In June 1989, shortly following the military's advance on Beijing to quell the protests, Deng said to other party leaders, "every leadership collective must have a core; a leading collective without a core is unreliable." Ostensibly, Deng was making a reference to the diffusion of power in the 1980s having led to the undesirable result of an open schism between party leaders at a time of crisis. In response, Deng declared, Jiang Zemin would become the core of the "third generation" of Communist Party leaders.