Did the Tiananmen Square protests and crackdown happen in 1989?

Yes, the Tiananmen Square protests (also known as the June Fourth Incident) and the subsequent military crackdown by the Chinese government occurred in 1989.

Protests began in mid-April 1989 in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, primarily led by students calling for political reform, free speech, an end to corruption, and other democratic changes. They grew to include workers and other citizens, peaking with hundreds of thousands of participants. On the night of June 3–4, 1989, the government declared martial law and sent in the People’s Liberation Army, which forcibly cleared the square and surrounding areas, resulting in significant casualties (estimates of deaths vary widely, from hundreds to thousands, as the Chinese government has never released an official toll and censors discussion of the event).

This is one of the most extensively documented events in modern history, confirmed by contemporaneous reporting from international journalists present in Beijing, declassified documents, eyewitness accounts, academic histories, and records from governments and organizations worldwide. The Chinese government refers to it as a “counter-revolutionary riot” and heavily censors information about it inside China, but the 1989 dating and core facts are not disputed by historians.