YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN, BOYS:

New story emerges of an infamous massacre (Robert Marquand, 6/03/04, The Christian Science Monitor)

On the 15th anniversary of one of the most cataclysmic events in modern China, a wealth of eyewitness testimony and interviews suggest that one stubbornly popular picture of what happened in Tiananmen Square needs revision: There was no massacre of students on the Square.

Standard histories such as that by Yale's Jonathan Spence, as well as the recent groundbreaking "Tiananmen Papers," suggest that Chinese soldiers did not fire on students before they left the square in the early hours of June 4, 1989. But in popular references, most recently in the first paragraph of a major retrospective wire story this week stating that "thousands were killed in Tiananmen Square," the myth persists. A massacre did take place in Beijing 15 years ago, eyewitnesses say - just not in Tiananmen. [...]

In two hours, between midnight and 2 p.m., the slightly riotous, unorganized festival of meetings and exhilarated free speech on the square became a grim confrontation with an Army that surrounded the students, and was using live rounds against citizens in neighborhoods all over the city.

That night still lives in infamy to many who remember it. Chinese leaders remain silent about the event 15 years later. No mistakes have been admitted nor has any government accounting been done. In today's bustling commercial China, moreover, few speak of the brutal putdown. New generations here profess lack of interest in the question of who was and wasn't a patriot, or what transpired, not that there are any rewards for such curiosity.

What actually did happen June 3 - 4 is still often confused with myth and misreporting.

Early wire reports, including a second-day account by a Tsinghua student, now widely regarded as disinformation, and several assertions to the media by student leaders who were not present, planted some of the misconceptions that persist today. A British reporter (who left the square at 1:30 p.m.) for example, wrote a widely read account based entirely on secondhand sources who claimed a massacre took place in the square.

In fact, the panic was so intense that most impartial observers left the square by midnight. In those days, says one European journalist who was there, "no one ever believed that the Army would actually shoot people."

As few as 10 foreigners actually witnessed events on the square during the crucial early morning hours of June 4 , according to eyewitnesses interviewed by the Monitor, and an unpublished 52-page document compiled entirely in the weeks after by Robin Munro (then of Human Rights Watch) and Richard Nations (a Le Monde reporter) of 14 testimonials of journalists, diplomats, and students present on the square after midnight.
No eyewitnesses to a massacre

Despite orders that the People's Liberation Army was to clear Tiananmen Square using whatever means necessary, there is no credible eyewitness testimony of a massacre of students there. No eyewitnesses at the Monument to the People's Heroes, where students were centered, ever saw one. No "rivers of blood" flowed on the square. No rows of students were mowed down by a sudden rush of troops, as reported in European, Hong Kong, and US publications in the days, months, and years that followed.

The actual number of students and citizens killed on the square may be as low as a dozen, according to the documents and the eyewitnesses. The medical tent on the square, originally used to comfort student hunger strikers, reported at least 10 deaths. Rather, between the morning hours of 4:45 and 6:15, some 2,000 to 3,000 students filed off the square through a cordon of troops, protected by a line of their own ranks who linked arms.

There was, however, a massacre in Beijing - during the four days starting June 3. It took place at street intersections, in Hutong neighborhoods, in the alleyways around the square, and in the western part of the city, where resistance to the deployment of the Army was strongest. Moreover, the victims were not only students, but ordinary people who were outraged that the soldiers of a people's army had been given warrant to shoot the people. [...]

On June 3 as the Army began approaching the square about midnight - calls went out all over Beijing. Sympathetic crowds numbering in the tens of thousands felt the Army was coming to shoot the students. There are hundreds of accounts of citizens, mothers and sons alike, chasing tanks in bicycles, setting fire to trucks, putting up road blocks. At the Jianguomenwai overpass a set of locals talked an entire truck-full of soldiers into climbing down. But the price paid by the citizens was high, as the troops - many of whom were brought into Beijing from all over China - began to retaliate.

"By June, the ordinary people identified with the students 100 percent," Munro remembers. "Beijing people are outraged when the soldiers leave their barracks. They said the soldiers planned to kill 'our' students, as they put it."

The bulk of departing students who left the square in a column took several turns and eventually crossed the Avenue of Eternal Peace just west of Tiananmen. At that point, one of the worst incidents involving students took place, as APCs fired on and ran over at least 11 students. AP reporter John Pomfret, traveling in the column, saw students remove seven bodies, and soldiers began to shoot tear gas into the student ranks, according to the Munro-collected testimony.

The Tiananmen Square protests were the apogee of a push toward openness in China and the adoption of more Western and international standards. The precipitating event was the death of beloved reformer Hu Yaobang on April 15. The genesis of the protest is thought to have begun in the party history department of Beijing University. According to the historian Spence, it was the children of high-ranking party members who saw a need for change - a perception corroborated here in Beijing by sources pointing out that no major operation like the Tiananmen protest could have been engineered by "someone on the street."

The protest became a kind of referendum on China's future, and its leadership. On May 15 Mikhail Gorbachev came to Beijing as a new type of Soviet leader preaching a new message of change. By that time, the square was so jammed that Mr. Gorbachev could not get through to the Great Hall of the People. But students immediately identified with him, as did Zhao Ziyang, then the party secretary. On May 19, days after Gorbachev left, Li Peng declared martial law and Zhao was out - itself angering the Beijing population. The Tiananmen Papers make clear that premier leader Deng Xiaoping felt that a glasnost style reform would cause damaging instability in China, and he advocated taking strong measures to put down the protest, despite the anticipated outrage in foreign lands. The die was cast: China outlined a path in which political reform would only come after economic reform.

George H. W. Bush made several major blunders during his administration--raising taxes, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and leaving Saddam in place--but consistently erring on the side of stability in the communist world was just un-American and hanging the Chinese out to dry was the one that really stuck in the craw.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 3, 2004 7:46 AM