"The tank ran over my body. There were major casualties in the student group I was with."

“The tank just ran into us," Fang recalls. "They first fired a gas bomb. Very near me, one female student collapsed. I tried to help her. I didn’t have time to escape.

Fang lost both his legs when he was brutally run over by a tank column on June 4. It was the day before "tank man" tried to stop the army in Beijing and walked away.

The image haunts Fang Zheng, who was 20 years old at the time.

A man wielding a shopping bag against the might of the People’s Liberation Army danced with a tank, darting left and right, and became the enduring image of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

These questions burn in the minds of victims, protesters and even some soldiers, who recently gathered in Taipei to piece together fragments of facts.

Thirty years after the crackdown on protesting students that shocked the world, and prompted Australian prime minister Bob Hawke to cry in parliament over the bloodshed, key questions about what took place as the PLA opened fire on Chinese citizens remain unresolved.

The bodies of dead civilians lie among mangled bicycles near Beijing's Tiananmen Square on June 4. Credit:AP

“Did they receive orders? Or is it just because the tank that Wang Weilin encountered had more conscience?”

“My story is totally different to Wang Weilin's. I want to know who sent the order to the tanks. I want to know the truth,” says Fang, who now lives in the United States.

The video of "tank man", believed to be 19-year-old Wang Weilin, shows the tank moving slowly and stopping.

“I am still puzzled why this tank wanted to kill us,” he says now.

He saw soldiers shoot a doctor who had raised his hand to say he was trying to reach the wounded. By the time he reached the square, Shao's t-shirt was soaked in blood.

“I saw a tank crush someone's body, and after they go through, you can look at the human body, very thin body, not like a human.”

“Most western people look at 'tank man' as a very brave person, but actually in the evening of June 3 there were a lot of people like 'tank man',” Shao says.

When Beijing University student Shao Jiang ran towards Tiananmen Square on the evening of June 3 to warn students that soldiers had opened fire west of the square, he saw many people try to block the tanks.

Tanks stationed on an overpass two days after the Tiananmen Square massacre. The slogan on the wall at left reads: "Strike down martial law." Credit:AP

They fear the "tank man" image that endures in the west, Chinese government censorship that prohibits discussion of June 4, and the government's refusal to formally investigate the event, risk silencing history.

“If it were to admit making a huge blunder turning the soldiers on the people, it faces mass rebellion."

Wu thinks the number of dead was likely around 2600, ten times higher than the deaths admitted by the Chinese government.

The Chinese University of Hong Kong's Willy Lam says the Chinese Communist Party never admits making mistakes, because with no ballot box to confirm its legitimacy, it “depends on the fiction of its judgements and achievements always being ‘great, brilliant and huge’.”

“I know two people injured by tanks who denied they were injured by tanks because of pressure from the [Chinese Communist Party] … The CCP paid out family members of people who died to keep them quiet.”

Victims were pressured to lie about their injuries if they wanted to graduate from university or get a job, Fang says.

Yet 30 years on, even the true death toll from the night is still unknown.

Now an Australian citizen living in Melbourne with two sons, Li has decided to bear witness to what happened and “tell my piece of the story, because June 4 doesn’t just belong to China but the world”.

Li Xiaoming was a radar operator in the martial law troops of the People's Liberation Army in 1989. He helped clean up Tiananmen Square on June 5, and says he found blood and trousers with bullet holes in the rubbish bins.

Wu thinks the number of dead was likely around 2600, the figure stated by China’s Red Cross. This is ten-times higher than the deaths admitted by the Chinese government. He says 250,000 troops were mobilised.

His research shows 100 hospitals received patients who were shot or killed that night, and there were 90 sites across Beijing where troops opened fire on people.

Historian Wu Ren-hua, who has scoured Chinese government documents and tracked the coded discussions of former soldiers on social media, says there were at least three deaths in Tiananmen Square itself despite Chinese government denials. But most died outside the square.

He recently donated his photographs and military artefacts from the Tiananmen crackdown to a Melbourne museum because he thinks it is crucial for young Australians like his sons, aged 28 and 16, to know the truth.

A student soldier in provincial Liaoning, Li felt torn when the order came to enter Beijing. “It was an awkward position. I was a soldier so I had to follow orders, but also a student. If I had been in Beijing I would have joined the protests,” he recalls.

China's unofficial leader, Deng Xiaoping, head of the Central Military Commission, is believed to have called troops in from outside Beijing exactly because the city’s police and soldiers had appeared to sympathise with the students over the weeks of protests.

On June 3, Li says, the order came from above to “spare no effort in arriving at Tiananmen Square.

“We didn’t go quickly. Our commander didn’t want to, because he sympathised with the protesters.” Keeping his soldiers in east Beijing, the commander claimed his radio was malfunctioning.

Li Xiaoming, fifth from left, in Tiananmen Square.

They arrived on June 5, and Li believes the blood he saw in the square is evidence that people were killed there.

“Before June 3 the instruction was we shouldn’t fire the first shot. We were told we would be responsible in history. But after that there was an explicit order that we had to arrive by June 4 at any cost.”

Li says soldiers were told if students surrounded them within 100 metres they should fire at the sky, if it was within 30 metres they should fire at the ground. “If they came nearer to you, you can fire your weapon – that was the explicit order on June 4.”

Li believes that Deng Xiaoping was the only person with the power to make the decision that troops could fire on citizens.

“I was in a military truck and the public were surrounding us and not happy with our presence. We couldn’t even go to the bathroom. Some soldiers were impatient. ‘These Beijing people are rioters. If you give me a gun I will shoot them,’ one said.”

The Beijingers didn’t believe the troops would open fire, Li says.

“I hope one day we can go to court and the criminals are brought to justice.”

After cleaning up the blood, the next order given was to hunt down student leaders. Li says they took AK47s to the diplomatic residence quarter.

At the Australian embassy

At the Australian embassy, Nicholas Jose was the cultural attache. He flew into Beijing on June 4 from Shanghai, and was driven by a security convoy to the embassy past wrecked and burnt vehicles.

Nicholas Jose, cultural attache at the Australian embassy, who sheltered student leaders Liu Xiaobo (later a Nobel prize winner), Hou Dejian and two others in his Beijing apartment.

Jose was tasked with going to the outlying universities to inform Australian teachers and students that there would be an evacuation flight.

Four high-profile student leaders had meanwhile taken refuge in Jose’s apartment.

Jose knew Liu Xiaobo, who had led students on a hunger strike, and pop singer Hou Dejian, who tried to negotiate before dawn on June 4 with the military for safe passage for students to leave the square.

“They wanted to be somewhere together so they could talk to each other and write a statement," he says of how the student leaders ended up at his place.

But after the government declared the Tiananmen protests to be a counter-revolutionary turmoil, it was decided it was no longer safe for them to stay.

Tanks outside the Jianguomen diplomatic compound were calling out on megaphones.

“The student leaders were wanted, and on the list of black hands was Liu Xiaobo,” Jose says.

A student pro-democracy protester flashes victory signs to the crowd the day before the massacre. Credit:AP

Hou was the first to leave, travelling with writer Linda Jaivin to the Australian embassy to seek asylum. He moved into Jose’s office at the embassy and stayed there for weeks. Then, Jose and Liu drove from the apartment to the embassy in Jose's Toyota.

In a pivotal moment, Liu decided not to enter the Australian embassy, and instead went to a friend’s apartment nearby. He was arrested within hours. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in absentia in 2010, Liu died in 2017 after years imprisoned in China for democracy activism.

Jose left on the Australian evacuation flight, and was in Parliament House in Canberra the next day, June 9, when Bob Hawke gave an emotional speech in which he granted refuge to Chinese students living in Australia.

“It was quite amazing. I had been close to that information communicated to Bob Hawke and what he said … it was a huge thing in Australia’s history.”

The perils of forgetting

So sensitive is the 30th anniversary of June 4 in China, as the economy slows amid a trade war and rising tensions with the United States, police are on alert to watch for any hints of "colour revolution" or foreign infiltration, and surveillance of foreign media has tightened.

Willy Lam says 1989 taught the CCP it would fall without the police state apparatus, which has been greatly strengthened since with the help of digital technology.

Jose says the Chinese government's paranoia around June 4 is “a sign of the cracks and instability in the whole system – no matter how much they have achieved, they are incapable of finding a way to move forward politically. And this is the touchstone.”

But he doesn't think the silence is sustainable.

“More than ever China is a country where history is so important. To try to silence history over such a major event is impossible in the long term," he says.

A young woman is caught between civilians and Chinese soldiers, who were trying to remove her from an assembly near the Great Hall of the People the day before the massacre. Credit:AP

Because of censorship, many young people in China have never seen the "tank man" image and don't know that people were killed in the centre of Beijing on June 4, 1989.

One danger of erasing history is that the same mistakes can inadvertently happen again. Shao Jiang points to the recent detention of Beijing University students who had formed a Marxist club and begun protesting on campus.

In 1989, Shao drafted the student’s seven demands for dialogue with the government as they took to the street en-masse after liberal reformer Hu Yaobang’s death. But Shao reveals he and fellow Beijing University students had also, earlier, formed a Young Marxist club and railed against communist bureaucracy. The student's anger grew as the club's members arrested.

Another echo of history which put the Chinese government on edge this year is rising food prices - the spiralling cost of living in 1989 was a contributor to public discontent.

A direct line to today

Near the top of the soldier’s most-wanted list in the round-up after Tiananmen was Wu’er Kaixi, a loud, charismatic Uighur.

Wu’er recalls he guided 60,000 students from 30 universities to the square without social media, smartphones or loudspeakers.

“I yelled,” he smiles.

Wu'er Kaixi on the Tiananmen front line in 1989.

Wu'er can see a direct line from the Tiananmen crackdown to the latest Chinese human rights emergency - the detention of hundreds of thousands of Uighurs in reeducation camps in China's western Xinjiang region.

China is deaf to international calls for the release of the Uighurs because after June 4, 1989, the government no longer cared whether its propaganda was believable, he says.

Loading

"Anything they can do to enforce their control they wouldn’t mind doing, including that the stability maintenance budget exceeds the national defence budget ... so breaking the spirit of Uighurs comes to their mind rather easily."

In Hong Kong, the only place on Chinese soil where June 4 can be publicly commemorated, the Tiananmen anniversary is in sharper focus this year.

A proposed extradition law that could see criminal suspects sent to mainland China to face trial for the first time has provoked a strong outcry on human rights grounds.

Student activists who weren't born in 1989 and had previously denounced commemoration of June 4 because it was China's problem, not Hong Kong's, are newly aware of Beijing's reach, says Richard Tsoi, vice chairman of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Movements in China.

"It is getting worse," he says.

Troops and tanks gather in Beijing on June 5, 1989, one day after the military crackdown. Credit:AP

A small June 4 museum established this year by Tsoi has seen a steady stream of young visitors, who pore through old newspapers and read about students who died.

Tsoi said some of the most precious items, the clothing and personal effects of two young people who were killed on the night of June 3, were donated by their families because they hoped public display would have a bigger impact.

"Even now we don’t know exactly the whole picture of June 4, how many died. That’s why we are urging the Chinese government to have a thorough and independent investigation.”

"Chinese authorities try to hide the truth. That is why in Hong Kong we are trying to keep this issue alive."