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On January 8, 1976, Zhou Enlai died. The "Gang of Four" suppressed mourning — no black armbands, no memorial halls. In February, Nanjing saw "the Premier's last words" leaflets. From late March, Beijing citizens spontaneously laid wreaths at the Monument to the People's Heroes — mourning Zhou, venting fury at the Gang.

With Mao gravely ill, the Gang (Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, Wang Hongwen) and Deng Xiaoping fought bitterly. Mourning Zhou became political speech: pro-Zhou/Deng, anti-Gang.

Mao Zedong gave the supreme approval; the Politburo made the characterization; Mao Yuanxin was the key messenger. Key decisions:

• January 1976: under Mao's instruction ("mourning is false, restoration is real" — attributed, unverified), Gang-controlled media suppressed coverage of Zhou Enlai's death commemorations.
• April 4 evening: the Politburo met on the Tiananmen movement. Hua Guofeng (vice-premier and public security minister) said some writings "directly attacked the Chairman"; Beijing party chief Wu De blamed Deng Xiaoping's long preparation. The Politburo concluded: most mourned the premier, but a minority attacked the center, with an underground "Petőfi Club" organizing — "a counterrevolutionary counterattack." (The "Petőfi Club" was the Politburo's characterization, not a proven organization.)
• Mao Yuanxin reported to Mao; the decision to clear wreaths, slogans and arrest "counterrevolutionaries" from April 4 night won Mao's approval.
• April 7: after Mao Yuanxin's report, Mao judged Deng Xiaoping's case had changed in nature. That night the Politburo appointed Hua Guofeng first vice-chairman and premier, and stripped Deng Xiaoping of all posts (party membership retained).
• April 8: Yao Wenyuan's People's Daily editorial branded it "a counterrevolutionary political incident manufactured with premeditation, plan and organization by a tiny handful of class enemies."

Build-up (late March – April 3). Wreaths multiplied to 200+. Poems and elegiac couplets covered the Monument's base, targeting the Gang ("Qin Shihuang's feudal age is gone forever").

Peak (April 4, Qingming). Up to a million gathered (unverified). That night Party chief Wu De ordered the wreaths cleared, enraging the crowds.

Crackdown (April 5). Tens of thousands faced militia and police; that evening the Beijing Garrison beat and arrested protesters. Wu De broadcast that Tiananmen was a "counterrevolutionary incident."

Verdict (April 6–7). On April 7, on Mao's proposal, the Politburo stripped Deng Xiaoping of all posts ("linked to the counterrevolutionary incident") and named Hua Guofeng First Vice-Chairman and Premier.

Rehabilitation (1978). In November 1978 the Beijing committee declared it "revolutionary action." Deng returned.

Execution chain: Politburo decision → Beijing Revolutionary Committee joint command → militia, police, garrison troops.

• April 1, 1976: a joint command of militia, police and garrison troops was set up at the square's southeast corner ("workers' militia command").
• April 2: 26 already arrested, including worker Han Zhixiong (author of the poster "Mourn the Premier with Grief, Roar Against the Monsters").
• April 5 dawn: troops, police, militia and 200 trucks removed the wreaths.
• April 5 afternoon: enraged crowds gathered at the Great Hall's east gate chanting "Return our wreaths, return our comrades!" and "Down with whoever opposes Premier Zhou!"; some stormed the Great Hall, clashing with militia and police; four vehicles were torched. At 6:30 PM Wu De's recorded speech was broadcast: "recognize the reactionary nature of this political incident." Most left.
• April 5 night clearing: Wu De and garrison commander Wu Zhong thought it too early (tens of thousands remained), but Hua Guofeng and Chen Xilian phoned urging action. At 9:30 PM 10,000+ militia, five garrison battalions, 3,000 police moved in. At 11 PM, with ~1,000 left, Wu De ordered the militia in. Troops encircled the square; militia and police wielding wooden clubs and belts violently cleared it. Dozens injured, 200+ detained, blood on the square — but no deaths reported.

Key executors: Hua Guofeng (urging from the top), Wu De (ordered the militia in), Wu Zhong (on-site commander), Chen Xilian. The "Gang of Four" did the propaganda branding (Yao Wenyuan), not the field command.

The movement left precious "square literature." Tiananmen Poems collected verses posted on the Monument, e.g. "Demons howl, I weep; jackals laugh. Shedding tears for heroes, brows raised, swords drawn" ("demons" = the Gang). Traditional forms voicing modern protest — a peak of Chinese political lyricism.

In 1978 Tiananmen Poems was published openly, millions of copies printed.

The April Fifth Movement's uniqueness: the movement itself was the opposition — the first time since 1949 that the masses publicly directed discontent at Mao Zedong himself.

• Mourning Zhou Enlai: Zhou died January 8, 1976; the "ten-mile farewell"; from March 19 wreaths piled at the Monument to the People's Heroes — "a mountain of flowers, a sea of poems."
• Against the "Gang of Four": "Down with whoever opposes Premier Zhou"; poems targeting Jiang Qing (as Wu Zetian).
• Pointed at Mao himself: "The age of the First Emperor is gone forever" — "the First Emperor" meant Mao. The first public pointing at Mao since 1949.
• For Deng Xiaoping: one goal was "Deng Xiaoping to power."

Nanjing March 29 prelude: after Shanghai's Wen Hui Bao attacked Deng and insinuated against Zhou, 400+ Nanjing University people marched with Zhou's portrait on March 28; posters spread nationwide by train. Nanjing, Zhengzhou, Hangzhou and Xi'an all peaked April 4.

Rehabilitation: November 12, 1978 Chen Yun called it "a great mass movement of millions mourning Premier Zhou, opposing the Gang of Four"; November 25 the central work conference fully rehabilitated it as "entirely a revolutionary mass movement."

Unlike the campaigns where no one questioned the goal, and unlike June Fourth where opponents left names — April Fifth's opponents were millions of leaderless masses who left poems, not organizations.

Harbinger of the Cultural Revolution's end. The first mass protest against the Gang during the Cultural Revolution, it prepared public opinion for the Gang's October 1976 arrest.

Deng's comeback capital. It proved where popular hearts lay. Rehabilitated in 1978, Deng rode it back to power and launched reform and opening.

Rehearsal for 1989. Its pattern — Tiananmen Square, mourning the dead, poems and posters, mourning turning to protest — replayed in 1989. But 1989's ending was far bloodier.

A million people lined the avenue. The movement began in January 1976. Zhou Enlai died on January 8; on the evening of January 11, as the hearse drove down Chang'an Avenue past Tiananmen toward Babaoshan cemetery, an estimated million Beijing residents stood silently along the route — an outpouring remembered as "ten li of street seeing off the Premier." The United Nations flew its flag at half-mast, a rare honour. At home, however, mourning was tightly rationed: no unofficial memorial halls, no black armbands or white paper flowers, and deliberately low-key press coverage. When Deng Xiaoping delivered the eulogy on January 15 and then vanished from public view, grief with nowhere to go began to turn into anger. From February a text purporting to be Zhou's deathbed testament circulated hand to hand; officially later declared a forgery, its very spread was evidence of where public feeling lay.

Nanjing, March 29: the spark in detail. On March 25 Shanghai's Wen Hui Bao attacked an unnamed "capitalist roader" bent on reversing verdicts — a transparent reference to Deng and, by insinuation, to Zhou. Nanjing University answered first: on March 28 more than 400 students and teachers carried a huge portrait of Zhou and wreaths to his former residence at Meiyuan Xincun, drawing crowds as they marched. From March 29, slogans — "Down with the arch-careerist," "Whoever opposes Premier Zhou must fall" — appeared across Nanjing and were painted on railway carriages, carrying the protest nationwide. One poster supplied the movement's most quoted line: "China is no longer the China of the past, the people are no longer benighted, and Qin Shihuang's feudal age is gone forever." Nanjing was branded a "counterrevolutionary incident" and suppressed first — but word had already reached Beijing that others had stood up.

April 4–5 in the square. Qingming, April 4, brought the peak: wreaths banked around the Monument to the People's Heroes, poems and couplets covering its base and the surrounding pines. That night, acting on the Politburo's decision, militia and workers cleared the wreaths and posters and detained people who had posted "offensive" verses; the wreaths were trucked away and burned. The clearance enraged the crowds who returned on the morning of April 5. Tens of thousands protested, demanding the wreaths back and punishment for those who had ordered the clearance. The record should be complete: before the square was cleared, some protesters smashed and burned a propaganda broadcast van and set fire to the militia command post on the square's east side. The movement's mainstream was peaceful mourning and protest, but those acts of violence against official property are part of the archive too.

The clearance and the casualty record. On the evening of April 5, Beijing party chief Wu De broadcast an ultimatum over the square's loudspeakers and branded the gathering a "counterrevolutionary incident." At about 9:30 p.m. the floodlights went out and came on again; militia, police and garrison troops armed with wooden clubs and belts closed in on the several hundred people still at the Monument, beating and arresting them. On casualties this page states the archival gap plainly: neither official accounts nor post-1978 rehabilitation reporting confirmed any death, and no injury total was ever published. Death figures circulating since have no reliable source and are not reproduced here. What can be confirmed is that the clearance was carried out with clubs rather than firearms, and that those arrested on the spot numbered in the dozens, with sources differing and no unified public count.

The hunt for "April Fifth elements." Repression did not end that night. For weeks afterwards, Beijing and cities across China investigated anyone who had posted a poem, laid a wreath, taken a photograph or simply lingered in the square. Work units compiled lists of "April Fifth elements"; detentions, struggle sessions and disciplinary sanctions fell on large numbers of ordinary people, with no unified national figure ever published. Hand-copied Tiananmen poems were confiscated as "reactionary leaflets," and copiers were punished; the Taiyuan youth Wang Lishan, author of the celebrated "Swords Drawn," was investigated. From April 8 the nationwide campaign to "criticize Deng and beat back the right-deviationist wind" purged Deng's sympathizers. The movement's price was thus not one night in the square but a black mark in thousands of personnel files for years.

Rehabilitated, then unmentionable. After the November 1978 rehabilitation, detainees were released and cleared; that December the Tiananmen Poems, edited by Tong Huaizhou, were published openly by Qunzhong Press and became a generation's political primer. Yet after 1989, Qingming offerings at the Monument came under strict control and the square under permanent guard; mainland textbooks reduced April Fifth to a passing mention and official commemoration all but ceased. A movement formally vindicated as "revolutionary action" became one that could scarcely be commemorated in public — the paradox this archive exists to resist.

From April Fifth to the fall of the Gang. The consequences unfolded in two acts within 1976 itself. After the crackdown the "criticise Deng" campaign swept the country, while Deng, stripped of his posts but keeping party membership, waited under a kind of protective house arrest. Mao Zedong died on September 9. On October 6, Hua Guofeng, Ye Jianying and Wang Dongxing arrested Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen; the Gang of Four fell in a single night. Official narrative credits the centre's decisiveness. Popular memory reverses the order: first millions of citizens declared themselves with wreaths and poems in Tiananmen Square, and only then, six months later, did the palace arrest become possible. Participants have a phrase for it — "the people passed the verdict first; history carried it out." It captures April Fifth's place in the causal chain: the movement showed the leadership itself, for the first time, what the Cultural Revolution's real support among the public had become.

How the rehabilitation happened: Chen Yun's six questions. Vindication was not automatic. At the Central Work Conference of November 1978, Chen Yun intervened in a group session on November 12 with six unresolved historical questions demanding settlement — among them Tiananmen. The movement, he said, was a great mass movement of millions mourning Premier Zhou, opposing the Gang of Four and rejecting the criticism of Deng Xiaoping, and the centre should affirm it. The intervention broke the conference's set agenda; delegates took up case after case of injustice, and the wind changed. On November 14 the Beijing party committee declared the incident "revolutionary action"; on November 25 the conference pronounced it an entirely revolutionary mass movement, fully and publicly rehabilitated. Deng then addressed the conference's close with "Emancipate the Mind, Seek Truth from Facts," and the Third Plenum followed in December. The rehabilitation of April Fifth was, in effect, the first domino of reform and opening.

How the Tiananmen Poems became a book — and what became of the men responsible. After the verdict was reversed, the confiscated poems became a publishing sensation. The Tiananmen Poems appeared at the end of 1978 from Qunzhong Press, edited under the name "Tong Huaizhou" — not a person but the collective pen name of a Tsinghua University Chinese-department editorial group, a homophone for "together cherishing Zhou." The editors gathered hundreds of poems from the hand-copied volumes citizens had preserved; many authors remain anonymous to this day. The book closed the movement's unique circle: a protest that began as poetry ended with the state itself publishing the poems as the record. Of the men who had ordered the clearance, Beijing party chief Wu De resigned his posts in 1980 and defended the decision to the end of his life, insisting "not one person died" — a claim often cited on the casualty question, recorded here as a responsible party's own testimony, not as a finding. Wu Zhong, the garrison commander, was removed and investigated in 1979. As in every rehabilitation in this archive, accountability stopped at the executors and the Gang: the highest level of decision was never itself put on trial.

The present day: memory racing against time. At the fortieth anniversary in 2016, commemorations and conferences were held in several cities abroad and participants published new memoirs and oral histories; that Qingming, mainland China saw no public commemoration at all, and the Monument stood under its usual guard. The ordinary people once listed as "April Fifth elements" are now mostly in their seventies and eighties; their testimony, their preserved hand-copied poems and their old disciplinary files are what remains to be archived. April Fifth thus has a double present: in the official narrative a closed, rehabilitated chapter; in lived reality a past that cannot be publicly told and survives only in private memory. This archive is, in essence, a race against that forgetting.