Studying the Beijing massacre from a historical distance allows for a careful accounting of the death toll, listening to the voices of a few soldiers who have spoken about their experience, and analyzing how the Peope's Liberation Army assessed its own performance, as recounted in internally published sources.

There were escalating sources of unhappiness and frustration during the 1980s in China, including anti-crime campaigns, crackdowns on student protests, the one-child policy, corruption, inflation, and an ossified political system characterized by old-man politics. These problems added up to a volatile situation in 1989.

A political culture of falsehoods was alive and well in 1989 as people caught up in the purge fabricated or downplayed what they had done during the protests. This allowed them to protect themselves and to shield others from punishment. Widespread passive resistance against the purge meant that it ended with a whimper in 1990. Some participants in the protests refused to lie. They remained defiant and suffered harsh punishments. Officials who enthusiastically oversaw the purge were rewarded with promotions.

The most dangerous part of Beijing was along Fuxing Road, Fuxingmen Avenue, and West Chang’an Avenue between 10 p.m. on June 3 and 1 a.m. on June 4 as the 38th Army forced its way through barriers and crowds on its way to Tiananmen Square. After arriving at Tiananmen, the 38th Army repeatedly opened fire on civilians at Nanchizi, just east of the square. The 15th Airborne also killed civilians as it approached the square from the south, passing through the Zhushikou intersection and entering Tiananmen by way of Qianmen.

Police killings of hundreds of Tibetans and the imposition of martial law in Lhasa in March 1989 was a precursor to the Beijing massacre of June 1989, but few Han people saw it that way. Han supremacy and antiblack racism (which had erupted in anti-African protests in Nanjing in December 1988) and protests by Muslims in May 1989 reveal the Han-centric, male-dominated, city-based bias of most histories of China's democracy movement. But Non-Han protesters did see potential for genuine change during 1989.

Protesters in cities paid little attention to the concerns of China's rural residents, who reacted in different ways to the Tiananmen protests and Beijing massacre. Some parents of university students from rural backgrounds did not understand why their children wanted to protest. Other rural people did not see anything wrong with the crackdown. But one group of villagers – the parents of massacre victims – suffered greatly.

June Fourth has become an obsession for people affected by it, but the obsession is warranted. Even though the Communist Party's censorship, repression, and patriotic education efforts seem to have erased the history of June Fourth within China, revealers continue to push back against concealers and offer hope that the future of June Fourth studies will be bright.

Top Communist Party officials admitted that some civilians had been wrongfully killed during the massacre, and promised that victims and their families would receive compensation. This was a tacit admission that the massacre had gone horribly wrong. If compensation came, it was meager and not systematic. While victims suffered, military officials and soldiers quietly received honors and promotions.

The imposition of martial law on May 20 sparked panic buying in addition to motivating citizens to block military convoys attempting to enter Beijing. Martial law also motivated more workers to join the Beijing Workers' Autonomous Federation. An umbrella organization called the Capital Joint Liaison Group tried to create an alliance of intellectuals, students, workers, and other Beijing residents but maintained a hierarchy that kept workers at the bottom. But the protest movement was slowly getting more inclusive in late May 1989.

Existing scholarly approaches, memoirs, and documentary films fail to capture the sense of hope experienced by many people in Beijing in 1989. Looking beyond students to include workers and ordinary Beijing residents provides a more comprehensive view of the Tiananmen protests of 1989.

Policy documents show that the post-massacre purge was akin to a political movement, or yundong, but was not allowed to be called a yundong. Central purge officials carefully identified purge targets and procedures in their effort to punish disloyalty and reward compliance in late 1989 and early 1990.

Protesters outside Beijing took cues from what demonstrators were doing in the capital. From demanding dialogue to staging hunger strikes, protests touched every province and autonomous region in China, and took on different shapes based on local dynamics.

Events and people outside of Beijing shaped what happened in China's capital. Protests in Xi'an and Changsha help convince Deng Xiaoping to take a hard line against demonstrators in Beijing. Hundreds of thousands of protesters from the provinces took trains to Beijing, adding to leaders' fears of a nationwide democracy movement. Many of the leaders of student organizations in Beijing had been born and raised elsewhere in China, but they failed to build meaningful ties to protesters from other places.

PLA soldiers continued killing civilians in Beijing on June 4, 5, and 6.