On April 15, 1989 a man named Hu Yaobang died at a party Political Bureau Meeting in Beijing, China. Hu has once been the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and had been a loyal follower of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping but was forced to resign in 1987 in disgrace. He had become an outspoken critic of the excesses of Chairman Mao’s program and a supporter of freedoms of speech and the press and, as such, had run afoul of the hardliners in the Chinese Communist Party. It was rumored that his criticisms, along with the collapse of the Soviet Union, emboldened freedom-minded students and intelligentsia who staged a series of protests in 1986 and 1987. He attempted to rehabilitate the masses of people persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and believed that Tibet should handle its own affairs (but remain a part of China). After he died, the Party was slow to laud Hu as they had lauded other senior members of the party after their deaths and those who had protested then saw that as a slight not only to him but to them.
They gathered to demonstrate for more freedom in April 18, some 10,000 strong in the same place they had gathered just two years before. By April 21st, the protests had gathered momentum and students numbering about 100,000 marched through Tienanmen Square on the day before Hu’s funeral. Other protests broke out: a two-day University strike that involved teachers as well as students, a 50,000 person march in Tienanmen Square on April 27, a march of 100,000 there on May 4 which also included thousands of workers from Beijing, and a massive sit-in and hunger strike on May 13 before the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev for a state visit.
On May 20th, the government declared martial law, but it did not stop the protests which by this time were breaking out all over China. There was Chaos in the government as the senior Party officials hashed out how to handle the situation. General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, who supported the protesters, was thrown out of his position and the politburo split between the hardliners who wanted to aggressively use the military and those who wanted to use softer means.
In the end, the hardliners won and they would order one of the most heinous acts of tyranny committed in my lifetime.
Troops were dispatched to the city with orders to take it back from the protesters. On June 3, 1989 at about 10:30 PM, armored personnel carriers and troops moved toward the Square. The APC’s started shooting, often hitting Chinese soldiers, and the people in front of the armed column panicked. The Chinese soldiers loaded their weapons, and the shooting began in earnest.
The protesters were not entirely defenseless. As Charlie Cole, who shot the most famous picture from that day recounts,
At the top of the square just in front of the Forbidden City, an APC got separated from its column, and in its panic to get out of the crowd area, ran over several demonstrators. This, in turn, caused the crowd to grow violent.
They disabled the APC, tore its crew from the vehicle, killed them, and torched the vehicle. All this was done in plain view of several PLA platoons about 150 metres away at the edge of the square. Standing beside the burning APC, I looked down the avenue and in the orange glow of the lights of the square I could see the PLA lock and load their AK-47s.
He went into the Beijing Hotel to get a better view from higher up and was beaten by members of the secret police, the Public Security Bureau. They took several rolls of film and other equipment from him, but let him go. From there, he saw the carnage that would continue into the next day.
By this time there was a fair amount of automatic weapons fire and I could see people with carts carrying wounded and dead running down the avenue trying to get the wounded to the hospital.
I counted 64 wounded or killed in a short span of time then stopped counting. Stuart [Franklin, a photographer on assignment from Time magazine] and I tried to shoot with the available street light, but it yielded very little.
At about four or five in the morning, tank columns raced into the square smashing buses, bicycles and humans under their treads. As the sun began to rise, we could see the mass of armour in the square, escorted by thousands of PLA troops.
Claudia Rosett, then the editorial page editor for the Asian Wall Street Journal, was in Tienanman Square as well. Her report is as gripping an account of the day as you will read. She witnessed the scene in the center of the Square and wrote,
Rapidly the troops sealed off all but the south end of the square. Troops, trucks and armored
personnel carriers lined up along the northern perimeter and soldiers took up positions around
them — firing sporadically at the demonstrators. More troops filled the steps of the Great Hall of
the People to the west, and the steps of the Museum of the Chinese Revolution and History to the
east. On the steps of the museum there were at least 4,000 soldiers, armed with AK-47s and long
clubs. By 2:30 a.m. the students were faced on three sides by tens of thousands of troops.Gunfire kept coming from the north end of the square. In half an hour spent near the hospital tent,
I saw seven students with bullet wounds carried in by fellow demonstrators. One young man, shot
in the right side of his chest and bleeding heavily, was rushed in from the northwest corner.Half a dozen more were brought in from the northeast, where a bus driver had just made a
suicidal attempt to stop the soldiers by ramming his bus into an armored personnel carrier.
Soldiers dragged the driver from the bus and carried him out of sight. Students later said he had
been killed by the troops.In their efforts to stave off invasion of the square, or at least register their outrage, demonstrators
set fire to a bus and an armored personnel carrier at the north end of the square. This brought
more gunfire from the troops.From 2 a.m. until about 4 a.m. came a chilling standoff. The students refused to leave the
monument, saying, “We are not afraid to die.” From a loudspeaker set up on the monument
during the three-week occupation of the square, a popular singer from Taiwan, Hau De Jian,
broadcast messages. “Please everybody,” he pleaded, “Use nonviolent means.” While he spoke,
huge government loudspeakers mounted on the lamp posts broadcast warnings that the troops
would take any measures necessary to clear the square: “If you do not leave, we cannot
guarantee your safety.” From the student loudspeaker came the stirring communist anthem, the
Internationale, which the demonstrators played many times that night. From both the north and
south ends of the square, again came the bullets.
By the end of the protest, 5:40 AM on June 4, the ground in and around Tienanman Square was filled with the dead. They were not only students but also older workers from the city who joined in solidarity and a desire for freedom. The white statue the protesters had named Goddess of Liberty and around which they had rallied lay destroyed by the soldiers. Crackdowns on other protests elsewhere continued for several more days, but none rivaled the size and intensity of the one in Beijing.
Family members of those killed that day have built what they call the “Massacre Map”. It is a map of Beijing that shows where most of the 150 dead were killed, or the hospitals to which they were taken. You can see the names and ages of 150 victims of the Chinese government’s brutality. The Chinese government’s official death toll from that day is 241 civilians with another 7,000 wounded. Other groups, including journalists who witnessed the massacre put the number in the thousands, perhaps as high as 7000 according to NATO intelligence (which included 6,000 civilians and 1,000 soldiers). The organizers and many of the participants who survived were hunted down relentlessly. Some escaped to other countries and eventually made their way to the United Stated. Others were arrested and eventually released. Others yet were tried and executed.
Ms. Rosett ended her report in 1989 with this paragraph. It it as applicable today as it was then.
The white Goddess of Liberty statue in Tiananmen Square was gone by daybreak Sunday. No
doubt when the Chinese government has finished dealing with its people, the tidy square will be
presented again as a suitable site for tourists, visiting dignitaries and the Chinese public to come
honor the heroes of China’s glorious revolution. It will be important then to remember the heroes
of 1989, the people who cried out so many times these past six weeks, “Tell the world what we
want. Tell the truth about China.”
Yet, for the most part, we are not telling the truth about China. Ms. Rosett wrote this as China wooed the world to host the Olympic Games in 2001.
Perhaps the charm Beijing officials lavished on the Olympic inspectors was enough to persuade them that none of these miseries would taint the Olympic spirit. Maybe the IOC even believes that by handing Beijing’s regime the unearned Olympic stamp of approval, it would be doing the 1.2 billion people of China a favor.
But in trying to imagine the Olympic torch lit in Beijing, I keep remembering another torch, put there not at the behest of the communist regime, but by the protesters who nearly 12 years ago rose up by the millions to defy China’s tyranny. It was the torch held in both hands by the Chinese Goddess of Democracy–patterned after our Statue of Liberty–that for almost a week stood in Tienanmen Square, until it was destroyed by government troops on June 4, 1989.
When that symbolic flame of freedom can be safely lit again in China, it will be fitting to award Beijing the Olympic Games. Until then, the Olympics can better keep faith with human dignity–especially that of the Chinese people–by going somewhere else.
I thought of the Tienanmen Square protests and their deadly conclusion as I read this article. It recounts how workers were made to scrub Tienanmen Square by hand to cleanse it of pollution and grime in anticipation of yesterday’s Opening Ceremonies. I couldn’t help but wonder if any of the workers saw dried blood there left by some innocent Chinese student, teacher, or worker who only wanted a little taste of what we casually enjoy here in the United States every day. I wonder if any of the workers had lost relatives or friends on that day and, if so, what they were thinking as they bent on their hands and knees to clean what freedom-loving people around the world ought to consider hallowed ground.
I wonder, if the dead of that day could see us now, whether they would look on us unkindly for the moral contortions into which we have forced ourselves to avoid condemning their killers. I hope they do not. I hope they forgive.
(I am indebted to those who wrote and footnoted the Wikipedia entry on the Tienanmen Square Protests of 1989. The article was invaluable to me in recounting the series of events that led up to the massacre. The listed sources and footnotes led me to other articles linked in this post and I thank them for their hard work.)
Previous 2008 Olympic Profiles:
Mao Hengfeng
Yang Maodong (AKA: Guo Feixiong)
Tags: 2008 Olympics, Charlie Cole, China, Claudia Rosett, Tienanmen Square, Time Magazine
