Things happened quickly in the next few weeks. The world watched in awe as a brave young Chinese man faced down an army tank in the middle of the Avenue of Eternal Peace; he was subsequently arrested for this "counterrevolutionary" act and was not heard from again, generating rumors of his execution. Fang Lizhi and his wife Li Shuxian sought asylum in the U.S. Embassy, while Beijing demanded the Americans turn them over to face arrest for their leadership of the counterrevolution.
In Shanghai, the country's largest city, up to half the city's workforce had walked off their jobs in response to the massacre. On June 6th, a railroad train crashed into a peaceful demonstration at Shanghai's railway station, killing six protesters. The train was burned and the tracks blocked by thousands of angry citizens. Tens of thousands marched on June 9th in Shanghai to protest the Beijing crackdown. Among them were over 1,000 workers marching under the banner of the Shanghai Autonomous Workers Federation. Within days, however, most of Shanghai's workers had returned to work; the authorities arrested nine leaders of the Shanghai AWF for being "enemies of the people"; and the unofficial student union at the city's East China Teachers College voted to dissolve.
Shanghai's demonstrations were not the only manifestations of resistance and outrage over the Tiananman massacre. Protesters reportedly blocked a major rail line and a bridge over the Yangtze River in the urban complex of Wuhan. Guangzhou (formerly Canton) reported similar actions. Army units in Chengdu, the capital of the southern province of Sichuan, reportedly killed demonstrators in that city.
On June 12th, China's government press exhorted the official union body, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, to mobilize workers across China to destroy all independent workers federations that existed. This in itself was testimony not only to the national scope of China's 1989 pro-democracy movement, but to the increasing social and political weight of the workers in that movement.
On June 14th, the Public Security Bureau announced that the Autonomous Workers Federations were illegal and counterrevolutionary. Three leaders of Beijing's AWF were put on the "wanted" list, and one of them, 26-year-old Liu Qiang, a worker from Beijing's Factory N 3209, was shown on CCTV being handcuffed and dragged off a train in Mohhot, Northern Mongolia's capital.
On June 21st, three Shanghai workers were executed for allegedly setting fire to the train on June 6th. By then, the mopping up end of the murderous repression of June 4th was well under way. Workers were publicly humiliated and paraded in front of TV cameras as "counterrevolutionaries" before being shot by firing squads. At least 37 individuals, many of them AWF members, were executed in this manner. The government alleged that it had received 1620 phone calls from the public fingering movement activists over "hotlines" set up for this purpose. On June 14th, 32 people, including worker activists, were arrested boarding trains at the Beijing railway station. By the 21st of June, over 1300 citizens had been arrested by the authorities.
Despite the outbreaks of resistance and protests in many areas of China, including the militantly defiant Shanghai demonstrations, when the tanks crushed the demonstrations with brute force in Beijing, the 1989 pro-democracy campaign was finished.
Where did it come from? What did it mean? What factors gave rise to the massive mobilizations for radical reforms and democratic rights in Beijing and other cities?
The glib explanation offered by various bourgeois commentators is that the pro-democracy movement was a natural consequence of the sizeable influx of Chinese students into the U.S. throughout the late '70s and '80s. The students, the theory goes, were so intoxicated with America's capitalist democracy that they attempted to import it once back in China. The construction of the replica of the Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square supposedly confirms this line of thinking.
While the Beijing Spring resulted from a more complex interaction of factors than this theory suggests, there are at least kernels of truth to it. The Chinese students did not return to their country possessed with a burning desire to import institutions of Western parliamentary democracy. What turned the students on about the United States were those democratic ideals that guided the revolutionary democratic tradition in the American Revolution, and the civil liberties and freedoms embodied in the Bill of Rights.
"Give me liberty/or give me death!" read the poster at Beijing University. The students were impressed with what the Statue of Liberty represented?America in its earlier, revolutionary period--not necessarily what the U.S. political system represents today. The fact that some students may have had illusions in the latter is irrelevant to the dynamics of the Beijing Spring.
Any discussion of "democracy" must draw a distinction between parliamentary democratic institutions and the democratic rights working people have fought for in order to have more political space to organize and function freely. The U.S. Constitution provided the framework for the young democratic republic established 200 years ago after the American revolutionists won their independence from England. At the time, it was a vast improvement over the rule of monarchs and colonialism, and even today it is a more favorable environment for working people to live under than the more extreme forms of capitalist rule, such as fascism.
However, this democracy was still very much a "capitalist" one; it was based on upholding and defending the rule of private property. One day in the future it will be replaced when the working class takes political power, expropriates the capitalist class and establishes a workers and farmers government. The workers will create newer, higher forms of democracy, "socialist" democracy (councils, soviets, mass organizations, etc.) which will enable them to directly administer and take command of the economy and the state.
For working people, the most important part of the U.S. Constitution is the first 10 amendments--the Bill of Rights--and other subsequent amendments that have extended democratic rights. These rights were the result of the struggles of working people to gain more political space and to extend the layers of people who are considered citizens with equal rights under the law. These include the freedoms of speech, assembly, press and religion, the right to petition for redress of grievances, the right to privacy, and others.
The sources of both the democratic republic and these democratic rights were the bourgeois democratic revolutions of the 17th through 19th centuries in Europe and the United States. Many times these two were merged as democratic revolutionary movements arose. But in the 20th century, the difference for working people throughout the world between parliamentary democracy and democratic rights is that the widest possible expansion of the latter is absolutely essential to our survival; they are unambiguously in the working class's interests, and we have more at stake in defending them than anyone else. These democratic rights are needed by workers to gain more elbow room and have more political space to organize and function politically. They are also prerequisites for workers' power and the transition to socialism. Parliamentary democracy, on the other hand, serves to block working people from meaningfully participating in political life. In today's world, it is an obstacle to genuine democracy; it keeps workers straitjacketed politically; it is rife with corruption, graft and privilege.
The Chinese students were organizing and demanding those democratic rights that have been denied the people by Communist Party rule, and which have been won by workers in many capitalist countries. Their demands for freedom of the press, speech, assembly, coupled with their campaign against the bureaucracy's corruption and privilege, were winning the support of the Chinese working people.
But contrary to the assertions of the senior leadership of the Communist Party, the pro-democracy demonstrators were calling for reforms, not revolution. No one in Beijing was talking about overthrowing socialism or the Communist Party and establishing a capitalist republic. In fact, on the whole, the students expressed pride in the accomplishments achieved by the Party made possible by the overturning of capitalism. Even those voices calling for multiparties did so within the framework of Communist Party rule and socialist legality.
It is also true that the students in Tiananmen Square were not calling on the workers and farmers to organize their own instruments of struggle that could replace the rule of the privileged bureaucracy with the democratic rule of the working class. Some Marxist organizations in the United States, like Socialist Action, a Trotskyist sect that split from the SWP in 1983, have said that the Tiananmen students were consciously leading a movement for socialist democracy in China, and that we were seeing in Tiananmen was the embryonic beginning of workers' councils that could lead the fight for socialist democracy in China. This is false. One must not project one's own consciousness onto other people's movements; we must instead look objectively at each movement's dynamics.
Beijing's 1989 pro-democracy movement was not a conscious fight for socialist democracy. Rather, it was a student-led, anti-bureaucratic privilege, militant mass movement for bourgeois democratic rights that was winning the support of China's working people. The students simply demanded that the government grant the people the same democratic rights enjoyed by workers in most capitalist countries. When they met an intransigent hard line from Deng and Li, the students called for their removal and supported those in the Party like Zhao who seemed to agree with them.
But the Beijing Spring was more than just a matter of Chinese students returning home from the United States inspired by America's democratic ideals. Why were the students striking a responsive chord among China's workers and farmers?
Contrary to the glib assertions of many bourgeois commentators, far from having an anticommunist character, the 1989 pro-democracy movement had a largely anti-capitalist dynamic. Since coming to power in 1978, Deng Xiaoping steered China in the direction of private enterprise and free market mechanisms. "To be rich is glorious," crowed the Communist Party leaders to the farmers in the countryside, in a 1980s version of Soviet leader Bukharin's 1920s slogan for the Soviet peasants, "Enrich yourselves."
As Deng increasingly relied on the free market to open more space for capitalist commodity production in agriculture and industry and expanded foreign trade and investment by capitalists from other countries, the inevitable social and economic dislocations and pressures followed. While economic growth averaged nearly 10 percent annually for the previous decade, social antagonisms and differentiations increased, as did rampant corruption throughout the bureaucracy. Rich lenders, traders, and factory owners appeared on the scene.
In the countryside, the pro-capitalist initiatives generated a layer of wealthy farmers and widening disparities of income and living standards. The rate of inflation rose to 50 percent, the highest since the 1949 Revolution; grain production continued to drop or stagnate; fertilizer shortages led to peasant attacks on warehouses. All of this contributed to the movement of millions of impoverished rural people into the cities.
During the 1980s the workers and farmers faced a tightening economic squeeze. Austerity budgets with higher taxes were imposed; wages and living standards fell while prices rose. In March 1989, the government concerned about the unrest that could flow from all of the above-mentioned problems, imposed still-tighter administrative controls over all private businesses and regional economic bodies. In the austerity budget adopted that month, new taxes were imposed on farmers and businesses, and 18,000 construction projects were halted.
The "new rich" in China were doing quite well from Deng's reliance on the free market, but working people weren't, and the result was a heightened polarization in both city and countryside. As Wang said in the square, "The ordinary people want government to correct some mistakes. Because the reform policy is hurting every ordinary people . . . They seem to forgot about the people."
A combination of growing frustration over the denial of basic democratic rights and the spiraling economic problems and hardships drove up to a million people into Tiananmen Square in May and show their support for the pro-democracy students. Tiananmen became the focal point for all Chinese suffering under the bureaucracy's misrule--the worker whose wages were falling; the farmer whose standard of living was plummeting; the displaced rural proletariat who had been thrown off the land by the Party's free market bent; the student embarrassed by the nation's backwardness and stifling repression of ideas.
The regime was really in a fix, for even those individuals who had materially benefited from the pro-capitalist measures--the cab drivers who were free to make more money, or those like Liu, who owned four stores in Beijing's free market--strongly supported the demands for democracy. It seemed that everyone had their grievances to bring to Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989. If they weren't suffering in their pocketbooks, they were angry over the government's continued denial of fundamental democratic rights. And for many demonstrators, it was both. While some students expressed resentment over the money being made by taxi drivers, the drivers were proud of the students and strongly supported their campaign. When the workers saw the students step forward and take action, they responded by marching into Tiananmen in solidarity with China's youth.
Like Gorbachev in Moscow, Beijing's Stalinists reacted to the deepening economic crisis in their country (brought on in part by their own bureaucratic mismanagement) by embarking on a free market path, the "economic restructuring" known in the Soviet Union as "perestroika." Deng Xiaoping took China on a much more accelerated version of perestroika. Though still a long way from a full-scale restoration of capitalist property relations, in other words, while still operating under the parameters of the nationalized, planned economy, thus remaining a workers state, Deng's perestroika relied on market mechanisms and resuscitated private enterprise to a far greater degree than Gorbachev's reforms ever did in the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev was shrewd enough to realize that since his economic restructuring wold cause painful hardships for Soviet workers, he would need to also provide some amount of political liberalization to give him political space to make perestroika palatable--hence, glasnost. The Beijing Spring resulted in part because Deng adopted an even heavier dose of free enterprise, with all its harsh prescriptions but without any political liberalization accompanying it. This combination created the foundation for the Tiananmen mass movement.
The Chinese Gorbachevs were represented by the more moderate, liberal faction of Hu Yao Bang and later Zhao Zhang. They argued fervently that the only way the free market reforms could work was if they were accompanied by a relaxation of political control and monopoly by the Communist Party; allowing more democratic rights and free expression; and adopting a conciliatory attitude toward the students by opening a dialogue with them as a means of diffusing the protests. But as the Tiananmen occupation continued, Deng, Li and Yang Shangkun were able to convince the Party that if they allowed the paralysis and chaos to continue, the antibureaucratic rebellion would hurtle out of control and their rule would be threatened. The party would be over.
"Listen to what these bourgeois loving students are demanding," the hard-liners told the Party. "They want us to disclose all our assets and incomes. They want our privileges to cease."
The students were not only demanding more democratic rights; they were articulating the workers' outrage over the rampant corruption that extended to all layers of the Party. The anti-bureaucratic privilege dynamic sent shivers down the spines of the bureaucrats. "It's them or us," Deng correctly observed.
The crisis facing the ruling caste in China was not acute enough to rupture it. So the caste was unified enough to act in concert and close ranks behind the Party, which was still the best instrument to preserve their privileges. By August 1991 in the Soviet Union, however, the crisis did rupture the caste into the hardline faction, whose coup attempt was thwarted by the large mobilizations of working people in Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), and the dominant wings of the caste, led by Boris Yeltsin, who decided the best way to maintain their privileges was to abandon whole sections of the caste, including the hopelessly discredited Communist Party.
Unlike the situation in Poland, where the industrial workers formed Solidarity to lead the fight for democracy, in China it was up to the students to provide the leadership of the Beijing Spring. While there had been worker involvement in the 1978-79 Wall of Democracy campaign in Beijing, organizationally most workers were still under the tight control of the Communist Party, from the official trade union federation to the work unit. The students, knowing their own frustration and sensing the growing widespread dissatisfaction among the masses, decided to seize the initiative and take action. Inspired by China's history, revolutionary legacy and traditions, including the May 4th, 1919 student protests in Tiananmen Square demanding democratic rights and national sovereignty, the students stepped forward and said, "Okay, if no one else is able to stand up and demand democracy, then we students will do so."
They were inspired also by student movements in other countries like the United States, as well as by other mass movements for justice that had occurred in recent decades around the world, such as the antiwar, civil rights, and women's rights struggles. The students, keenly aware of the watchful eye of the international media, showed this influence when they shrewdly blanketed Tiananmen Square with signs in English reading, "We Shall Overcome."
Thus the students decided they could wait no longer for others to act. They began modestly articulating their own grievances and demands for more autonomy in the educational system. Emboldened by the success of the initial demonstrations in the square, sensing the support of society at large, and encouraged by the strength of the more moderate faction of the Party headed by Zhao Zhang, the students picked up the torch and ran with it, and in doing so became the moral conscience of China in the spring of 1989.
Further fueling the students' drive was a profound sense of righteous anger. They didn't pretend to know all the answers; they were the first to admit they had no blueprint for a better society. But they were profoundly embarrassed over the fact that a small group of autocratic octogenarians were still ruling China with an iron grip.
Many students realized that on their own they could not effectuate the kind of reforms they were demanding. All we want is the truth/Just give us some truth, the students were saying to the country and the world, in the spirit of John Lennon. As they looked around China, they saw the people were enjoying fewer democratic rights than working people in the advanced capitalist countries possessed; they saw pervasive corruption and privilege in the ruling Party bureaucracy. And by 1989, they could remain silent no longer.
"The students always to make the rule to stand on the truth," Liu had told me. "It's the only thing they can do. If workers didn't come and follow students, the movement means nothing. Everybody understands that, even Chairman Mao."
The students gave organizational expression to the underlying grievances and frustrations building in China. They articulated serious, specific political demands for more democratic rights and an end to privilege and corruption. Then they spearheaded the Tiananmen demonstrations and continued to provide the organizational leadership. But sometime during the third week of May, after over a million workers filled the square in support of the students, the pro-democracy movement faced a serious dilemma--it was politically powerless. The students had taken things as far as they could. Their courage and example had sparked the working people from Beijing to Shanghai to Chengdu, and now they had a mass movement on their hands, one that was rapidly posing the question of power: "Who rules China?"
And mass movements require conscious, disciplined leaderships aware of the stakes involved and possessing clear goals. In this epoch of imperialism and Stalinism, the working class struggle for political and economic power--communism--requires a special kind of leadership: a centralized, combat, vanguard party of class conscious Bolsheviks, that is, a Leninist party.
This is true, said Trotsky, whether you're talking about a capitalist country where a SOCIAL revolution has not yet occurred, or in a Stalinist-led workers state--countries like the Soviet Union, China, Poland, Romania, etc., where the historical task on the agenda is a POLITICAL revolution, that is, the overturning of the privileged bureaucratic caste and the establishment of socialist democracy.
Once the pro-democracy campaign took on a mass character, the question of leadership came to the fore, and that became the Beijing Spring's downfall. The students could ignite the mobilizations and provide the creative energy for the organizational leadership, but they could not sustain the movement with conscious political direction. In modern society, that kind of leadership could only be provided by the working class. Even Chairman Mao, champion of the peasant-based variant of Marxism, understood that, Wang had reminded me.
And the workers had by no means been silent or inactive. Despite laboring under the Party's extensive system of control, from the unions to the work unit, China's toilers were very quickly showing signs of taking advantage of the political openings being won by the movement, as evidenced by the rapidly growing independent unions, particularly the Autonomous Workers Federations in Beijing and Shanghai. In open defiance of the Party, workers were integrally involved in monitoring the million-strong Tiananmen mobilizations during the third week of May.
Which is why the tanks attacked the BAWF tents first in Tiananmen Square; why the workers were the ones executed after June 4th; why the harshest prison sentences were reserved for workers. What Deng and Li feared most was the potential represented by the independent federation. Deng and Company were worried that if the workers assumed leadership of the mass movement from the students, the question of who rules China--the bureaucracy or the workers--would be clearly posed.
Deng knew that there were workers in the BAWF who were well aware of the stakes involved. As the banner over the BAWF tent read, the Tiananmen movement was one for democracy, not just a student movement. "In fact, it's a democratic revolution," one of the workers told me just hours before the tanks invaded the square. "Our aim is not just to oppose corruption, not just to put down Li Peng 's government, not just to put down conservatives, but to eliminate society's problems, all these problems. Down with dictatorship."
Wang had echoed these convictions almost word for word. "Democracy for all the people, not just the students. A democratic revolution, not just to oppose corruption."
But these important developments within the Beijing Autonomous Workers Federation were a long way from providing the kind of political leadership needed. As May unfolded, the Communist Party increased the pressure on the workers, warning them to tow the line and back off from the Tiananmen protests. Though the hundreds of activists in the federation were busy trying to get the word out, this was all in its infancy. The leadership of the Beijing Spring was in the hands of an increasingly divided student movement.
There were divisions between the Beijing-based students and those from other provinces in China. The latter wanted to continue the occupation and encampment of Tiananmen Square, at least until the June 20th National People's Congress meeting, while the former favored ending the demonstrations and carrying on the pro-democracy cause in other ways. The radicals were still counting on the Zhao faction to emerge victorious in the intra-party battle with the hard-liners; they believed that Zhao had enough backing in the army to preclude an all-out assault by the troops on Tiananmen Square. If they could just hold on until June 20th, when army commanders from all over China would see for themselves the support for Zhao in the capital, the thinking went, then Deng and Li would have no choice but to back down. Besides, many of these students genuinely believed that the People's Liberation Army would never attack the students.
The Beijing students had far fewer illusions. They could see the handwriting on the wall far more clearly than their counterparts from around the country. The Tiananmen protests had run their course and proved their point, but Zhao's faction had lost the fight to Deng and the hard-liners. The game of chicken was approaching its denouement. It was time to end the occupation of the square and take the campaign for democracy to other forums. A good start was already underway--the teams of pro-democracy agitators that had begun touring China, spreading the word.
These students sensed that the people's stamina was ebbing and the relationship of forces was not as favorable as they had been even a week before. It might be difficult to repeat the May 23rd mobilization that had blocked the army's first advance on Tiananmen Square.
The erection of the Goddess of Democracy and Freedom only crystallized these arguments. The more moderate students contended that the statue gave the movement a chance to declare victory, give a final parting shot to the government, and end the Tiananmen demonstrations preserving the dignity and safety of the people. At the end of May it was reported that a final vote actually decided in favor of leaving the square, but it was never acted upon, because in the meantime the Goddess had become the catalyst for the people of Beijing to rally around. The idea that everyone should go home and the Goddess of Democracy and Freedom be handed over to the Deng government suddenly became absurd. As hundreds of thousands of Beijing's citizens filed into Tiananmen Square every night paying homage to the statue, the message was clear--the Goddess belonged to the people.
As the month of May wound down, Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng were able to politically defeat Zhao Zhang's faction and marshal support for the crackdown by saying something like this to the Party:
"Look at the paralysis and embarrassment these bourgeois democrats have caused us! How much longer can we allow this to go on? They are disgracing the honor of our nation, erecting symbols of America's bourgeois democracy on sacred ground, desecrating the memories of China's patriots. Look at where the moderate, conciliatory course urged by Comrade Zhao has gotten us. There is no end in sight; the counterrevolutionary troublemakers lurking in the background will not cease stirring up trouble. The only place it will lead will be increased turmoil to the point where it might get out of control Their goal is a capitalist republic. The Tiananmen movement must be crushed. We must be willing to pay whatever international political price this may generate. We have no alternative. It's them or us."
It took some time, for the Zhao/Hu Yaobang faction of the Communist Party had substantial strength in the Party as well as the army. As the movement reached its zenith, Party members, including prominent journalists from the People's Daily, were resigning in protest against the headline position. But as May dragged on with no end in sight to the demonstrations, the logic of Deng's arguments rang true to more and more Party bureaucrats. By the time Zhao made his tearful address to the students in Tiananmen Square on May 19th, whatever chance he had in winning the intra-party battle was lost, and he knew it. "It's too late," he told his student admirers.
Even so, as late as Saturday evening it still was't a foregone conclusion that the army was coming to violently end the pro-democracy movement. The bizarre scenes that took place at the side and rear of the Great Hall of the People just hours before the tanks arrived showed this. Standing in the middle of them, it was hard to tell if you were witnessing a confrontation or fraternization between the soldiers and the demonstrators. One minute, soldiers menacingly brandishing clubs looked like they were on the verge of charging; the next minute soldiers and protesters were singing the Internationale under a white flag. The troops ended up retreating to the victorious cheers of the people. Many in the crowd were convinced that they had won, and that once again any army advance would be repulsed.
Other demonstrators, including Wang, told me that the hundreds of thousands of soldiers based outside Beijing were not there to be deployed against the demonstrators, but were there rather as a show of force by those divisions loyal to Deng against those backing Zhao.
The soldiers who confronted the thousands of demonstrators at the Great Hall were from the Beijing-based 38th Division, known to be supportive of Zhao and more reluctant to fire on the demonstrators. The army unit which did most of the killing was the 27th Division, commanded by a son-in-law of hard-liner President Yang Shankung and consisting of ethnic minorities from China's outer provinces (who were also battle-hardened veterans of the brutal 1979 war against Vietnam). Maybe the 38 Division troops were more reluctant to fire on the people because of their close proximity to Beijing; maybe it was because Zhao enjoyed considerable support from the division's commanders. But whatever the reasons were, they did not exist for the soldiers brought in from distant ethnic provinces.
These soldiers, speaking a different dialect than the Han dialect spoken in Beijing, and falling victim to China's national divisions and chauvinism, had no trouble internalizing their commanders' propaganda directed against Beijing's demonstrators.
"Counterrevolutionaries in Beijing are threatening to overthrow the Party and restore capitalism," the top brass told the 27th. "They are paralyzing Beijing and desecrating China's national monuments. They are responsible for the chaos and turmoil. They must be stopped. Your country calls on you to save it."
Several demonstrators told me on Sunday that the 27th Division's troops had been drugged up for the massacre and were laughing as they shot people dead. This was not independently confirmed but what is clear is that the non-Han soldiers were far more calloused about slaughtering protesters than the 38th Division confronting the people at the Great Hall. From all accounts, it is clear that it was the 27th Division soldiers who did the vast majority of killing in the streets of Beijing that night.
But if the Beijing-based 38th Division was more supportive of Zhao Zhang and more reluctant to fire, it is not true that this was a reflection of the fact that the Chinese army was on the verge of civil war. There were scattered, unconfirmed reports of shooting between rival army units, and they may indeed have been based on some elements of truth. But China was never near a civil war with pro-Zhao and pro-Deng units fighting each other. The ruling bureaucratic caste was not that divided. Though it had taken Deng some time to marshal his forces and politically defeat Zhao's reformist faction, he had succeeded in convincing enough of the bureaucracy that its privileges were threatened by the continuation of the pro-democracy movement, and the Tiananmen rabble had to go.
But what about the demeanor of the 38th Division? Did their reluctance to shoot, the semi-fraternization, and their singing of the Internationale, reflect the substantial support in the army for Zhao's more moderate positions? Or was it all a ploy, designed to lure Beijing's populace into a false sense of security, to soften them up for the heavy blows coming from the 27th Division? Was it, indeed, part of the same plan that sent hundreds of unarmed soldiers jogging into Tiananmen Square the day before the massacre, a scheme purposely designed for the troops to be routed and humiliated at the hands of the demonstrators, the better to inflame the revved-up 27th Division to do the dirty work? Then there were the provocateurs, like the one caught by the mob outside the Minzu Hotel, who was freed from their grasp by the meddling American as the PLA mowed down hundreds of citizens.
As late as Saturday night there were still many Chinese who were convinced the People's Liberation Army would never fire on the people. But others, like those holding meetings all over Tiananmen Square by 10:30 pm, had no such illusions and were fully aware of the dangers ahead. "Tell the world we die for democracy and freedom, " said the young man at the Beijing Autonomous Workers Federation. Some had made a conscious decision to become martyrs and announced an unequivocal statement to the Party and the world: "You 'll have to kill us to separate us from Tiananmen and the Goddess and all she stands for."
One of the biggest points of dispute concerning the June 4th crackdown was the death toll inflicted by the army. Initial estimates from the Red Cross and Western news agencies ranged anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000. Though too high, these reports had a veneer of credibility during the first week of June 1989, particularly with the lurid rumors circulating in Beijing of the soldiers burning bodies in the square and dumping others into rivers. If the initial estimates of civilian deaths were too high, the numbers put out by the Chinese government were laughable.
"Only 200 were killed the night of June 4th," said Deng and Li Peng with straight faces. "And most of them were soldiers, brave soldiers, killed by counterrevolutionary hooligans while trying to save the nation from chaos." One government report stated that only 23 students were killed in the "rioting."
A related controversy was the issue of how many citizens were killed in Tiananmen Square on June 4th. There were several early reports which claimed that the army slaughtered hundreds, perhaps thousands of people in the square alone; that the tanks crushed many tents, including BAWF's, with dozens of demonstrators still inside; that soldiers opened fire on hundreds of protesters trying to flee Tiananmen; and that soldiers used flamethrowers to burn bodies in order to camouflage fatalities.
One particular eyewitness account from the square received significant worldwide notoriety. A Chinese student gave a graphic account detailing army atrocities in Tiananmen Square reported in the Hong Kong Standard, San Francisco Examiner, New York Times and much of the international media. His account gave credence to the charges that the soldiers killed scores of people inside Tiananmen Square. But in the next few days, the student's version was widely discredited by several other individuals, independent of each other, who also claimed to be eyewitnesses to the June 4th events in the square. It was from these reports that we learned of the saga of Hou Dijian, Wang's hunger-striking friend, who emerged from his tent to lead the negotiations with the army that allowed the remaining Tiananmen demonstrators to leave the square before 5 am in almost ceremonious manner, complete with an army escort. Hou's story and others cast serious doubt on the main premise of the above-mentioned student's testimony: a wholesale massacre by the army against demonstrators fleeing Tiananmen.
The controversy raised some interesting questions. How many people were killed that night? How many in Tiananmen Square? Was the figure closer to the government's claim of 200 than the higher estimates in the tens of thousands?
If I could do one thing over again in Beijing, I would have stayed in the square that Saturday night and waited for the army to arrive. I sensed that it was the place to be for a journalist; all hell was breaking loose, and with all the controversy that followed over the killings in the square, I wished I had stayed there to see for myself.
In truth, my head was dazed and spinning by 11 pm, and I just wanted a pit stop at the Minzu for a spell, fully intending to return to Tiananmen later. But I had seen Tiananmen for the last time. There was no way of knowing that the Minzu would be the scene of one of the first battles in Beijing on June 4th; no way of knowing I'd see the first army casualties when teenage boys were dragged in to the Minzu's lobby-turned-infirmary; no way of knowing I'd be confined to the hotel watching the killings on the Avenue of Eternal Peace.
It has been difficult to pin an exact casualty figure on the June 4th massacre, given the Chinese Communist Party's tight control of such information. However, my sense of it is that the government's claim of 200 deaths, most of them soldiers, is ludicrously low, while some of the early estimates of 10 to 20,000 were overinflated. The truth probably lies somewhere in the 700 to 1200 range, with those wounded numbering in the thousands. This estimate is based on my own limited eyewitness observations from my hotel room, conversations with Chinese the next day, and piecing together the most credible accounts that have emerged.
While confined to my room I witnessed a portion of the June 4th massacre. Although my vista point did not front Changan Avenue, I was still able to see a small strip of the street, scene of many of the fatalities. From about 1:30 until 5:30 am, I personally witnessed several dozen citizens gunned down in the street by soldiers atop the tanks rumbling down Changan on their way to Tiananmen Square. That was just a very small slice of the terrifying violence unleashed by the army during the overnight. There was constant gunfire in and around Changan all night long; I heard the immediate gunfire from the action near the Minzu and more distant shots emanating from the square. I saw many people picking up limp bodies and placing them on their carts before carrying them off the main drag.
Not having stayed in Tiananmen, I am not able to offer any eyewitness testimony on the events there or shed any light on the debate over how many were citizens were killed in the square. Nicholas Kristof, then the China correspondent for the New York Times, wrote that contrary to that Chinese student's claims of mass killings in the square, most of the casualties occurred in the fierce street fighting surrounding Tiananmen. Kristof pointed as evidence to the army's escort of the Hou Dijian-led procession of students out of Tiananmen at 5:30 am.
While I agree with Kristof's central point that the majority of people killed by the army were felled in the street fighting, that does not mean there were no killings in the square. Tiananmen is an extremely large area, the size of 7 to 10 Times Squares, and no single eyewitness account can cover all the events that transpired in the square that night. It seems certain that at least several dozen students and workers were killed in Tiananmen. There were too many reports of tanks crushing tents, including BAWF's and at least of some soldiers firing at individuals trying to flee the square.
But the orderly retreat from Tiananmen led by Hou Dijian showed that there was no single, uniform, conscious decision by the army to physically eliminate the entire Tiananmen population. Even when the attack was carried out, things were not that disciplined and organized. Kristof is correct--the majority of the 700 to 1200 people killed by the army were gunned down in street battles like the one outside the Minzu Hotel.
"The Chinese people are highly miserableized," one man said as we waded through the battle debris strewn across Changan Avenue. Unforgettable is the sheer terror in the faces of Beijing's people that Sunday afternoon; the sickening pall hovering over the city; the face of death; the look of shock on their faces as they realized that "their" army, the PLA, had murdered its own children in the streets; the sinking realization that the government was "them" as opposed to the people, "us"; that the Communist Party, so long admired for how it fought the Japanese and its role in winning national independence, did not belong to the people, that it represented "them," the bureaucracy.
And the terror which filled the people's hearts did not stem from any "counterrevolutionary thugs," as the government falsely claimed; the people of Beijing had become terrified of their own government. Many lessons were no doubt absorbed by many Chinese, especially those veterans of the autonomous workers union who learned that what the working people of China needed was a new party, their party, a party of the working class, because the Communist Party was not theirs, but an instrument of privilege for the bureaucracy. The time had passed for reforming the Party; a new one would have to be built.
But what about the Chinese government's assertion that most of the fatalities were soldiers killed by counterrevolutionary thugs? The Communist Party leadership claimed that the brave soldiers trying to restore order in Beijing and prevent a capitalist restoration were besieged by the troublemakers who were running about Beijing, the ruffians who stole weapons and fired upon soldiers and attacked tanks with firebombs. There was indeed film footage showing crowds of citizens in Tiananmen Square throwing bricks at tanks and setting one on fire.
First, the violence that occurred in Beijing in June 4th was initiated by the rampaging army; any violence by the people was reactive and defensive in nature. Those individuals who attacked the tanks in the square reacted with rage to the murderous onslaught already unleashed by the army. There had been no violence committed by any demonstrators during the entire Beijing Spring; the mobilizations in Tiananmen, while militant, were peaceful and pacifist, carried out by an entirely unarmed populace.
The government's propaganda quickly churned out the lie that rioters had shot at soldiers with stolen guns, but the word around Changan Avenue on Sunday was that soldiers had purposely left behind weapons, either to frame up students or in sympathy with them, and that the guns were missing parts or otherwise defective. One student said that the students had seen through the "trick," and refused the weapons. On late Saturday afternoon, and again later that night behind the Great Hall of the People, I saw some of those rifles, which looked as if they had missing parts, resting against the lean-tos atop the "liberated buses." There may have been a few isolated incidents of citizens firing shots, and reports of sniper fire persisted for several days after the crackdown, but the overwhelming majority of gunfire came from soldiers shooting down workers and students in the streets near the square.
The ordinary people do not have access to guns in China. Wang and Liu confirmed that when I asked them about it. "Tell the USA we need guns," one man desperately said on Changan Avenue Sunday morning. It is true, however, that Beijing's working people put up much resistance to the army's firepower.
One of the last images from that night in Beijing is the sight of many hundreds of demonstrators running after the last of the tanks on their way to occupy Tiananmen Square. This was no vanquished, demoralized populace that would roll over. Consequently, the army did suffer some casualties of its own. The young soldiers who were brought into the Minzu's lobby with their heads smashed from bricks were no doubt some of the army's earliest casualties that evening. Much of the trouble in the streets was no doubt caused by the many agent provocateurs running amok in Beijing, like the one outside the Minzu who faced the wrath of the people after his identity was revealed.
By far the most graphic illustration of the people's resistance to the army's attack was the burned corpse of the soldier, helmet in hand, hanging from a bus in the middle of the intersection three blocks from the square on Sunday morning. But even this horrible violence was not unprovoked, for this was the soldier who was pulled from the tank by an angry crowd after the tank had crushed 11 people trying to scale a wall while attempting to flee from the tank's path.
Though there were indeed some army casualties on June 4th, the Chinese government's figures of 200 to 300 dead are no doubt inflated. But the responsibility for all the violence, dead and wounded, rests with the senior leadership of the Communist Party. There may very well have been troublemakers, ruffians, and transients running about, taking advantage of the conflict to cause some trouble of their own. We know there were agent provocateurs instigating trouble; and there were angry, frustrated demonstrators who lashed back at the army with whatever weapons they could construct in response to the murderous onslaught down the Avenue of Eternal Peace. But it is ludicrous to suggest, as the government does, that Beijing's and the nation's safety was threatened by riotous counterrevolutionaries; that the army was only defending itself and trying to restore order. The people were unarmed, and peacefully if militantly assembling for a redress of their grievances. It was the army that killed many hundreds of citizens.
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