NC Chang*, playwright, 21, London

My mother was there when it happened: she was studying in Beijing at the time. She didn’t tell me about it at first, I actually heard of the massacre in school and I was bullied for it by kids who were like: “How could you do that to your own people?” It was one of the first moments in my childhood when I realised I’m not English, I’m an other. I am Chinese and this is part of my history.

My mum was slowly able to tell me what happened and of the violence she saw. I used to think: “Why aren’t you saying more?” But I realise now it’s because she doesn’t want to think about it. It was a traumatic thing for her.

I wrote a play about the protest, called Clouds Over Beijing, which was performed at Omnibus theatre [in south London] as part of a festival to mark the 30th anniversary. The play is about four students who think they’re going to change the world and do something great. It wasn’t necessarily something I wanted to do: it felt more like my duty – to my parents, my community, and my motherland.

Watching the performance was very sobering. There was a feeling of solidarity, that I’m not alone in this. We as a community are still thinking about this, it’s an important thing in our culture and we’re not letting it fade away. I’m glad people came and that they still care. People should care. In China, people are rapidly forgetting about it. You talk to people my age and they don’t even know it happened.

This has been an important part of my life but I’ve never done anything about it until now. But now I have, seeing this event and seeing everyone coming together gives me so much hope that eventually things will get better. It’s something we need to talk about, continue having a dialogue on. It’s still relevant: not just for the people in China but for people all over the world.

We shouldn’t forget just how subversive and brave what these students were doing was back then. They were campaigning for freedom of speech and press, and were putting themselves at risk.

It is important we remember events like Tiananmen Square, but we need to do more than just remember the atrocities that happened. We should remember the people before they died and what they were fighting for. These were real people. They were kids who had lives, dreams, ambitions, who thought they could change the world, and for two months they did.

*NC Chang is a stage name.

Tiananmen Square with the Monument to the Heroes of the People and the mausoleum of Mao Zedong in 1995. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images

Ian Chan, government lawyer, 28, Canberra

I was born in Hong Kong and my family moved to Sydney when I was three years old.

At home we spoke Cantonese. I grew up quite bilingual and quite balanced in terms of the mix of Aussie and Chinese cultures. We used to go and visit Hong Kong every year for a month around Christmas time, so I still had a strong connection to the place.

I can’t remember when I first heard about Tiananmen Square but it would’ve been when I was very young – like primary school – and most likely it was through my parents. When they were in Hong Kong in 1989 they went out on the marches, they were invested in that as well, seeing that hope for China to liberalise, to be more free.

Ian Chan as a toddler and his family in Hong Kong in the 90s. Photograph: Ian Chan

I don’t want to speak for my parents and get it wrong, but I think for them and for a lot of people of their generation, it was a big shock. They didn’t think something like that would happen in the late 80s as China was opening up.

I was born a year after 1989, but for me, 4 June, it has a particular place, I do feel emotionally invested in it. Maybe it’s because my family is from Hong Kong and Hong Kong has kept that flame of 4 June alive for so many years. It’s the only place under Beijing’s jurisdiction that you can do that: that you can have that commemoration and have people aware and educate the next generation about it.

Fourth June was a missed opportunity, a juncture where China could have taken a path but actually chose not to and we’ve seen since then, the economy it has liberalised, but the political side of things hasn’t changed and arguably has gotten worse in recent years under the current president.

For me 4 June is a symbol of what could have been and it’s also a hope of what could be the case in the future, which is why commemorating 4 June is really important, especially when the Chinese government wants people to forget, or wants to write their own version of what happened.

Q&A What caused the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square? Show In April 1989, popular Chinese reformist leader Hu Yaobang died. Two days after his death, on 17 April, several hundred students marched to Tiananmen Square and laid a wreath to him. They called for greater freedom of speech, economic freedoms and curbs on corruption. The demonstrations spread to hundreds of cities. On 26 April, an editorial in the Communist Party’s People’s Daily denounced the student demonstrations as a ‘premeditated and organised conspiracy and turmoil’. The next day, tens of thousands of students in Beijing staged a demonstration to protest against the editorial. On 13 May, just two days before the arrival of Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev for a state visit, hundreds of students began a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square. The protests forced the cancellation of the welcoming ceremony. On 20 May, martial law was declared in parts of Beijing. Troops moved in, but were blocked by the civilians and demonstrations continued. In the early hours of 4 June, Chinese troops launched a two-pronged attack with orders to put down the protests. Armoured cars and tanks smashed through the citizens’ barricades. Some forty workers who went to plead with the soldiers were shot. On 5 June, an unidentified young man stood in front of a tank convoy leaving Tiananmen Square, in a final act of defiance. The actual number of deaths from the crackdown remains unknown, but it is believed the Chinese army killed at least 10,000 people, according to a secret diplomatic cable from the British ambassador to Beijing. Thirty years on, the Chinese authorities continue to view the Tiananmen protests as one of the most sensitive and taboo subjects. ‘June 4’, as the movement is commonly known as in China, remains largely scrubbed from official history and is censored from school text books and online. The authorities punish those who try to commemorate the event, and relatives of the victims who died during the massacre are barred from openly mourning their loved ones.

Verna Yu in Hong Kong Photograph: STRINGER/X80002

Peter Ngan, government staffer, 28, Wellington

When I hear about it I feel sad, and I feel most people don’t know about it. In the Chinese community, you know about it if you’re local born but a lot of the overseas Chinese don’t know about it, or they have a different interpretation of what it is, or they disregard it or don’t want to acknowledge it.

[Tank man] is kind of David versus Goliath, the big tank, and David the small person who is fighting for freedom and trying to change the world. I guess it’s quite sad.

I think there will be more [protests] in the future. There will be more in the future, and more conflict.

For me, I have a lot of ties [in China], family and friends. I guess I wouldn’t consider living there personally. There are reasons I wouldn’t go in terms of government and censorship, and I am used to the western way of living. The values of openness and free speech are not there.

Being able to speak freely about the government is highly sensitive in China and doing a lot of the normal things that you take for granted in New Zealand, [like] using social media and not having the government watch you.

My friends in China probably don’t know much about [Tiananmen]. I think there should be more education in China about actually what happened. A lot of people born in China, they still don’t acknowledge it, even if I give them the hard facts.

Quite recently with friends they denied it, which is based on their values. But it is good to open their mind up to different things based on fact. I think it’s good to keep the conversation going and the memories, otherwise you’ll forget and it will become like nothing.

I definitely think people can still take inspiration [from tank man], especially for the Hong Kong protests, and I think they will and build on that and keep up the awareness.