During the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 in Beijing, China, students demanded a dialogue between Chinese government officials and student representatives. In total, three sessions of dialogue took place between the students and government representatives. The demand for dialogue began on April 22 during Hu Yaobang's official memorial. Three students knelt on the steps to the Great Hall holding a large paper containing seven demands and waited for a party official to accept their petition. No party official, however, came out to receive their list of demands. The main purpose of dialogue was to resolve growing problems such as corruption and rising living costs within China. In order to prepare for potential dialogue, the Dialogue Delegation was created. It was organized by Shen Tong of Peking University and Xiang Xiaoji of University of Political Science and Law and included elected representatives from various universities. Students requested that any student-government dialogue be broadcast live on television. The government, however, repeatedly failed to meet this request and proposed instead to have it recorded and aired at a different time. Three major student-government dialogues occurred throughout the student movement on April 29, May 14, and May 18. The April 29 and May 18 dialogues were broadcast on television at a later time after the original dialogues concluded. All of the dialogues, however, failed to produce a satisfactory result for both the students and the government. April 29: the preliminary dialogue The dialogue on April 29, 1989 was the first dialogue between student and government representatives to be recorded and broadcast. It was attended by government representatives Yuan Mu (spokesman for State Council), He Dongchang, Yuan Liben, Lu Yucheng and student representatives from 16 different Beijing institutions. Issues that were brought up by students included official profiteering and freedom of speech within the media. At the beginning of the dialogue, student representatives stated that this dialogue should be regarded as a preliminary dialogue and not the equal dialogue demanded by students. Equal dialogue by the definition of students was one where student representatives are elected by majority of students and where they are not treated as subordinates. From the students' perspectives, this dialogue did not reach any firm conclusions as Yuan and other officials were evasive in responding to the students' questions. The focus of the dialogue always went back to the need for stability in China. From Li Peng and other leaders' perspective,