1989 Mao portrait vandalism incident

At 2:00 pm, May 23, 1989, three young protesters from Liuyang, Hunan, posted banners on the wall of the Tiananmen gate's passway.

The slogans on the banners read, Time to End the Five Thousand Years of Autocracy (Chinese: 五千年专制到此可以告一段落！; pinyin: Wǔqiān nián zhuānzhì dào cǐ kěyǐ gào yīduànluò!)

and Time to End the Cult of Personality (Chinese: 个人崇拜从今可以休矣; pinyin: Gèrén chóngbài cóng jīn kěyǐ xiū yǐ).

In his earlier years prior to the student protest of 1989, Lu eloped with his wife in order to escape government and societal pressure on unlawful marriage and pregnancy.

[citation needed] Yu Zhijian was a teacher back in Hunan, he demonstrated on numerous occasions his dissatisfaction with the administration of the schools, for which he was transferred to the countryside and demoted.

[3] Upon their decision to throw eggs at the portrait, he and Yu Dongyue brought up the idea that their actions would be symbolic and would serve a greater purpose although they discussed other options: "We’d come all this way to Beijing, and we had to live up to our duty.

[5] After throwing eggs on Mao's portrait, Yu Zhijian was sentenced to life imprisonment, but was released in 2009 on bail.

He eventually arrived in the United States in 2009 and obtained political asylum and settled in Indianapolis where he was also taking care of Yu Dongyue, who suffers from mental illness after torture in prison.

[6] He died on March 30, 2017, in Indianapolis worried "that his fervent gesture would fade from minds, and that the spectre of Mao would remain".

The vandal's name was Gu Haiou, a 35-year-old unemployed man from Ürümqi, as reported by the official Xinhua news agency.

The protester was only identified as Mr. Chen by the police, who came to Beijing from Heilongjiang to raise individual and human rights issues.

At early afternoon on April 5, Mr. Chen threw a plastic bottle of ink at the portrait in resonance with the 1989 incident.

Protesters gathered on the square hoping to attract the attention of the annual National People's Congress that began on March 5.

As part of the protest, an unidentified man aged around 30 threw ink on the lower left hand corner of the portrait.