Call it “Occupy Tienanmen Square.” In 1989 Chinese students upset at the lack of opportunities and the corruption of the government and political parties decided to stage a rally in the capital, Beijing. They gathered on the 15th of April, and stayed for the rest of the month, through May and beyond, the communist Chinese authorities keeping a weary eye but not doing anything drastic. The movement gathered student supporters outside of the Square as well, including a group at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, who made their own liberty statue to revitalize the pro-democracy movement.

On this day, May 29, in 1989, after building an earlier scale model of the statue on campus, student protesters in Tienanmen Square erected scaffolding and began building the full-size “Goddess of Democracy.”

Where it was placed in the Square, opposite the  Tienanmen Gate, the Goddess directly faced the large portrait of Chinese leader Chairman Mao, becoming a kind of metaphor for the ideological confrontation between the two. The student makers of the statue said in their statement “Today, here in the People’s Square, the people’s Goddess stands tall and announces to the whole world: A consciousness of democracy has awakened among the Chinese people! The new era has begun!” The statement ended with a rallying cry, “Long live the people! Long live freedom! Long live democracy!” taken up by protestors all the around the square.