The student-led pro-democracy movement that occupied Beijing's Tiananmen Square in spring 1989 — drawing millions of demonstrators across China before the People's Liberation Army cleared the square with live fire on the night of June 3–4, killing an unknown number of people — and the Chinese Communist Party's subsequent erasure of the event from public memory inside China.
On June 5, 1989, a young man in a white shirt stepped into the path of a column of tanks on a Beijing boulevard and refused to move. The lead tank stopped. He climbed on it, then stepped back into the street. The tanks sat idle. The moment was photographed from a hotel window and broadcast around the world. No one knows who he was. No one knows whether he lived or died. Inside China, the photograph cannot be found.