April 27 demonstrations  The April 27 demonstrations were massive student protest marches throughout major cities in China during the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989. The students were protesting in response to the April 26 Editorial published by the "People's Daily" the previous day. The editorial asserted that the student movement was anti-party and contributed to a sense of chaos and destabilization. The content of the editorial incited the largest student protest of the movement thus far in Beijing: 50,000–200,000 students marched through the streets of Beijing before finally breaking through police lines into Tiananmen Square. After the editorial was published, the students at Peking University in Beijing met during the night to discuss their plans for a march on April 27. Some of the authorities in the school tried to coax the students into calling it off; they gave hints that if the students did not protest, then the school officials would use their government connections to begin dialogues. But the students were too upset to stand down, and their enthusiasm to march could not be quelled. They compromised: they would only march part of the way, up to the Third Ring Road, but not all the way to Tiananmen Square itself. One scholar observed that the students thought it would show that they "rejected the April 26 editorial but would not constitute a major provocation," because the students were still scared of the government using retaliatory force. Although students had demonstrated before, the April 27 demonstrations were particularly significant, in part because their scale was the largest instance of defying the state since 1949. Students were protesting across China: "not only in cities where demonstrations had already taken place, such as Shanghai, Tianjin, Changchun, Xi'an, Wuhan, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Hefei, Changsha, Chengdu, and Chongqing, but also in cities where demonstrations now broke out for the first time: Shenyang, Dalian, Shijiazhuang, Nanning, Kunming, Shenzhen, Yinchuan, and Guilin." The Beijing demonstration was the largest, with one conservative estimate at 30,000 students marching, but most sources claim between 150,000-200,000 were present. It is difficult to ascertain the exact number of student protesters, however, because there were so many citizens from Beijing cheering them on and supporting them in solidarity . In the words of economist Chu-yuan Cheng, it was the first time that a "pro-democracy student protest campaign drew enthusiastic support from the masses."