The 1976 Tiananmen incident or the April 5 Tiananmen incident () was a mass gathering and protest that took place on April 4–5, 1976, at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China. The incident occurred on the traditional day of mourning, the Qingming Festival, after the Nanjing incident, and was triggered by the death of Premier Zhou Enlai earlier that year. Some people strongly disapproved of the removal of the displays of mourning, and began gathering in the Square to protest against the central authorities, then largely under the auspices of the Gang of Four, who ordered the Square to be cleared.
The event was labeled "counterrevolutionary" immediately after its occurrence by the Communist Party's Central Committee and served as a gateway to the dismissal and house arrest of then-Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping, who was accused of planning the event, while he insisted that he was nearby only for a haircut. The Central Committee's decision on the event was reversed after the Cultural Revolution ended, as it would later be officially hailed as a display of patriotism.
Origins
The death of Premier Zhou Enlai, a widely respected senior Chinese leader, on January 8, 1976, prompted the incident. For several years before his death, Zhou was involved in a political power struggle against other senior leaders in the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, with Zhou's most visible and powerful antagonists being the four senior members who came to be called the Gang of Four. The leader of the clique, Jiang Qing, was the wife of Communist Party Chairman, Mao Zedong. To defuse an expected popular outpouring of sentiment at Zhou's death, the Chinese Communist Party limited the period of public mourning.
On April 4, 1976, on the eve of China's annual Qingming Festival, in which Chinese traditionally pay homage to their deceased ancestors, thousands gathered around the Monument to the People's Heroes in Tiananmen Square to commemorate the life and death of Zhou Enlai by laying wreaths, banners, poems, placards, and flowers at the foot of the Monument. The most obvious purpose of this memorial was to eulogize Zhou, but Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan were also attacked for their alleged evil actions against the Premier. A small number of slogans left at Tiananmen even attacked Mao himself, and his Cultural Revolution.
Up to two million people may have visited Tiananmen Square on April 4. They consulted with the sickly Mao Zedong, claiming these people to be "capitalist roaders" who were hitting back at the Proletarian Revolution.
Government action began on the morning of April 5, when the People's Liberation Army began removing articles of mourning from Tiananmen. On the morning of April 5, crowds gathering around the memorial arrived to discover that it had been completely removed by the police during the night, angering them. Attempts to suppress the mourners led to a violent riot, in which police cars were set on fire and a crowd of over 100,000 people forced its way into several government buildings surrounding the square. Approximately 40 arrests occurred with no casualties, and by the morning of April 6, all articles of mourning had been removed.
Many of the 1976 demonstrators had written poems in memory of Zhou Enlai and as an expression of political opposition to the political situation in China. Poetry created during the incident was later published in four unofficial editions by students from Beijing's Number Two Foreign Language Institute, a school with close ties to Deng Xiaoping.
In December 1978, at the Third Plenum of the CCP Eleventh Central Committee, the Chinese Communist Party reassessed its position on the Tiananmen incident of 1976 and declared it a "revolutionary event", a complete rebuttal of the previous position put forward by the Party.
See also
- Beijing Spring
- Day of Sorrow
- May Fourth Movement
- Tiananmen Square protests of 1989
- U Thant funeral crisis