It is 15 years since the June 4 massacre in Beijing's Tiananmen Square - when Chinese soldiers fired live rounds and used tanks and armoured vehicles to crush peaceful student demonstrators.
The crackdown resulted in the deaths of several hundred students - possibly thousands - and ended six weeks of unprecedented pro-democracy protests in China.
The young people had been protesting the political, economic and educational policies of the mainland government. The massacre sent shockwaves around the world.
In Hong Kong, Beijing's repression resulted in huge public protests. On May 28, the World Chinese March saw 1.5 million Hong Kong people expressing their support for the Tiananmen protesters.
While China has changed considerably economically and socially over the last decade and a half, the Tiananmen massacre continues to cast a shadow over its international image.
The seeds of the 1989 crackdown were sown years earlier, argue Michael Fathers and Andrew Higgins in Tiananmen: The Rape of Peking: 'The explosive events of April, May and June were the product of tensions which had been building up in China for more than a decade, tensions between economic reform and stagnation.'
In 1979, Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping began liberalising the economy and introducing some market reforms.