Craig Calhoun, a well known sociologist, wrote a very first hand account of the Tiananmen Square protests back in 1989, “Revolution and repression in Tiananmen square“, Society, September 1989, Volume 26, Issue 6, pp 21–38. If you want help getting access to that article, PM me. It's useful because it gives context and chronology about event leading up to June 4th, which is useful for understand how the movement grew and changed. It's in some places a day-by-day account. I found it very useful for orienting me.

Here’s the ungated PDF to Protest in Beijing: the Conditions and Importance of the Chinese Student Movement of 1989, another thing he wrote about the protests, this time for the Partisan Review. This article is thematic. It starts by covering what other social scientists would call the "opportunity structure" of the period, that is to say, what was going on specifically in the lead up to Spring 1989 that made the opportunities possible. It gives lots of small economic details of the lives of a student in 1989 that I think your exchange student will find quite quaint (most students rented beat up bikes; there was a shortage of lightbulbs; Deng had returned many intellectuals to work in the 80's). It then focuses, in very readable prose, on three questions:

(1) what did the protesters want? (2) what may turn out to be the historical achievement and importance of this protest? And (3) what are the limits or weaknesses which inhibited it and will need to be confronted as Chinese people push for democracy in the future?

Here's an ungated link to the article he wrote for Dissent Magazine, "[The Beijing Spring](https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/beijing-spring-an-eyewitness-account"*, which was reprinted in 2007. This article focuses very much on the protest tactics of the protestors (especially how protestors shared resources; how they made use of pre-existing social networks of friendship; how they attracted other groups; how ideas were disseminated; what ideas influenced the protestors; how the event that nominally initiated the protests, mourning the death of Hu Yaobang, related to later events) at a time immediately after the protests when Western "attention has been focused, ironically, on the killers not the killed, on the Chinese government and not the student protesters." This article alone is probably not the best introduction, but if your exchange student is interested in the specific strategies used (and where they succeeded and failed) it's a good one.

Calhoun happened to be a visiting professor in Beijing that year, and a scholar of social movements, so he really had a unique perspective on the events. The articles, when read in succession, become somewhat repetitive because, in a pre-internet age, Calhoun was trying to get this information out to a wide intellectual audience. He also was writing in 1989, so to some degree he takes the students immediate grievances for granted. In 1995, he turned his work on Tiananmen into a book called Neither Gods nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China.

In a later interview, here’s how he characterized the protests:

Nigel Warburton: I’m really interested how a social scientist approaches something like the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, now there were journalists there, there were historians who have written about these events in relation to China, what does a social scientist have to contribute here?

Craig Calhoun: I’d like to tell you that because I was a social scientist I knew these were coming and I planned a research project around it. In fact I was teaching in Beijing that year, and so my students were part of the protest movement, and I was able to observe some of the early developments that helped pave the way to it. Social scientists are interested in movements and protests because of their role in bringing social change, because they are a kind of social action that requires social organisation that depends on social relationships. So to give you an example from China, one of the things that you notice is that there are large crowds, big marches, big gatherings in Tiananmen Square. Well, how is that organised, who comes out, how do they get out? People marched often in groups that corresponded to their courses of study and their classes in the university. The ties, the links that they had to each other from their dormitories, from their classes, were used to organise the protest. Then when they put tents in, and camped out in Tiananmen Square, they were also using pre-existing organisational ties, but they were trying to give a symbolic message that they were capable of organising, the people could be orderly, could be organised, and therefore the government claim that without the government there would be no order, was shown to be false. So on both the input side, how do things get organised, and the output side, what message gets sent, there is a strong social science element.

Nigel Warburton: That case was particularly interesting because the message sent from Tiananmen Square as received in the West was about democracy, but to some people there, as I understand it, it was about corruption.

Craig Calhoun: Well the two are not unrelated, but right, the slogans that were used were often different in English and Chinese, and people picked up on different things. So as you can imagine, reporters who spoke only English received those messages the students put in English. And because this was a protest of students, and to some extent intellectuals, they were often people who spoke English and could craft the message, so they knew that a message about democracy would have a wide appeal. That didn’t mean that they were not sincere about democracy, but that that message would catch the reporters. They knew that a message about corruption would catch members of the Chinese working class. It’s just like a Western politician, who has different messages when he’s speaking to a trade union group, and when he’s speaking to a group of university students, and when he’s speaking to parliament. Messages are crafted for occasions. The story of the protest, I think, had several roots. One of them was corruption, the terrible inefficiency and even theft of taking money and using it for bad ends. Another was the extent to which the system failed to deliver economic development and a strong country – that corruption undermined the government. So you had a government that was strong, and people might object to some of the uses of power, but by being corrupt it wasn’t able to do the things people wanted a government to do. So there was a message of ‘we need China to be a stronger country, the government needs to be less corrupt, more efficient’, and then that connects to students in particular because, as young intellectuals, they’re thinking what you need are well-trained people who have the expertise that we have. The message about the government was partly if you aren’t creating opportunities for well-educated people to assume leadership roles, you’ll make the country weaker, and that then connected to a national self-strengthening message, we want China to be strong. They knew that that wasn’t the message that foreigners wanted to hear, but it also then connected to democracy, that the people want something better of the government.

That's a long quote and I don't want it to undermine actually reading the articles linked above, but I think one important point of it is that many in the West want it to be solely a beautiful and simple embrace of democracy, while many other critics point out that, in fact, the claims were more complicated than simply "democracy" vs. authoritarianism. These criticism, however, can sometimes be taken too far, and it be made as if the protests weren't really about democracy at all. What Calhoun is pointing to is that the, like almost every social movement, there are multiple claims by multiple groups for multiple audiences. It was simultaneously about democracy and corruption, it was simultaneous a student led moved and one that sought (and to some degree achieved) solidarity with working class people.

More, of course, has been written since Calhoun wrote in the same year the protests happen, but as a very early, on the ground look, they might be useful places to start. This is a very bottom up view of what the students were experiencing (Calhoun was a professor, his interlocutors were his and other students), but maybe your student would prefer a more top-down approach, which someone else would have to provide.

Below I will provide one short chronology that I found useful.

Bonus points if it's not just about that one specific event, but also about Tibet and general Chinese government corruption.

u/yodatsracist gave an excellent response. Regarding the Tibetan question, Sam van Schaik's Tibet: A History includes the most concise and well-balanced presentation of the events that transpired between Tibet and China in the 20th Century, IMO. While many other modern histories of Tibet really focus on the Tibetan side, Schaik's book does a really good job at presenting how events in Tibet, from China's perspective, were only one piece of the puzzle for China, and how events in Tibet, Oslo (the Dalai Lama's Nobel Peace Prize), Beijing, and Taiwan were all intimately connected. He doesn't go in depth on the corruption of the Chinese regime, partly because that's not the focus of his book, but it does give a wide picture that doesn't paint demons of state actors as this genre of history is often wont to do.

I'd also recommend (though chances are it's above the student's reading level) Warren W. Smith Jr.'s Tibetan Nationalism: A History Of Tibetan Nationalism And Sino-tibetan Relations. It's a tome that goes crazy in depth into Sino-Tibetan relations as far back as the first migrations, all through the subsequent Chinese and Tibetan dynasties, the rise of the Dalai Lamas, and the development of modernity. The salient chapter, however, is about 2/3 of the way through the book where Smith details the fusion of Classical Chinese worldview (regarding China as the center of the world and the beacon of civilization) with revolutionary (via Chiang Kai-Shek and Yuan Shikai) and Marxist (via Mao) thought over the course of the first half of the 20th Century. Again, it can get... very high brow, and while Smith's Pro-Tibetan viewpoint is quite strong, it's 1100+ pages of explanation, source material, and detail. I'd only recommend it after van Schaik's book, and if the student has a high reading level. After the details about this philosophical argument that took place in China, Smith goes over the history of the invasion of Tibet, followed by its development, the Cultural Revolution, and even more detail regarding what transpired between the tripartite Beijing - Dharamsala - Taipei episode of the late '70s, and then barrels into Tiananmen Square (though this is, of course, not a high focal point of the book).

Hope that helps.

(I'm not sure if follow up questions are allowed in top-level comments but) while these responses are all excellent, are there any good resources written in Chinese, perhaps publications from Taiwan or Singapore? Not only would you get a more first-hand perspective but it could also be beneficial for OPs student to read about it in his native language.

Hi folks,

I've now had to remove eight responses to this thread, because all of them have been nothing but one-to-two sentence responses about a documentary or article or book someone's heard of. Here at /r/AskHistorians we expect recommendations for reading / materials to be provided by experts with an in-depth familiarity with the content they're recommending. If there's a documentary you're recommending, you need to be able to demonstrate why it's a quality documentary, where it fits in with scholarship on Tienanmen Square, and so on. If OP wanted folks with no expertise to recommend random stuff they'd found, they could google the question themselves. They're asking here on /r/AskHistorians because they expect a quality answer from qualified contributors.

Thanks for your understanding!