"They're shooting!"

The cry spreads through the Beijing crowd at 11:30 pm, as the first clicks from the army's AK-47s ring out into the darkness.

On the Avenue of Eternal Peace, the wide street running north of Tiananmen Square, one protester refuses to believe it.

"No, no, they wouldn't shoot," he insists, stripped to the waist on this humid June night.

"They're the people's army."

But a moment later there is no doubt. A tricycle cuts through the throngs of protesters. It's an ambulance now. Slumped on a plank of wood behind is the bloodied body of a student, his stomach ripped by several bullets.

For 50 days, the symbolic heart of the Chinese state had become a huge and peaceful experiment -- hundreds of thousands of people, dreaming of democracy and freedom, as the Cold War wound down.

Day and night, Chinese citizens from all walks of life imagined a different future -- one that was not dictated by the Communist Party. But the discussions they sought with authorities turned into a dialogue of the deaf.

In front of the world's cameramen -- who had gathered here to cover a reconciliation summit between Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev on May 15 -- the horror unfolded.

Massed ranks of soldiers drafted in from outside Beijing -- whose city forces were deemed too sympathetic to the protesters -- launched an operation to take back control of Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3-4.

Martial law had been declared two weeks earlier, but did not have the government's desired effect -- merely swelling the numbers of protesters.

- Troops, tanks and terror -

Last hopes for a peaceful solution are extinguished in the early hours of Saturday, June 3 when between 20,000 and 30,000 ill-prepared soldiers are sent marching towards Tiananmen.

The crowd soon disperses the soldiers, beating some of them. Humiliated, the military are forced to retreat. But it proves to be only the authorities' opening salvo.

On the Saturday evening, at the Muxidi crossroads, tanks break through the line of buses that had blocked their entry.

With heavy helmets on their heads, the soldiers open fire at close range on the tightly packed crowd. Terrified protesters respond with a volley of projectiles.

The gunfire rains down under skies lit up by thousands of tracer bullets and burning vehicles. Swarming in from all sides, the troops finally reach Tiananmen around 2:00 am on Sunday, June 4.

Armoured vehicles charge full-throttle into the crowd. They flatten everything in their path, people included. Several tanks are burned, their crews beaten to death. Other soldiers are saved by the students.

In the capital's 20 or so hospitals, distraught medics struggle with the influx of dead and wounded crammed into blood-stained corridors.

Now totally encircled, Tiananmen Square plunges into darkness at 4:00 am, all the street lights switched off.

By now, there are no more than a few thousand protesters left gathered around charismatic student leader Chai Ling. The Goddess of Democracy, a towering replica of the Statue of Liberty fashioned by art students, is felled by a tank.

- Defiance in defeat -

Under the eyes of paratroopers with fixed bayonets, the remaining students leave the square at 5:00 am. Many of them are in tears, singing the Internationale anthem and raising their hands in a defiant "V" for victory.

A dozen of them will die later when a tank rolls over their procession back to their campus.

From a balcony of the Beijing Hotel -- where a clutch of journalists, including this correspondent, have taken refuge -- the scene before us in the early hours of Sunday is hellish.

Shots can still be heard across the capital, and smoke rises from burning vehicles. More protesting civilians are mown down on Sunday morning by tank machine guns, some as they try to collect the dead and injured littering the streets.

By now, Tiananmen Square itself is the heart of a military camp, with hundreds of tanks and army vehicles on standby.

But towards midday on Monday, under the windows of the Beijing Hotel, a young man in a white shirt walks calmly into the Avenue of Eternal Peace and stops in front of a column of tanks, halting them in their tracks.

His identity remains unknown, but he will forever be known as "Tank Man", a world-famous symbol of the courage and defiance of the Tiananmen protesters 25 years ago.

Fast-forward to the China of today and I see a country transformed at a pace never before seen in history.

But the Communist Party remains in control, its power reinforced by an emphatic declaration of might that sweltering June night -- an event that has been virtually erased from the country's official history.

Tiananmen anniversary: US urges China to free activists
Washington (AFP) June 03, 2014 - The United States on Tuesday pressed China on human rights 25 years after the Tiananmen Square crackdown, urging the Asian power to release activists rounded up ahead of the anniversary.

At a time of growing distrust between the world's two largest economies, the United States repeated calls for Beijing to allow greater political freedoms as the communist government steps up arrests and censorship.

"We've very clearly called on the Chinese authorities to release all the activists, journalists and lawyers who have been detained ahead of the 25th anniversary," State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters.

"I think it's time to allow some more space, quite frankly, for discussion in their own country, particularly around this kind of anniversary," she added.

China has tried hard to quash any public memories of the June 3-4, 1989 crackdown, when soldiers killed hundreds of unarmed civilians -- and by some estimates, more than 1,000 -- to crush a movement by pro-democracy students.

Police visibly stepped up their presence in Beijing to prevent any public commemoration and detained dozens of activists. A monitoring service said that several Google sites had been blocked in the world's most populous nation.

The United States regularly raises human rights concerns with China, although critics say that US efforts have largely been symbolic as Washington resumed normal trade relations with Beijing soon after the Tiananmen crackdown.

But relations between the two countries have grown tense in recent months, with the United States raising the stakes by indicting five Chinese officers for alleged cyber-espionage.

- 'A government without a future' -

Chen Guangcheng, one of China's most prominent activists who dramatically escaped from house arrest in 2012 for the safety of the US embassy, urged commemorations of the Tiananmen Square movement as he addressed a think tank in Washington.

Speaking in English in public for the first time, the blind-since-birth self-taught lawyer hailed Hong Kong -- which is part of China but autonomous -- for its annual June 4 vigils and for recently opening the first museum on the Tiananmen crackdown.

"Every candlelight vigil makes the perpetrators shudder in fear. It gives people courage to think and speak aloud again," Chen said, speaking forcefully in clear but careful English as he read his speech in Braille at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

"A government that cannot face its own history is a government without a future," Chen said, asking how a government that disrespects its citizens can be expected to "treat other countries any better."

Chen said he was 17 years old at the time of the Tiananmen crackdown and was not enrolled in school due to his blindness. But Chen said he sympathized as he listened to the radio and would have joined the protests if he were a student.

Chen rose to prominence by exposing forced abortions in eastern Shandong province as authorities enforced China's one-child policy. He spent four years in prison until 2010 and was then put under house arrest, where he said that he and his wife -- who appeared with him in Washington -- were subjected to severe beatings.

Chen, who was allowed to move to the United States after high-level negotiations, urged Western countries to keep raising human rights and "stop receiving the June 4 incident's criminals as your honored guests."

"Don't let those who crush human rights enter your free, democratic countries. Deny them the warmth of your handshake and the warmth of your smile."