BEIJING — For four days, more than 400 of China’s brightest political minds gathered in smoke-clouded halls at a Beijing hotel, vigorously debating the nation’s future.

It was April 1989, and after a decade of economic transformation, China faced a clamor for political liberalization. Days later, protests erupted in Tiananmen Square, and the lives of those at the meeting took radically different turns. Several are now national leaders, including Li Keqiang, China’s prime minister. Others ended up in prison or exile, accused of supporting the demonstrations that shook the Communist Party and ended with soldiers sweeping through the city on June 4, shooting dead hundreds of unarmed protesters and bystanders.

“The atmosphere at the meeting was to let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend,” said Chen Yizi, who helped organize the conference. “Afterwards, it was impossible to hold a meeting like that where everyone was willing to debate different points of view.”

This year is the 24th anniversary of the bloodshed, and the first under a party leadership dominated by officials with such intimate and ambivalent ties to the events of 1989. Many top leaders served their political apprenticeship in the 1980s, when the boundaries between the permissible and the forbidden were not as stark and heavily policed as they are now. Their careers and friendships, and sometimes their viewpoints, overlapped with intellectuals, officials and policy advisers who were jailed or dismissed after the June 4 crackdown.