A petition signed by a thousand Beijing journalists was presented to the secretariat of the All-China Journalists Association, demanding a dialogue on press reform with leading officials in charge of the media in the Party's Central Committee. The petition raised problems as topics of the dialogue: 1) the Economic Herald incident in which Qin Benli was dismissed as editor-in-chief of the newspaper; 2) the news coverage of the students' activities in the past weeks, which was far from enough and not objective, a failure of the news media caused by censorship and in violation of the principle set down by the Thirteenth National Congress of the CCP that important events should be made known to the people; 3) State Council spokesman Yuan Mu's statement during his dialogue with the students in Beijing on April 29th that "news reporting in China was based on a system of chief editors being in charge of everything in their units," which did not conform to the facts.

 

When the petition is handed in, some thousand students gathered outside of the association building in support of the journalists. They chanted "The Internationale" and shout "Journalists, don't be afraid, demand democracy and report the facts", "Support the Economic Herald", and "Long Live Qin Benli". The students later march to Tiananmen Square and stop at the gate of People's Daily before returning to school.