EMMA: The year was 1989.
The World Wide Web had just been invented.
Nintendo brought out the Game Boy...
MAN: All the power and excitement of Nintendo
right in the palm of your hand.
..and this song was everything.
# When you call my name
# It's like a little prayer... #
It was also a year of big political events,
including one in China that shocked the world.
This image of a man standing up against a tank
outside of Beijing's Tiananmen Square
became one of the most famous of the 20th century,
and a powerful symbol to many.
But to understand how this came to be and why,
we'll have to go back a bit.
After a revolution in 1949, China became a communist country.
Communism is a very different type of government
to what we have here in Australia.
It's based on the idea that everyone owns everything,
and the government shares the wealth equally.
But in practice,
it usually means the government has a lot more control
over people's lives.
In the early days of communist China,
there was a lot of poverty,
but by the '80s, things were changing a lot.
The Communist Party started to allow more trade
with other countries,
and that was helping the economy to grow.
But many didn't like the way
the Communist Party was running the country.
They said there was a lot of corruption,
and they were unhappy with their lack of rights.
Young people started to join together to protest.
Many had seen the way people lived in other countries,
and wanted China to be more like that.
After a popular former Chinese leader died in April 1989,
the protests got bigger.
Tens of thousands of students
gathered in a place called Tiananmen Square,
a famous landmark in Beijing, where they held hunger strikes
and refused to leave until their demands were met.
On 20 May, the Chinese government declared martial law.
That means the army took control of the city.
But at first, they weren't allowed to use force.
That changed on the night of June 3.
Thousands of soldiers moved towards Tiananmen Square.
Some opened fire on people,
even when they were trying to get out of the way.
Hundreds, possibly thousands, of people were killed,
and videos like this caused outrage around the world.
Here in Australia,
then prime minister Bob Hawke made an emotional speech.
BOB HAWKE: Thousands have been killed and injured,
victims of a leadership
that seems determined to hang on to the reins of power at any cost.
He let 10,000 Chinese students
living in Australia stay here permanently.
30 years on, the things that happened in Tiananmen Square
are still remembered around the world,
and last week, there were memorials to remember the victims,
including a big one in Hong Kong.
But here in China, Tiananmen is really controversial.
After June 4, 1989,
the government tried to stop people from talking about the event.
It admitted that the protest happened and that 200 civilians were killed,
but it said the students were trying to overthrow the government.
It introduced tighter controls on the media,
and these days, people in China can't easily research
the Tiananmen protests on the internet.
Young people aren't taught about it in schools,
and many either don't know what happened
or don't want to talk about it in public.
TRANSLATION: There's really nothing I can say.
I wasn't there and don't have an objective opinion.
Many people in China say it's pointless to dwell on the past
and they'd rather celebrate China's achievements since 1989.
It's now the world's second biggest economy
and has a more open relationship with the outside world.
But some still criticise China for covering up the past
and say the country needs to acknowledge the tragedy
so it can move forward.