April Fifth Movement

Around the Qingming Festival (also known as the Tomb-Sweeping Day) in 1976, the Tian’anmen Incident became the beginning of a nationwide mass movement to mourn Zhou Enlai and developed into a protest against the “Gang of Four”, and manifested a support for the correct leadership of the Party represented by Deng Xiaoping.

When Zhou Enlai died in January 1976, the “Gang of Four” adopted various covert and overt means to prevent the masses from mourning and praising the contributions of Zhou Enlai for the Party and people.

At the end of March, students, workers, government officials and soldiers took to the streets of Nanjing and to protest and hanged posters, which ignited vehement protests throughout the country, especially in Beijing which became the prelude to the April Fifth Movement. At the beginning of April, in Beijing, people from all walks of life flocked to Tian’anmen Square to lay wreaths, pull couplets, carried placards as well as people distributed copies of the poems which they had written; people shouted the slogans of "Down with the careerists and conspirators" and "four modernizations"; by these slogans people reflected the strong feeling of the times which demanded the realization of " four modernizations" which was identified by Zhou Enlai; the mourning activities reached a climax point on April 4.

Under the influence of Jiang Qing and her clique, the meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee chaired by Hua Guofeng that night, evaluated the actions of the masses as "counter-revolutionary incident which aimed to incite the masses against Chairman Mao Zedong and the Central Committee, a counter-revolutionary incident which interferes and undermines the general line of the struggle", and decided to cleanse Tian’anmen Square, as well as gave the following instruction: no wreath laying, no gathering to mourn Zhou, no wearing black armbands, no memorial activities and no handing out photos of Zhou Enlai.

On April 5, when the masses saw that wreaths and couplets were cleared by the security forces and the Monument of the People's Heroes in Tian’anmen Square was cordoned off, as well as the people who were guarding the wreaths all night were arrested for custody, people opposed such oppression and gathered in front of the Great Hall of the People and shouted slogans such as “Return my wreath, Return my comrade-in-arms” and “Long live the people” and other slogans. A part of the masses confronted with the personnel of the workers' militia headquarters in Tian’anmen Square and severe clashes occurred. This was the Tian’anmen Incident. Mao Zedong and the Political Bureau of the Central Committee mistakenly believed that the character of the Tian’anmen Incident was a "counter-revolutionary political incident", thus deployed more than 10,000 militia, police and garrison troops to suppress the masses inTian’anmen Square.

After the incident, Mao Zedong accused Deng Xiaoping as being behind the Tian’anmen Incident and revoked all of Deng Xiaoping's positions inside and outside the Party. During the same period, large-scale mass protests erupted in many big cities, such as Nanjing, Taiyuan, Hangzhou, Zhengzhou, and Xi'an, commonly known as the "April Fifth Movement". The April Fifth Movement expressed the people's strong desire to oppose the perverse attitude of the "Gang of Four", end the “Cultural Revolution”, which resisted against the trend of the times; demanded the development of the economy and prospering of the country. Its essence was to support the correct leadership of the Party represented by Deng Xiaoping. This movement laid the mass foundation for the later crushing of the counter-revolutionary clique of the “Gang of Four”.