With martial law already declared and troops massing outside Beijing, four well-known figures, Liu Xiaobo among them, began a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square to reinvigorate a protest movement that had lasted seven weeks and was losing momentum. Their declaration urged both students and the government toward peaceful dialogue, a plea that went unheeded when tanks rolled in on the night of June 3 into June 4.
By early June 1989, the pro-democracy demonstrations that had filled Tiananmen Square since mid-April were fraying. Student organizers were exhausted, factions squabbled over tactics, and the initial euphoria had curdled into uncertainty about how to proceed against a government that had already declared martial law weeks earlier. Into this drift stepped four prominent figures, the literary critic Liu Xiaobo, the singer Hou Dejian, and two others, who launched a new hunger strike on June 2 specifically to reinject moral urgency into the square.
Their manifesto, later called the "June Second Hunger Strike Declaration," was notably measured. It criticized both the government's intransigence and the students' own disorganization, and it called for rational, peaceful engagement rather than escalating confrontation. Liu would go on to spend years in and out of Chinese prisons for his activism and eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 while incarcerated.
Within 48 hours, their appeal for dialogue was overtaken by events. On the night of June 3 into June 4, the People's Liberation Army moved into the square with tanks and live ammunition, killing an unknown number of civilians, estimates range from several hundred to more than a thousand. The hunger strikers survived, but the moment of possible negotiation they sought never arrived.
Key people: Liu Xiaobo, Hou Dejian