Ada: Martial law is declared on May twentieth. And at first it fails.
Theo: Fails how?
Ada: The troops try to move in and ordinary Beijing citizens pour into the streets and block them. People surround the convoys, talk to the soldiers, let the air out of tires. For almost two weeks the army just can't get through.
Theo: So the city itself is protecting the square.
Ada: It is. And on May thirtieth the art students build something remarkable. A ten-meter statue of foam and plaster, the Goddess of Democracy, set up facing Mao's portrait directly.
Theo: Staring him down.
Ada: Then comes the night of June third into the fourth. Units of the People's Liberation Army, including the twenty-seventh Army, are ordered to clear the streets by dawn. And this time they have live ammunition.
Theo: And here's where I always pictured it happening in the square itself.
Ada: And that's the part the compressed memory gets wrong. The heaviest killing was west of the square, at a district called Muxidi and along Chang'an Avenue, the big east-west boulevard. Armored vehicles, crowds, soldiers firing on civilians in the surrounding streets.
Theo: Not mainly inside the plaza.
Ada: Right, and this distinction really matters. The written order was to clear the square by dawn. But the deaths happened out on the approach streets, among residents and onlookers, not just protesters. There's a real gap between clear the square and what the bullets actually did in those neighborhoods.
Theo: And how many died?
Ada: Nobody agrees, and this is where you have to be careful. The Chinese government cited around two to three hundred. Independent estimates range from several hundred to several thousand. One British diplomatic cable claimed around ten thousand, but that figure is widely regarded as unverified.
Theo: So anywhere from a couple hundred to ten thousand, and we genuinely don't know.
Ada: We genuinely don't. Inside the square itself, pre-dawn, the singer Hou Dejian and others negotiate with the army for the students to leave peacefully. And around five or six in the morning the students walk out in a column.
Theo: They actually got out.
Ada: The square is cleared by dawn. But the morning brings one more confrontation, and it's the one the whole world remembers.