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The Breaking Point
Nineteen eighty-nine promised
to be an anniversary year of special significance for China: the year
would mark the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, the 70th anniversary of the May Fourth movement, the 40th
birthday of the People’s Republic itself, and the passage of 10
years since formal diplomatic relations with the United States had been
reinstituted. A number of China’s most prominent scientists and
writers — including the dismissed party member Fang Lizhi and the
poet Bei Dao — sent letters to Deng Xiaoping and other leaders
asking them to seize this opportune moment to take steps that would
emphasize the flexibility and openness of Chinese politics. They urged
that Wei Jingsheng, who had now served ten years in prison for his role
in in the 1978 Democracy Wall movement, be granted amnesty, along with
others who were in prison solely for their dissident political views.
They also urged the government to grant the rights of freedom of
expression that would allow the kind of lively intellectual exchange
considered essential to real scientific and economic progress, and to
put more money into education for the sake of the country as a whole. ...
Neither Deng Xiaoping, Li Peng, or Zhao Ziyang
responded publicly to these various overtures, leaving the task to
their subordinates, whose response was harshly dismissive. Such
requests and critiques, they observed, were “incitements”
to the public and an attempt to exert “pressure” on the
government. Since there were no political prisoners in China, the
request to “release” Wei Jingsheng and others was a
meaningless one.
In this uneasy atmosphere, on April 15, 1989,
Hu Yaobang suddenly died of a heart attack. Hu, the feisty Long March
veteran and Communist Youth League leader, had been Deng
Xiaoping’s handpicked secretary-general of the CCP until he was
made the scapegoat for allowing the 1986-1987 student demonstrations to
spread. ... As soon as news of Hu Yaobang’s
death was released, students in Peking saw a means of pressuring the
government to move more vigorously with economic and democratic
reforms. ... By launching a pro-Hu Yaobang
demonstration, and demanding a
reversal of the verdict against him too, the students would ensure that
all the issues of the 1986-1987 pro-democracy protests, and perhaps
also those of Democracy Wall in 1978-1979, would once more be at the
forefront of the nation’s attention. ... [Thousands of students
gathered] in a rally that was held in Tiananmen Square on April 17.
Their purpose was to mourn Hu’s
passing and to call for an end to corruption and nepotism in
government, for more democratic participation in decision making, and
for better conditions in the universities. Wall posters — declared
illegal by the party since 1980 — appeared in many places, openly
praising Hu and his support of liberalism and political and economic
reform. (SMC, 657-9)
But in late April the students were stunned by a strong editorial in People’s Daily
that referred to their movements as a “planned conspiracy,”
firmly implying that all those following the current action might be
subject to arrest and prosecution. ... Instead of being intimidated,
the
students reacted with anger and defiance. They were joined now by many
of their teachers, by scores of journalists, and by citizens of Peking.
The rallies and marches grew larger, the calls for reforms and
democratic freedoms more bold. The government leaders appeared
paralyzed,
for any use of force on the anniversary of the May Fourth
demonstrations would immediately lead to reminders of the warlord era.
May 4 came and went peaceably, though over 100,000 marched in Peking,
dwarfing the student demonstrations of 1919. (SMC, 660)
Similar rallies and parades were held in
cities throughout China, but it was Peking that remained the focus for
world media attention, not only because of the demonstrations, but
because the secretary-general of the Soviet Communist party, Mikhail
Gorbachev, was due in Peking in mid-May for a crucial and long-planned
summit meeting with Deng Xiaoping. This summit was expected to mark the
end of the rift between the Soviet Union and China that had lasted for
thirty-three years. ...
But the significance of Gorbachev’s
visit and the benign light this might have cast on Deng Xiaoping was
overshadowed as the student demonstrators introduced a new
tactic — the hunger strike — to emphasize their pleas for
reform. Tiananmen Square became a vast camp as close to 3,000 hunger
strikers lay out in makeshift tents, surrounded by tens of thousands of
their classmates, Peking citizens, and curious visitors and
onlookers. ... Nothing like this had been seen in China before, for although
crowds as large had assembled during the Cultural Revolution, those
gatherings had been orchestrated by the state and were held in homage
to Mao Zedong as supreme leader of the party and the people. Now, even
though Zhao Ziyang still tried to mute the conflict, and suggested that
the People’s Daily’s
condemnation of the students had been too harsh, the demonstrators
began openly calling on Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng to resign. ... On May
17 and again the following day, the
number of demonstrators in and around Tiananmen Square passed the 1
million mark. Muzzled until now by government controls, journalists and
editors of newspapers and television news threw off their restraints
and began to cover the protests as honestly and comprehensively as they
could. ... On May 20, with no published comment by Zhao Ziyang, Premier
Li Peng and the president of China, Yang Shangkun, declared martial law
and ordered units of the People’s Liberation Army brought into Peking to clear the square and return order to the city. (SMC, 660-1)
But for two weeks the soldiers could not clear the square,
their efforts stymied by the courage and unity of the citizens of
Peking. Workers, initially sought out as allies by the students, now
organized themselves into their own groups to join in the protests and
to stem the soldiers’ advance. With a kind of
fierce yet loving solidarity, the people of Peking took to the
streets and erected makeshift barricades. They surrounded the army
convoys, sometimes to let the air out of tires or stall engines but
more often to argue with or cajole the troops, urging them not to
enforce the martial-law restrictions and not to turn their guns on
their fellow Chinese. For their part the troops, seemingly embarrassed
by their assignment, practiced considerable restraint while the central
leadership of China, both in the party and the army, was clearly
divided. (SMC, 661-2)
May 23, 1989: Workers cover Mao's portrait after it was pelted with paint
May 30, 1989: The Goddess of Democracy installed in Tiananmen Square
The
students who had emerged as leaders of the demonstrations over the
previous month now found themselves in charge of a huge square crammed
with their supporters but also awash with dirt and garbage that
threatened the outbreak of serious disease. At May’s end they began to
urge their fellow students to end the hunger strikes, return to their
campuses, and continue to attempt a dialogue with the government from
there, and the great majority of the Peking students did so. ... A
group of Peking art students provided the faltering movement with a new
symbol that drew all eyes — a thirty-foot high white plaster and
Styrofoam statue of their version of Liberty, fashioned as a young
woman with head held proudly aloft, clasping in both her hands the
torch of freedom. (SMC, 662)
Late at night on June 3, the army struck.
These were not inexperienced and poorly armed soldiers like those
called in up to this time, but tough, well-armed troops from the
Twenty-seventh Army (whose commander was a relative of President Yang)
and from other veteran units loyal to Deng. Backed by scores of heavy
tanks and armored personnel carriers that smashed through the
barricades, crushing those who fell in front of them or tried to halt
their progress, the troops converged on Tiananmen Square down the wide
avenues to its east and west. Armed with automatic weapons, they fired
at random on crowds along the streets, at anyone who moved in nearby
buildings, and at those who approached too close to their positions. (SMC, 662)
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The Tiananmen Square Massacre
In the small hours of June 4, troops blocked
off all the approaches to Tiananmen Square, and turned off all the
lights there. ... There followed a period of macabre and terrifying chaos
in Peking, as the army gunned down students and citizens both near the
square and in other areas of the city. Screams echoed through the
night, and flames rose from piles of debris and from army trucks or
tanks hit by homemade explosions. ...
PLA soldiers also died, some killed in
terrible ways by enraged crowds who had just seen unarmed demonstrators
mowed down. Rumors spread swiftly that the fires in Tiananmen Square
were piles of corpses burned by the army to hide the evidence of their
cruelty. Whether that was true or not — and no one could get past
the troops to check — there were enough bodies in full view
elsewhere, lying in the roads, in hospitals, or tangled up in their
bicycles where they had fallen, to indicate the scale of the violence.
Many hundreds were dead and thousands more wounded. The callousness and
randomness of the killings evoked memories of the worst episodes of
China’s earlier civil wars and the Cultural Revolution. (SMC, 662-3)
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Deng Xiaoping
Explanation of the
Tiananmen Crackdown
June 9, 1989
First
of all, I’d like to express my heartfelt condolences to the comrades in
the people’s Liberation Army, the armed police and police who died in
the struggle — and my sincere sympathy and solicitude to the comrades
in the army, the armed police and police who were wounded in the
struggle, and I want to extend my sincere regards to all the army,
armed police and police personnel who participated in the struggle. ...
This storm was bound to happen sooner or later. As determined by
the international and domestic climate, it was bound to happen and was
independent of man’s will. It was just a matter of time and scale. ...
It was also inevitable that the turmoil would develop into a
counterrevolutionary rebellion. ... The main difficulty in handling
this matter lay in that we had never experienced such a situation
before, in which a small minority of bad people mixed with so many
young students and onlookers. ... [Some comrades] thought [that the
demonstrations were] simply
a matter of how to treat the masses. Actually, what we faced was
not just some ordinary people who were misguided, but also a rebellious
clique and a large quantity of the dregs of society. The key point
is that they wanted to overthrow our stand and the party. Failing
to understand this means failing to understand the nature of the
matter. I believe that after serious work we can win the support
of the great majority of comrades within the party.
 OVERTHROW OF THE PARTY
The nature
of the matter became clear soon after it erupted. They had two
main slogans: to overthrow the Communist Party and topple the
socialist system. Their goal was to establish a bourgeois republic
entirely dependent on the West. Of course we accept people’s
demands for combating corruption. We are even ready to listen to
some persons with ulterior motives when they raise the slogan about
fighting corruption. However, such slogans were just a front.
Their real aim was to overthrow the Communist Party and topple the
socialist system. ...
What
were the aims of the protesters?
Did they include overthrowing the Communist Party and/or the socialist system?
PASSING THE TEST
In a word, this was a test, and we passed. ... This army retains
the traditions of the old Red Army. What they crossed this time was genuinely
a political barrier, a threshold of life and death. This is by no
means easy. This shows that the People’s Army is truly a great wall
of iron and steel of the party and country. This shows that no matter
how heavy the losses we suffer and no matter how generations change, this
army of ours is forever an army under the leadership of the party, forever
the defender of the country, forever the defender of socialism, forever
the defender of public interest, and they are the most beloved of the people.
At the same time, we should never forget
how cruel our enemies are. For them we should not have an iota of
forgiveness. (DC, 560-2) |
Tiananmen Anniversaries in Beijing (above) and Hong Kong (below)
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