Tiananmen
name ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A gate near the Forbidden City, Beijing, China.
"In 1966, Mao sanctioned the start of the Cultural Revolution, a campaign against entrenched party interests and "capitalist-roaders" that brought China to the brink of civil war and ruined lives and careers. All the while, he nurtured a personality cult. People carried around his "Little Red Book" of quotations; Mao thought was studied in schools, and his portrait hung on the Tiananmen gate in front of the former imperial palace. It hangs there still."
- 2 Ellipsis of Tiananmen Square. abbreviation, alt-of, ellipsis
"Jiang Zemin has almost managed to make the event disappear down an Orwellian memory hole. Even in Western countries, sub-editors have taken to calling it the ‘Tiananmen crackdown’, rather than ‘massacre’, making it seem as insignificant as the endless stories about routine ‘crackdowns’ on smuggling, prostitution, counterfeit goods, VAT forms or corruption, which provide the stuff of daily reporting here in China."
Example
More examples"The Chinese government controlled the internet to prevent the people from knowing the truth of the Tiananmen Square Massacre."
Etymology
From the Hanyu Pinyin romanization of the Mandarin Chinese pronunciation for 天安門／天安门 (Tiān'ānmén), literally "the gate of Heaven's peacemaking" or conventionally: "the gate of heavenly peace", without syllable-dividing mark (隔音符號／隔音符号 (géyīn fúhào)).
Related phrases
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.