June 1989, for weeks hundreds of thousands of students of Chinese students and workers had defied their authority leaders and camped out in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square calling for change. It was a revolution in the making, as people for the first time were questioning authority in China and this had never happened before.

The protesters had captured the worlds attention, while the communist party struggled to deal with this growing peoples movement. While some in Tiananmen Square sensed that their protest could not continue few imagined how brutal the end would be. But the spirt of resistance did not die, in one of the 20th centuries most defiant acts of bravery one man became the symbol of the Tiananmen Square protests.

Al Jazeera speaks to some of those who took part in the world’s largest and most influential pro-democracy movement.