People's Liberation Army soldiers entered Tiananmen Square with a mandate to clear the demonstrations. It was from the outset an uneven battle between the unarmed students and demonstrators and the heavily armed PLA troops, who also bought in battle tanks. Initially, the students believed that the soldiers would not fire upon their fellow countrymen, but they were wrong.
The PLA struck hard: soldiers opened fire and the tanks mowed into the demonstrators. Hundreds were killed and many were seriously injured. The exact tally of dead and injured remains unknown: the Chinese government says about 200 people were killed; journalists present in Beijing that day say about 1,000 were killed; the German Red Cross and Beijing residents placed the number of dead at around 3,500.
The leaders of the movement were arrested in the days after the crackdown; many were jailed and later exiled, while many fled, mostly to the US, to evade escape.