Remembering Tiananmen, 15 Years Later

From the NYT (March 14, 2004):

In one sense the June 4, 1989, crackdown on dissent that caused hundreds and perhaps thousands of deaths and injuries around Beijing is a distant memory. China's economy has since grown at a double-digit annual pace. Most top leaders directly responsible for ordering the bloodshed have retired or died.

But as the 15th anniversary approaches, it is clear that neither time nor official propaganda has erased the events from China's political consciousness. A new generation of leaders may face pressure to revise the official interpretation of the event in coming years, potentially upsetting a delicate balance of power at the top of the Communist Party.

Just last week, a letter written to China's senior leaders by Jiang Yanyong, a respected surgeon and Communist Party member, became public. Dr. Jiang, who works at an elite military hospital, the 301, in Beijing, was already a folk hero of sorts. He exposed China's cover-up of the SARS epidemic last year, prompting the dismissal of two top officials and an all-out campaign against the disease.

In his letter, dated Feb. 24, Mr. Jiang told of treating people who had been gunned down by soldiers in Beijing's streets that night in 1989. He also said that some leaders, including the late general and president Yang Shangkun, may have shared his views about that night. Excerpts from the letter, as translated by The New York Times, follow.

**********

In 1989 Beijing students responded to government corruption with just calls against corruption and official racketeering and for clean government. The students' patriotic actions won the support of the vast majority of people in Beijing and throughout the country. But a small number of leaders protecting corruption resorted to measures unprecedented in world and Chinese history. They used tanks, machine guns and other weapons to savagely suppress completely unarmed students and residents; hundreds of innocent youths suffered cruel deaths on the streets of Beijing, and thousands of people were left injured.

Afterward, the authorities immediately set in motion all their propaganda tools to concoct lies and used high-pressure tactics to prevent the people from speaking out. Fifteen years have passed, and the authorities hope people's memories have gradually faded. In the past they called the Tiananmen incident a" counterrevolutionary revolt," and later they took to calling it the"political disturbance of 1989."

The changes in the names given to this event testify to the perpetrators' guilty minds. If it was a disturbance, why mobilize tens of thousands of troops to suppress it? Why use machine guns and tanks to slaughter innocent people? So I propose the June 4 student patriotic movement of 1989 be correctly appraised.

I am a surgeon at the People's Liberation Army No. 301 Hospital, and during June 4 in 1989 I was director of the general surgery department. On the night of June 3 I heard the constantly repeated broadcasts telling people not to go onto the streets. At about 10 o'clock from my apartment I heard repeated gunfire from the north. A few minutes later my pager sounded; it was the emergency ward calling me, and I rushed over.

The scene was beyond imagination. Lying on the floor and beds of the emergency ward were seven youths, their faces and bodies covered in blood. Two of them had been confirmed dead by electrocardiogram tests. My mind roared and I nearly fainted. Now lying before me in China's grand capital, Beijing, were my own people, slaughtered by the Chinese people's own brother-soldiers using weapons the people had bestowed on them. Before I had time to think, there was another flurry of gunfire and again many more injured youths, who were brought to the emergency ward by locals using wooden planks or three-wheel carts. In the two hours from past 10 till midnight, the hospital emergency ward received 89 patients with bullet wounds, and 7 of them died despite emergency treatment. ...