Tiananmen Square is named ground. The Square is the figurative centre of China's literal centre; it is what a journalist calls “China's state cathedral”. Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace — the main gate leading from the centre of power to the rest of China and thence the world — is the symbolic space where the emperor could make spiritual contact with his subjects. The spiritualism emanated by power transcended the rise and fall of not just dynasties but ideologies. Tainanmen, which had been a site of the May Fourth Movement of 1919, was the arena where Mao Zedong proclaimed the birth of a new China in 1949. He had the area outside Tiananmen levelled, rebuilding the square into a grander version of Moscow's Red Square, which he might have had in mind. Tiananmen was where Mao met Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. But if the Square was where the ruler met the masses, it was also where the masses met their ruler. In the post-Mao China of 1978–79, thousands recorded their protests on a stretch of blank wall called “Democracy Wall” to the west of Tiananmen Square. Deng put a stop to this expression of discontent when people began to attack the Communist Party and system. Wei Jinsheng, a dissident who had demanded democracy as the “fifth modernization” to complete Deng's Four Modernizations, was punished severely. Initially, Deng had appeared to believe that economic reforms could not survive without a free discussion of problems and solutions. This idea, which had blossomed during the Prague Spring of 1968, had been adopted by Chinese Communist Party Chairman Hu Yaobang and had been advanced by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. However, as inflation, corruption and nepotism accompanied China's reforms, the anger of workers, students and intellectuals was sidelined in Beijing's quest to preserve political stability at all costs. When Chinese television announced Hu's death on 15 April 1989, popular mourning over his demise became a channel for the expression of repressed demands for political change, in a replay of the demonstrations at the funeral of Zhou Enlai in 1976. China was in ferment.

On the international front, although the Berlin Wall had several months left to fall, the winds of glasnost (openness) released by Gorbachev in 1985 were travelling well.