Chengdu protests of 1989

On April 21 and 22, there were large marches and arrests, but it was not until May 15 that class boycotts and hunger strikes began. On May 16, there were around 30,000 students, faculty, and clerical workers gathered at Renmin Square. The crowd was there largely to support the students in Beijing but also to protest police tactics. On May 17 there was another demonstration, at 10 p.m that night and around 100 students announced they were going on a hunger strike. The protests remained peaceful and after martial law was declared in Beijing, the protests in Chengdu started to dwindle. By then, only a handful of students were still having sit-ins and local residents were beginning to lose interest. == June 4–8 ==

On June 4, the Chengdu Public Security Bureau “announced that traffic into the square on People's South Road would be halted.” After the announcement more than half of the 300 students sitting in front of the square left. The police forced the 51 remaining students to leave at 7:45 that morning. The fires continued on June 5 with the burning of a shopping mall in southwest Chengdu, the Rose Empress Restaurant, a movie theatre, and two police stations. Many of the shops were closed. Three hundred police from Public Security and the People's Armed Police arrested the suspects who set fire to Sichuan Exhibition Hall and robbed the Tiancheng Jewelry store. On June 7, in a news report published by the Sichuan Daily, that the provincial and municipal governments “resolutely attacked a tiny minority of criminal elements hellbent on sowing destruction and mayhem” and that the students “welcomed the provincial and city governments’ decisive measures in sternly attacking the beating, smashing, looting, and burning by illegal criminal elements.” The report also stated that the province and city are taking steps to insure “social safety networks among the masses.” By June 8, the city had calmed down and “traffic [was] back to normal.” == Witness accounts ==

Early on in the protests (May 16), more than a thousand police came into Chengdu and tried to clear the main square. The pair went to a small clinic that was treating the injured and nearby they saw a chain of people walking through the streets to help injured people get to safety. Kim Nygaard, an American who witnessed the protests, found refuge at the hotel she was staying at along with other foreigners. From her hotel window, she saw the security forces putting protestors into sandbags and stacking their bodies into trucks. She remembered seeing the security forces wiring a detainee's arm behind his back by breaking his arms. They were then loaded into trucks and taken away. Nygaard noted that there was no noise coming from the pile of bodies and thinking that “there were definitely lifeless bodies.” Another witness, Jean Brick, described a similar account. Brick was able to note that some of the bodies had the “students’ white headbands" and there was a pile of “30 to 40 abandoned plastic flip-flops commonly worn by workers, farmers, and unemployed people.” Karl Hutterer, a visiting professor of anthropology from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, personally witnessed the violence and in a letter to the New York Times stated that "there was a consensus that from 300 to 400 people had been killed and upward of 1,000 wounded". == Aftermath ==

In response to the events that took place in Chengdu, the government quickly released its account of what happened. The Sichuan Provincial government published an article titled The Whole Story of the Chengdu Riots. Within this article it was reported that “1,800 people sought medical treatment, including 1,100 policemen, 353 were admitted to the hospital and among them 231 policemen, 69 students and 53 others.” According to a “U.S State department cable released by WikiLeaks the real toll was probably higher.” == See also ==