most are now white-haired; they still live under surveillance and receive official “visits” every early June. Han Dongfang's China Labour Bulletin operated in Hong Kong for thirty years. And after 1989, the words “independent union” became the unavoidable starting point for any Chinese workers' movement.
On the death toll: The June Fourth death toll is the most contested figure of all. The Chinese government announced in late June 1989 a figure of about 300, including some 200 “rioters” and 23 students, the rest soldiers — a formulation adjusted slightly since. A martial-law spokesman at the time said nearly 300. Amnesty International, working from eyewitnesses and hospital sources, estimated about 1,000. British archives declassified in 2017 revealed that a Chinese source had told the British ambassador of a figure around 10,000; that number cannot be independently verified and survives only as a claim within diplomatic files. The Tiananmen Mothers have verified and published the names of more than 200 dead, stating plainly that these are only part of the true number. This site's practice is to present the figures side by side with their sources and dates — and, for the dead who have names, to record them one by one rather than letting any single total stand in for them.
The hospitals' night: From late on June 3 into the morning of June 4, the hospitals of western Beijing passed the most frantic night in their histories. At the emergency doors of Fuxing Hospital, Beijing Children's Hospital, Xuanwu Hospital and the Railway Hospital, bicycles, pedicabs and flatbed carts delivered the wounded trip after trip; medical staff recall corridors and halls filling with bodies, plasma running short, doctors and nurses rolling their white-coat sleeves to the elbow. After daybreak a new pressure arrived: departments required hospitals to register the wounded and the dead, and families who came searching were in some cases told “no such person,” in others left to identify bodies one by one in the morgue. For many years afterward, in the homes of western Beijing, June was not a month for weddings. The rescue records and recollections of those doctors and nurses are today key material for reconstructing that night's distribution of casualties — among the people they saved were some who later went to prison, and some who were never heard of again.
Sources for this entry: Published materials behind this entry include Han Minzhu (ed.), Cries for Democracy (1990); Walder and Gong's research on the BWAF (1993); the victim lists and memorial essays published over the years by the Tiananmen Mothers; Amnesty International's 1989–90 report series; the British diplomatic cables declassified in 2017; and the later accounts of Han Dongfang, Lu Jinghua and others. China's official archives on 1989 have never opened: the martial-law troops' operational records, hospitals' emergency records and court judgments remain unavailable to researchers. This site's practice is to write what is verifiable as fact, to place disputed claims side by side, and to mark what cannot be found as not found — for an event that was systematically erased, marking the blanks matters as much as recording the facts.
Memory preserved underground: After the crackdown, writing about June Fourth went underground and overseas. From the second half of 1989, poems describing the square and the gunfire began circulating in hand copies — researchers call them the “June Fourth poems,” answering the Tiananmen Poems of 1976 across a generation, likewise ballpoint pens, exercise books and networks of trust. Collections of participants' testimony were published abroad one after another: students, workers, citizens, medical staff and soldiers each recounting where they stood that night. In the 1990s, Ding Zilin and others compiled the families' oral accounts into books published overseas. In the internet era these texts have been scanned, archived and mirrored, in a tug-of-war with deletion that continues today. This site's June Fourth entries follow a stated principle: whatever can be read only in overseas archives is cited with its source and place of keeping; whatever cannot be verified is left blank — for an event whose official policy is forgetting, the first step of archival work is admitting which parts have already been taken.
The square, every year: Since 1989, Tiananmen Square enters a special state every June 3 and 4: open as usual, but with tightened security checks, and far more plainclothes officers and patrols than normal around the monument and the square's edges. People carrying flowers or black armbands are questioned; anyone lingering too long with a camera pointed at the monument is moved along. This state has lasted over thirty years — an institution that needs no announcement. In 2019, at the thirtieth anniversary, commemorations were held in dozens of cities worldwide; Taipei's vigil alone drew several thousand, making it among the largest years of overseas commemoration. That same June 4 in Beijing, light rain fell on the square and tourists queued for security checks as usual — in official footage, the day was indistinguishable from any other. The difference exists only in some people's calendars: on that day the families are taken on “trips,” activists are taken for “tea,” and the square itself is surrounded by its own history.
Executions as display: The executions of late June 1989 were carried out with a publicity function. State media published some of the executed men's names, charges and photographs, under the formula “extremely heinous rioters.” Amnesty International's urgent actions from the time record that on June 21–22 alone, Beijing executed at least eight men under death sentence; Shanghai, after executing Xu Guoming and the two other workers, executed several more in late June. From arrest to execution these cases generally ran two to three weeks: no public appeal process, no record of family farewells; some families learned from a radio broadcast that their relative had already been shot. The publicity was itself part of the punishment — meant to punish not only the dead but everyone who recognized a face on the television screen: neighbors, colleagues, workmates, and the families who for thirty years afterward did not dare speak the name again.
The general who refused: There were refusals inside the martial-law troops as well. Xu Qinxian, commander of the PLA's 38th Group Army, ordered to lead his troops into Beijing to enforce martial law, pleaded illness, refused to march, and demanded the order in writing; according to the later-leaked record of the conversation, he told the officers conveying the order that he would rather lose his head than become a sinner in history. He was removed and investigated, and in 1990 a military court sentenced him to five years in prison, which he served in Qincheng. His case was kept from the public for years; the trial video and the conversation records surfaced only much later, becoming key archives for studying how the military carried out 1989. If even an army commander who refused was sent to prison, the workers and residents who blocked the convoys with their bodies on Chang'an Avenue that night were facing the same machine — their refusal left no names, only consequences.
The Flying Tigers: Under martial law, Beijing residents also organized a motorcycle corps of their own, shuttling between intersections with news of troop movements and carrying food, medicine and roadblock materials; residents called them the Flying Tigers. Its members were mostly motorcycle enthusiasts and ordinary workers — no registry, no uniforms, recognizing each other by signals and familiar faces. On the night of June 3 the corps became one of the main ways the wounded were moved: stretchers and door planks lashed to back seats, carrying the injured from the western Chang'an Avenue area to nearby hospitals. Some members were investigated afterward, but the corps never had a roster — it exists in many participants' memoirs, differing in detail, undisputed in its existence. This site records only what multiple sources agree on: in the spring of 1989, an improvised network of ordinary people, for a time, ran faster than the official broadcasts.
Xu Qinxian's later years: After his release, Xu Qinxian was expelled from the Party and the army and lived quietly in Shijiazhuang, Hebei, declining nearly all interviews. When fragments of his trial video leaked years later, he said again in late-life interviews that he did not regret his refusal. He died in Shijiazhuang in early 2021, aged eighty-six. An army commander who left the sole dissent on a roster otherwise filled with obedience — and the fact that his name is known today owes nothing to official records, and everything to leaked archives.