April Fifth Tiananmen incident (1976)
4·5 톈안먼 사건 (1976)
The suppression of crowds who gathered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square around the Qingming festival of April 1976 to mourn Zhou Enlai and turned to criticising the Gang of Four and the Cultural Revolution; also called the April Fifth movement. The authorities declared it a “counter-revolutionary incident” and stripped Deng Xiaoping of all posts as its alleged mastermind, but the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee reversed the verdict in December 1978 and called it a revolutionary event.
In depth
When Zhou Enlai died on 8 January 1976 the authorities restricted public mourning, and when Shanghai’s Wenhui Bao cast him on 25 March as a “capitalist roader inside the party”, protest broke out in Nanjing at the end of March. On 4 April wreaths, poems and placards piled up beneath the Monument to the People’s Heroes, and up to two million people visited the square that day. The poems attacked Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan, and some targeted Mao and the Cultural Revolution itself. That night the Politburo labelled it counter-revolutionary and had the wreaths removed overnight.
On the morning of the 5th, finding them gone, crowds burned police cars and pushed into nearby buildings, and that night militia and police cleared the square with clubs and belts and made arrests. Similar events occurred in Zhengzhou, Kunming, Taiyuan, Changchun, Shanghai, Wuhan and Guangzhou. On 7 April Deng Xiaoping lost all posts inside and outside the party and Hua Guofeng became first vice-chairman and premier. The memorial poems were later collected in unofficial anthologies, and the verdict was reversed in December 1978 as Deng returned to power.