This was not going to be the kind of Sunday to sleep in. A spectre of death haunted the early Beijing morning. Just after nine I went downstairs to survey the damage. A crowd of curious citizens had gathered in front of the Minzu, staring in awe at the many bullet holes in the windows over the front doors. I ventured out into the battle-scarred street. The people of Beijing were in a state of shock and grief. I made my way toward Tiananmen amidst the carnage of the fierce fighting from the previous night. Jeeps were overturned and burning; buses barricaded the intersections with all of the windows smashed out; on top of one bus were two rifles mounted on a lean-to. A message on a wall written in black paint stopped me in my tracks; most of it is in Chinese, except for the last word, which is in red: “blood.”
A dazed man walked up to me and volunteered: “the Chinese people are highly miserable-ized.” Another said: “Tell the USA we need guns,” as smoke was still visible rising from from Tiananmen Square.
I walked a little further and observed a gruesome sight—a burned corpse in a soldier’s uniform was lying on the street. Several different individuals told me that the soldier was a tank driver who had run over 11 people as they were trying to climb a fence while attempting to escape a tear gas attack. Outraged citizens had then doused a blank with gas and thrown it on top of the tank. As the driver tried to get out, the people burned him alive. I left a large crowd of curious onlookers staring with open mouths at the burned corpse. Someone else told me of a similar scene elsewhere in Beijing, where the bodies of six charred soldiers were hanging from Quingha Bridge.
When I returned to the location of the dead soldier he was now hanging from a noose tied to the window of a burned-out bus. He was holding his hat in his hands, and his shoes were off. I noticed soldiers on tanks at the next intersection viewing this scene through binoculars. Crowds of people got as close as they could to the soldiers, taunting them. When they got too close, or when they yelled “fascists” at the troops, tear gas was fired at them.
Throughout the day, intermittent gunfire could be heard all over Beijing. Fighting was still going on in various parts of the city. From the sky came the ominous buzz of observation helicopters keeping a close eye on the battles below. My mobility was limited to Changan Avenue, from the Minzu to the intersection preceding the square, where the army’s tank blockade prevented anyone from going further.
Tiananmen Square had clearly been retaken by the army, which was rapidly consolidating its position around it. I heard reports that troops were pouring into Tiananmen from all directions. But for now, there was no army presence on that part of Changan from the Minzu to one block before the square. The streets were littered with flattened bicycles and bike racks. The people of Beijing walked around in a traumatized daze. The faces that were so full of hope one week earlier now showed shock, terror and angry disbelief. How could the People’s Army turn so savagely on the people? And what exactly happened in Tiananmen Square?
Sensing correctly that I was a journalist, at least 10 different people walked up to me and volunteered their testimony of the Tiananmen tragedy. They said that the soldiers killed and wounded many students and workers in the square, and shot many as they tried to flee. Troops fired indiscriminately at unarmed citizens in the streets surrounding Tiananmen, which we had witnessed from the hotel room.
Then the testimony took a turn for the chilling. I heard from five different people that when the tanks first entered the square, they went straight for the tents belonging to the Beijing Autonomous Workers Federation, even before they smashed the Goddess to pieces. The tanks rolled over the BAWF tents, crushing to death those inside. One reported that the students were still singing the Internationale just before the tanks killed them. Others testified that soldiers used flamethrowers to burn many of the bodies in the square before dumping them in a nearby river. Still others told me that they saw soldiers drag doctors and students out of ambulances and shoot them.
One student reported that the army had intentionally sent spies into Tiananmen Square and university campuses with the expectation that some would be exposed and beaten or killed. This was to rile the soldiers and make it easier to whip them up into a murderous frenzy. I thought of the “spy” who was at the center of all the trouble outside the Minzu, and the unarmed soldiers sent jogging into Tiananmen to be ridiculed by the far more numerous demonstrators.
A related report that I heard repeatedly while walking up and down Changan Sunday afternoon was that the army had set up the students by leaving behind guns with missing parts or lacking ammunition. When people would grab them, soldiers took photographs. I thought of the lean-to rifles atop the liberated buses. The foundation for the government’s justification of the massacre was already being established—a concoction of deception consisting of agent provocateurs, frameup and lies—weapons long cherished and utilized by Stalinists. Deng and Li Peng would surely say that China was faced with the fires of a counterrevolutionary rebellion; that it was the counterrevolutionaries who were violent, confiscating guns and killing our brave young soldiers.
The streets were rife with rumors that rival army units were exchanging gunfire; that those divisions loyal to Zhao Zhang were rebelling against Deng’s crackdown and on the verge of waging a civil war against the pro-Deng divisions.
The foreign press was already picking up on this theme. It is said that the 38th Division, the unit geographically closest to Beijing, was under the command of pro-Zhao officers who opposed the use of force to end the demonstrations. The soldiers who had retaken Tiananmen and did most of the shooting belonged to the 27th Division, the unit commanded by a son-in-law of President Yang Shangku. This division consisted of soldiers from the outer provinces of China belonging to ethnic minorities who speak different dialects than the majority Han dialect spoken in Beijing. They were also battle-hardened veterans of China’s 1978 border war with Vietnam. Several people told me that the troops of the 27th Division had been seen laughing hysterically, as if they had been drugged, while firing at will into crowds along the Avenue of Eternal Peace.
As I walked past the burning jeeps and overturned buses that lined Changan, I thought about this civil war theory in relation to the strange confrontations between demonstrators and soldiers late Saturday afternoon behind the Great Hall of the People. These troops belonged to the 38th Division. While the atmosphere was tense and many of the soldiers appeared angry, there was also an element of fraternization in the air; some of the soldiers seemed more confused than angry, and white flags were waved while soldiers and citizens sang the Internationale.
After several hours of this standoff, it was the army that withdrew and appeared to retreat into the Great Hall of the People. What was going on here? Why didn’t the armed soldiers make their move then and there? Maybe there was some credence to the civil war theory. I had to admit that when I left Tiananmen at 11 o’clock, I felt buoyed by the turn of events behind the Great Hall. Maybe Zhao had enough support in the army to turn things around after all.
But as I passed Zhonghanan on the way back to the Minzu, my confidence had dissipated, for the scene there had been an accurate barometer of the relationship of forces all week. And the mood had crystallized—the army versus the people. It was a sobering sight—100 stern, armed, helmeted soldiers staring down the crowd of demonstrators. By the time I saw the Paul Revere bicyclists doing wheelies and yelling at the top of their lungs, I knew the Beijing Spring was over.
Which is not to say there was not dissatisfaction within the army over the leadership’s decision to crack down on the protests, or that Zhao did not enjoy support among some army officers, including those in charge of the Beijing-based 38th Division. And it is true that the lion’s share of the violence was committed by the 27th Division, whose soldiers were from distant ethnic provinces speaking different dialects than Beijing’s citizens.
It is possible there might have been a brief exchange of fire between units as had been rumored. But civil war was not in the air. The divisions in the army were not deep enough for that. And there was no fight left in the people. The smashing of the Goddess of Democracy and Freedom symbolized the crushing of the pro-democracy movement she represented.
It took a massive deployment of the People’s Liberation Army to forcibly clear out the square and end the protests. It required a long night of terror to physically destroy the Tiananmen demonstrations. The people of Beijing had responded to the army’s brutality with heroic resistance.
They did not go down without a fight that evening of June 3rd. They burned buses and army vehicles and built barricades throughout the city to prevent the tanks and armored personnel carriers (APCs) from getting through. And Beijing’s citizens were unarmed; they fought back against the advancing, shooting army with whatever weapons they could find—bricks, sticks, poles and homemade firebombs. I saw hundreds, perhaps thousands of citizens following the first wave of tanks and APCs into Tiananmen Square. I heard reports on Sunday, and watched news footage later, of demonstrators trying to stop the tanks in Tiananmen by throwing bricks and setting them afire. I witnessed the young recruits being brought into the Minzu’s lobby with their heads busted open, and the charred corpose of the soldier hanging from the bus.
But the source of all the violence was the army. Throughout the entire Beijing Spring, including the final week that I witnessed, the Tiananmen protests were entirely peaceful, almost Woodstock-like. Militant, yes, but peaceful, and not a trace of counterrevolution, only the desire for reform. The violence did not come until Saturday night, when the army invaded Beijing, guns blazing. Despite the government’s attempted frameups, such as the planting of guns, and the widespread use of agent provocateurs, like the Minzu spy, the vast majority of dead and wounded were unarmed students and workers shot by soldiers firing indiscriminately.
There was sporadic gunfire in Beijing throughout the day and evening on Sunday, amidst reports that troop reinforcements were on their way into the city. I took a walk through the streets behind the hotel with an American woman I had met in the Minzu’s restaurant. She had been studying in Beijing for six months, and she said what struck her most about the Chinese was their racist attitudes toward the Africans living there. We recalled how there had been near riots earlier in the year when Chinese students attacked African men for consorting with Chinese women. Another payoff of 40 years of Stalinist misleadership and miseducation—the total lack of internationalist solidarity, replaced instead by rampant chauvinism and nationalism.
The scheduled Sunday night rendezvous with Wang, Liu and Zhu had been preempted by the massacre. I wondered if they were still alive, or if I would ever hear from them again.
I spent Sunday evening holed up in my room at the Minzu, listening to the ongoing gunfire. Shortly after 4:30 am, I heard a loud motorized roar from the street below. I called the American woman I had befriended earlier, whose room looked out directly in front of the hotel, providing a much better view of Changan Avenue than did mine. I asked her if I could come to her room to better witness what was happening outside, and she consented, her voice quivering with fear. When I got there, I knew why. A steady procession of tanks and APCs moved ominously past the hotel, crushing the bicycle racks-turned barricades in their way. Every few minutes, soldiers perched atop the tanks fired wildly into the shadows.
The procession of tanks and APCs seemed to last an eternity; I lost count of them after 40. When the last vehicle had passed, a few individuals emerged from their hiding spots amidst the shadows, shouting to each other. One of them ran out into the middle of the street and picked up the bike rack to barricade the street again. Next I saw an ambulance drive up and stop across the avenue. Someone got out, picked up a body that was lying in the street, and placed it in the ambulance. Shouts followed, then that ominous motorized roar was drawing closer, and the ambulance sped away. Ten more tanks rumbled down the Avenue of Eternal Peace, crushing the makeshift barricades, soldiers still firing at shadows. The army was fortifying its positions around Tiananmen Square.
At 5 am the prospects looked bleak for making my scheduled 11:15 am flight from Beijing Airport. At seven, the U.S. Embassy called to say that the airport was open, but I was on my own in getting there. This was not encouraging, for there was no public transit or taxis running. As I packed my audio cassettes and other materials deep into my luggage, I expected police or soldiers to bust in and arrest me for violating the martial law restrictions on the press.
Then I remembered that way back on Friday afternoon, Mr. Xing had said something about a last appointment on Monday morning, and that his taxi driver would pick me up at 8:30. Obviously the massacred had canceled any last appointment with the TV Ministry. But the one thread of hope I clung to was that the friendly taxi driver would remember that pick-up time. It was a long shot, because the rumor going around was that the taxi companies were forbidding their drivers from working on Monday morning. It was still far too dangerous.
At exactly 8:25 am, I walked outside the Minzu into a state of chaos. Everyone was trying to leave Beijing; other foreigners were frantically trying to buy a ride to the airport. But the takers were few and far between. Suddenly I noticed the waving arm of my taxi driver. I ran over to him and, in his very best English, he said he had defied his superiors’ orders and would take me to the airport. He’d been worried about how I was going to get out of there.
The taxi driver had to take a long, tortuous route out of the city in order to avoid the massive army presence, but eventually we were on the long road to Beijing Airport. Along the way, we passed a large contingent of soldiers in 23 trucks in a scene that reflected the contradictory relationship of forces so characteristic of Beijing that week. There were many citizens interacting with the soldiers. The first group we passed seemed friendly to the troops, but further down the road the atmosphere appeared very tense. At one point my driver slowed down and yelled to the soldiers angrily, “You’ve killed a few thousand already, why don’t you kill a few more?” One soldier seemed uncomfortably shamefaced at the driver’s tongue lashing.
The scene at the airport was even more chaotic than it had been on my first night. I embraced the driver and thanked him profusely for risking his job to give me a ride. He told me I cold repay him by telling the truth about what his government had done.
Beijing Airport was crawling with foreigners desperately seeking exit from the turmoil-wracked country. After a long wait on line, I handed the harried airline agent my ticket. She informed me that my reservation had been canceled. By whom, I asked. She wasn’t able to reply. Maybe it was the panic that was gripping my body, but I found myself causing a scene and insisting that everything was in order; the ticket was valid because I had check with San Francisco before leaving.
Amazingly, the ticket agent reversed her decision, and I was on my way. We boarded the plane shortly after 11 only to sit there for over two hours. Fear and loathing in Beijing. I was convinced that the rumors flying around the plane that they were checking our luggage were true. I couldn’t shake the imagery of Chinese police confiscating my tapes and dragging me off to jail.
Finally, just after 1 pm, the jet took off. It turned out the long delay was caused by a shortage of airline staff. I recalled that on Sunday there were rumors in Beijing of a general strike the next day. Approximately sixty percent of Beijing’s workers did not report to work that Monday, some consciously in protest of the massacre, others staying home out of fear. But very little of it was the result of an organized effort; like much of what had transpired during the Beijing Spring, it was more spontaneous than organized.
An hour after takeoff, we made the brief stop at Shanghai Airport, where apart from a slightly nervous atmosphere, things appeared to be “business as usual.” Soon we were airborne again for San Francisco International Airport. Fifteen hours later, the Chinese flight attendant announced: “The time of arrival in San Francisco is 1:08 pm.”
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