I was in Tiananmen Square in 1987, two years before the terrible events that shocked the world. While in Beijing I visited Scott Simmie, a friend from my university days who is a journalist and ended up covering the Chinese government crackdown. He also cowrote a book about it. The following description is from Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac" website.

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It was on this day in 1989 that the Chinese government cracked down on students conducting pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. The demonstrations by the pro-democracy student groups had begun months earlier, after the government accused them of planning a coup d'état. They drew thousands of supporters from three dozen universities and staged hunger strikes and sit-ins. The Chinese government declared martial law, and troops approached the square with tanks in the late evening of June 3.

Ordinary workers had gathered along the nearby roads. They had been demonstrating in support of the students for weeks, and they crowded into the streets to block the advance of the tanks toward the square. Though the event would come to be called the Tiananmen Square massacre, almost all the people killed were the ordinary people in the streets outside the square. Violence broke out around midnight on this day in 1989, with some people throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the troops, and the troops responding with gunfire.

Soldiers surrounded the perimeter of the square, and the students expected that they would kill everyone at the center. Around 4:00 a.m., all the lights went out, and it got quiet. The students debated whether or not they should surrender. They heard the engines of the tanks start up, and finally they made the decision to evacuate. Almost all the students survived.

One of the few journalists who witnessed the evacuation said, "Many [of the students] had tears rolling down their cheeks. All looked shaken; many were trembling or unsteady on their feet. But all looked proud and unbeaten. One group shouted, 'Down with the Communist Party!' [It was] the first time I had ever heard this openly said in China."

An American Associated Press photographer named Jeff Widener took the famous photograph of a student staring down a tank, refusing to move.