The 48-hour transitional command is a working research entity used by the Free China 1989 archive to separate a claimed temporary delegation of authority in late May from both the May 19–22 joint command and the later 保卫天安门广场指挥部. The archive has not yet established an uncontested contemporaneous formal name for this structure.
Working chronology
Participant reconstructions place the arrangement around May 22/23 through May 24/25 and describe an approximately 48-hour mandate. The exact start and end hours, grantors, written terms, voting procedure, authority transferred and return mechanism remain unresolved.
People in the research record
Source-specific claims connect Chai Ling / 柴玲, Lian Shengde / 连胜德, Zhang Boli / 张伯笠, Wang Dan / 王丹, Wang Chaohua / 王超华, Guo Haifeng / 郭海峰, Li Lu / 李录 and others with this transitional phase. Their exact roles and whether they were grantors, officeholders, staff, participants or later narrators must be established source by source.
Why it is separated
Collapsing this disputed transitional phase into either the earlier May 19–22 joint command or the later Tiananmen Square Defense Command would erase the central historical question: whether limited authority was delegated temporarily, whether it expired, and how later authority was claimed or institutionalized.
Evidence status
Transitional-phase claim: supported by participant reconstructions. Contemporaneous authorization instrument, formal name, complete roster, exact mandate and termination: not yet recovered. This page is therefore explicitly a research-status page, not a declaration that every later recollection is established fact.
1989 Organizations Directory · Open Research Questions — 1989