Event: June Fourth: The Tiananmen Protests and Beijing Massacre of 1989 (June 1, 2021)

Jeremy Brown’s June Fourth takes a historical approach to the events of 1989 in China, arguing that the Beijing massacre was neither necessary nor inevitable, and tracing alternative paths that could have led to different outcomes. Brown decenters the student movement by looking at the choices of non-students and people outside of Beijing, and by tracing the stories of victims of the crackdown, pushing back against explanations that blame student protesters for provoking a massacre.

Jeremy Brown (he/him) is associate professor of history at Simon Fraser University. He specializes in the social history of modern China. He is the author of City versus Countryside in Mao’s China: Negotiating the Divide (2012), and is the editor of Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism (2015, coedited with Matthew D. Johnson).

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.