Jonathan Mirsky: The Long Shadow of Tiananmen
[Jonathan Mirsky is a journalist and a historian of China who lives in London.]
The Tiananmen Square killings of 4 June 1989, 20 years ago, remain the most deadly events in the People's Republic of China since the death of Mao in 1976. Merely mentioning them can lead to arrest and detention. More than a dark shadow, the Tiananmen nightmare still hovers over the country.
Here are the essential details of what is officially still called "the incident" or "the events". On 15 April 1989, deposed party general secretary Hu Yaobang died. He had incurred the displeasure of senior leader Deng Xiaoping for being relaxed about dissent. But students, who liked him for his honest, country bumpkin ways, assembled in their thousands to mourn him in Tiananmen, the world's largest man-made space. The crowds grew ever larger, and on 26 April, the Communist Party newspaper People's Daily condemned the demonstrators for conspiring to destabilise China. This enraged the students, who from then on called for a retraction, greater government openness and less corruption. Real democracy was never demanded, but there were huge shouts for the end of party rule and the removal of the unpopular Premier, Li Peng, and even of Deng Xiaoping. At their height the demonstrators, no longer just students, numbered over one million. On the night of 3-4 June, the square was violently cleared and hundreds lay dead.
From single incidents to subsequent developments at the highest level of Chinese politics, one cannot exaggerate the importance of Tiananmen. Nor were the "events" confined to Beijing alone. There were hundreds of uprisings, from Mongolia, in the north-west, to the deep south. In addition to the numbers killed — and there has never been an official figure since the government declared within days of the massacre that "not a shot was fired, not a person was killed" — thousands were imprisoned.
To this day, if the word Tiananmen appears on the Chinese internet, whoever has used or accessed it can expect a knock on the door and may join the dozens of Tiananmen activists still in China's jails and labour camps. Such prisoners used to be convicted of "counter-revolution". Now they are simply "criminals".
It is a measure of the significance of what happened that spring, that after 1989 and 1990, when communist regimes in eastern Europe began collapsing, China's Communist Party remains in place, ruling well over one billion non-citizens and sitting on hundreds of billions of US dollars. To attract those dollars, Britain, together with the US, has issued demeaning statements involving Tibet and human rights. The debate about how to handle the demonstrations split the higher echelons of the party. Party general secretary Zhao Ziyang argued with Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng for negotiations with the students and lost. He appeared in the square on 19 May, muttering through a megaphone, "I have come too late." We didn't know he was referring to the declaration of martial law the next day. Within a few days, Zhao, now deposed, became the focus of leadership wrangling about how much he should be blamed for the "disorder". By 1991, he had disappeared into house arrest. He died in 2005. Zhao's secret memoir, Prisoner of the State (Simon & Schuster), composed while he was detained and smuggled to Hong Kong, has just been published. It confirms his sympathy for the Tiananmen demonstrators and his misery as he heard the sound of gunfire from the square. "I told myself," Zhao whispered into a hidden tape recorder so as not to be heard by his guards, "that no matter what, I refused to become the general secretary who mobilised the military to crack down on the students. The students are only asking us to correct our flaws, not overthrow our political system." These statements are now widely available on the internet. When they are read in China, the regime will denounce them as fabrications or delusions, but they will arouse public feelings of uncertainty and anger against the leadership. It took Deng weeks to persuade army units from around China to come to the capital to crush the uprising. When they did this, on Saturday night and Sunday morning, 3 and 4 June, it was witnessed by scores of international journalists (and millions around the world watching television), who had spotted Tiananmen as a huge story in late April. Some set up their breakfast programmes to be presented from Beijing.
Mikhail Gorbachev came to Beijing on a state visit between 15-18 May. With the square in the grip of demonstrators, he had to be smuggled into the Great Hall of the People through the secret tunnels dug under Beijing especially to guarantee safety for the leaders in case of emergencies for his audiences with an embarrassed leadership. Gorbachev held a warm conversation on 16 May with Zhao Ziyang, who revealed that Deng Xiaoping, although retired, still made key decisions. (This was held against Zhao when he was axed.) I asked Gorbachev's press spokesman, Gennady Gerasimov, how his boss had enjoyed his discussions in Beijing. He replied,"Next time he comes here, except for Zhao, he hopes he never sees any of these guys." At his press conference, Gorbachev said that if such demonstrations had happened in Moscow,"I would have gone into the streets to talk with the people." He clearly imagined that the Beijing regime would not endure.
But talking with the people is precisely what Deng and his aged, mostly retired comrades, did not do. And for the first time for us foreign journalists, Beijing's streets were fun. The almost total absence of security forces gave us the false impression that the police state had collapsed. We warmed to the open friendliness of the capital's people, who for once were eager to speak to foreigners about the demonstrations. Instead of the usual greeting,"Have you eaten yet?", people now asked each other,"Have you demonstrated yet?" Even the official press began running stories with pictures of the demonstrators, and I recall the staff of People's Daily marching into the square under a banner reading:"No More Lies."
Some Tiananmen events remain easy to recall even 20 years later...
Read entire article at Standpoint (UK)
The Tiananmen Square killings of 4 June 1989, 20 years ago, remain the most deadly events in the People's Republic of China since the death of Mao in 1976. Merely mentioning them can lead to arrest and detention. More than a dark shadow, the Tiananmen nightmare still hovers over the country.
Here are the essential details of what is officially still called "the incident" or "the events". On 15 April 1989, deposed party general secretary Hu Yaobang died. He had incurred the displeasure of senior leader Deng Xiaoping for being relaxed about dissent. But students, who liked him for his honest, country bumpkin ways, assembled in their thousands to mourn him in Tiananmen, the world's largest man-made space. The crowds grew ever larger, and on 26 April, the Communist Party newspaper People's Daily condemned the demonstrators for conspiring to destabilise China. This enraged the students, who from then on called for a retraction, greater government openness and less corruption. Real democracy was never demanded, but there were huge shouts for the end of party rule and the removal of the unpopular Premier, Li Peng, and even of Deng Xiaoping. At their height the demonstrators, no longer just students, numbered over one million. On the night of 3-4 June, the square was violently cleared and hundreds lay dead.
From single incidents to subsequent developments at the highest level of Chinese politics, one cannot exaggerate the importance of Tiananmen. Nor were the "events" confined to Beijing alone. There were hundreds of uprisings, from Mongolia, in the north-west, to the deep south. In addition to the numbers killed — and there has never been an official figure since the government declared within days of the massacre that "not a shot was fired, not a person was killed" — thousands were imprisoned.
To this day, if the word Tiananmen appears on the Chinese internet, whoever has used or accessed it can expect a knock on the door and may join the dozens of Tiananmen activists still in China's jails and labour camps. Such prisoners used to be convicted of "counter-revolution". Now they are simply "criminals".
It is a measure of the significance of what happened that spring, that after 1989 and 1990, when communist regimes in eastern Europe began collapsing, China's Communist Party remains in place, ruling well over one billion non-citizens and sitting on hundreds of billions of US dollars. To attract those dollars, Britain, together with the US, has issued demeaning statements involving Tibet and human rights. The debate about how to handle the demonstrations split the higher echelons of the party. Party general secretary Zhao Ziyang argued with Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng for negotiations with the students and lost. He appeared in the square on 19 May, muttering through a megaphone, "I have come too late." We didn't know he was referring to the declaration of martial law the next day. Within a few days, Zhao, now deposed, became the focus of leadership wrangling about how much he should be blamed for the "disorder". By 1991, he had disappeared into house arrest. He died in 2005. Zhao's secret memoir, Prisoner of the State (Simon & Schuster), composed while he was detained and smuggled to Hong Kong, has just been published. It confirms his sympathy for the Tiananmen demonstrators and his misery as he heard the sound of gunfire from the square. "I told myself," Zhao whispered into a hidden tape recorder so as not to be heard by his guards, "that no matter what, I refused to become the general secretary who mobilised the military to crack down on the students. The students are only asking us to correct our flaws, not overthrow our political system." These statements are now widely available on the internet. When they are read in China, the regime will denounce them as fabrications or delusions, but they will arouse public feelings of uncertainty and anger against the leadership. It took Deng weeks to persuade army units from around China to come to the capital to crush the uprising. When they did this, on Saturday night and Sunday morning, 3 and 4 June, it was witnessed by scores of international journalists (and millions around the world watching television), who had spotted Tiananmen as a huge story in late April. Some set up their breakfast programmes to be presented from Beijing.
Mikhail Gorbachev came to Beijing on a state visit between 15-18 May. With the square in the grip of demonstrators, he had to be smuggled into the Great Hall of the People through the secret tunnels dug under Beijing especially to guarantee safety for the leaders in case of emergencies for his audiences with an embarrassed leadership. Gorbachev held a warm conversation on 16 May with Zhao Ziyang, who revealed that Deng Xiaoping, although retired, still made key decisions. (This was held against Zhao when he was axed.) I asked Gorbachev's press spokesman, Gennady Gerasimov, how his boss had enjoyed his discussions in Beijing. He replied,"Next time he comes here, except for Zhao, he hopes he never sees any of these guys." At his press conference, Gorbachev said that if such demonstrations had happened in Moscow,"I would have gone into the streets to talk with the people." He clearly imagined that the Beijing regime would not endure.
But talking with the people is precisely what Deng and his aged, mostly retired comrades, did not do. And for the first time for us foreign journalists, Beijing's streets were fun. The almost total absence of security forces gave us the false impression that the police state had collapsed. We warmed to the open friendliness of the capital's people, who for once were eager to speak to foreigners about the demonstrations. Instead of the usual greeting,"Have you eaten yet?", people now asked each other,"Have you demonstrated yet?" Even the official press began running stories with pictures of the demonstrators, and I recall the staff of People's Daily marching into the square under a banner reading:"No More Lies."
Some Tiananmen events remain easy to recall even 20 years later...