Official government announcements shortly after the event put the number who died at about 300.

The Swiss Ambassador had estimated 2,700, following a visit to Beijing's hospitals.

Records from Beijing's main eleven hospitals, compiled shortly after the events, recorded at least 478 dead and 920 wounded, though Timothy Brook notes that these figures are an undercount due to lack of information from other hospitals.

Jonathan Fenby puts the death toll at over 700 in his book

British Ambassador Alan Donald initially claimed, based on information from a "good friend" in the State Council of China, that a minimum of 10,000 civilians died [...] Donald later revised his estimate to 2,700–3,400 deaths

While public discussions about the events have become socially taboo, private discussions about them continue to occur despite frequent interference and harassment by the authorities. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo remained in China in order to speak out about Tiananmen in the 1990s despite the fact that he received offers of asylum; he faced constant surveillance. Zhang Xianling and Ding Zilin, the mothers of victims who died in 1989, founded the Tiananmen Mothers organisation and were particularly outspoken about the humanitarian aspects of the protests. The authorities mobilize security forces, including members of the People's Armed Police, every year on 4 June in order to prevent public displays of remembrance, with an especially heavy security presence on the anniversaries of major events such as the 20th anniversary of the protests in 2009 and the 25th anniversary of the protests in 2014. On the 30th anniversary of the protests in 2019, the well-known Chinese artist Ai Weiwei wrote that "autocratic and totalitarian regimes fear facts because they have built their power on unjust foundations" and he also wrote that memory is important: "without it there is no such thing as a civilised society or nation" because "our past is all we have."

Journalists have frequently been denied entry to the square on the anniversaries of the massacre. Also, the authorities are known to have detained foreign journalists and increase surveillance of prominent human rights activists during this time of year. Internet searches on "4 June Tiananmen Square" made within China return censored results or result in temporarily severed server connections. Specific web pages with select keywords are censored while other websites, such as those which support the overseas Chinese democracy movement, are blocked wholesale.