In the absence of regular elections, the chief moments of tension are often anniversaries of failed pro-democracy movements, which routinely implicate the regime in crimes against citizens. This chapter explores a trade-off. Propaganda content intended to threaten citizens may be useful to deter protest, but draws attention to moments that the regime might prefer citizens forget. This chapter explores how the most repressive governments resolve this tension between memory and forgetting. The CCP, we find, goes to extraordinary lengths to scrub pro-democracy anniversaries from public consciousness, and so reserves propaganda spikes and threats of repression for major political events and the anniversaries of ethnic separatist movements. There is, however, one pro-democracy anniversary that the CCP knows citizens will not forget: the Tiananmen massacre of June 4, 1989. Since the Xinjiang Uprising of 2009, on each anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, the CCP has used propaganda to remind Beijing’s urban class of ongoing repression against ethnic Uyghurs, millions of whom have been incarcerated. Using a survey experiment, we show that many citizens interpret this as threatening.

Chapter 6 traces the trajectory of a renewed consciousness of the rule of law and various freedoms in the final decade of colonial rule and unpacks the geopolitical concerns and motivations of the British government in de-silencing Hong Kong before the handover in 1997. The conclusion in 1984 of negotiations between Britain and China on the reversion of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to the latter marked the opening of an era of liberalistic rule of law and individual freedoms in Hong Kong. Laws and regulations that had been used to suppress free speech, control publication and prosecute political protesters were loosened or repealed one after another in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Hong Kong’s first statute expressly recognising freedom of speech, assembly and association was passed only in 1991, just six years before the colonial era came to an end. Not only were laws and senior judicial appointments liberalised in the last decade of British rule, but the 1980s and 1990s also witnessed unprecedented levels of public discussion of, and official and media narratives on, the importance of free speech and the rule of law to Hong Kong.

There were many alternatives to shooting unarmed civlians in Beijing. Soldiers or police could have used non-deadly force. Leaders could have ignored the protesters and waited them out. More military officials could have followed the lead of General Xu Qinxian, who refused to carry out martial law, or of He Yanran, who passively resisted on June 4, 1989, and allowed soldiers under his command to disperse. The massacre was not inevitable.

Studying the Beijing massacre from a historical distance allows for a careful accounting of the death toll, listening to the voices of a few soldiers who have spoken about their experience, and analyzing how the Peope's Liberation Army assessed its own performance, as recounted in internally published sources.

Top Communist Party officials admitted that some civilians had been wrongfully killed during the massacre, and promised that victims and their families would receive compensation. This was a tacit admission that the massacre had gone horribly wrong. If compensation came, it was meager and not systematic. While victims suffered, military officials and soldiers quietly received honors and promotions.

The imposition of martial law on May 20 sparked panic buying in addition to motivating citizens to block military convoys attempting to enter Beijing. Martial law also motivated more workers to join the Beijing Workers' Autonomous Federation. An umbrella organization called the Capital Joint Liaison Group tried to create an alliance of intellectuals, students, workers, and other Beijing residents but maintained a hierarchy that kept workers at the bottom. But the protest movement was slowly getting more inclusive in late May 1989.

Existing scholarly approaches, memoirs, and documentary films fail to capture the sense of hope experienced by many people in Beijing in 1989. Looking beyond students to include workers and ordinary Beijing residents provides a more comprehensive view of the Tiananmen protests of 1989.

Events and people outside of Beijing shaped what happened in China's capital. Protests in Xi'an and Changsha help convince Deng Xiaoping to take a hard line against demonstrators in Beijing. Hundreds of thousands of protesters from the provinces took trains to Beijing, adding to leaders' fears of a nationwide democracy movement. Many of the leaders of student organizations in Beijing had been born and raised elsewhere in China, but they failed to build meaningful ties to protesters from other places.

PLA soldiers continued killing civilians in Beijing on June 4, 5, and 6.

Zhao Ziyang and Li Peng clashed on how to handle the student protests, with Zhao arguing for a more open press and for democratic and legal solutions. Students declared a hunger strike shortly before Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's visit to Beijing. Millions of Beijing residents hit the streets to support the hunger strikers. Deng Xiaoping decided to impose martial law. When Zhao Ziyang refused to implement martial law, Deng decided to replace Zhao as general secretary with Shanghai Party secretary Jiang Zemin.

In late May and early June 1989, Deng Xiaoping, Yang Shangkun, and Li Peng prepared the People's Liberation Army to enter Beijing and forcibly clear Tiananmen Square.

"Beijing massacre" is more accurate than "Tiananmen massacre" because most of the people killed by the army fell on the streets of Beijing, not inside the square. Tiananmen Square was, however, a site of death and violence: at least five students were shot and killed inside the square, and the army forcibly removed protesters from the Monument to the People's Heroes.

Details remain murky about the order for the PLA to open fire on protesters, but it is clear that there was an order. Soldiers received verbal orders permitting them to shoot as they advanced toward Tiananmen Square on June 3.

The Beijing massacre killed ordinary people as they went out to witness or block troops advancing toward Tiananmen Square. Soldiers also killed people trying to get to work, seeking medicine for their children, or hiding in their own homes.