TIANANMEN MOON (ebook and pdf)

Tiananmen Moon: Inside the Chinese Student Uprising of 1989

First-hand account of Tiananmen demonstrations by Philip J Cunningham

2026 Edition with new Preface and Afterword

On the night of June 3, 1989, Philip J. Cunningham was inside Tiananmen Square. He had marched there with the students, shared their all-night vigils and meals, listened to their arguments, recorded their words, and watched their movement build from a campus protest into something that briefly shook the most powerful government on earth.

Then the tanks came.

Tiananmen Moon is the eyewitness account of those tumultuous weeks when the line between observer and participant was fluid; it is the story of history being made, told in real time. An intimate and idiosyncratic account, Tiananmen Moon details the perspective of one observer in a crowd that reached a million at its peak.

This 2026 edition includes a new preface written from Beijing in the summer of 2025, when the author found himself once again caught in the shadow of Tiananmen — this time watching military convoys clear the same boulevard for a parade celebrating authoritarian power. Deng Xiaoping's decision to crack down continues to haunt China today, despite the impressive gains in development and prosperity built on the backs of Chinese workers.

The story of what happened that night, and during the six weeks preceding the crackdown, remains taboo in China.

A Nieman Fellow at Harvard and longtime contributor to the South China Morning Post, Japan Times, Bangkok Post and China Story (jinpeili.substack.com), Cunningham is one of the few foreigners to have marched from campus to the Square with protesters until the square was occupied in mid-May. He then worked with Western media, conducting interviews with key protest leaders as a death match was played out on the giant chessboard of Tiananmen Square.