|««NATION, Page 24COVER STORY: Despair and Death In a Beijing SquareAfter weeks of hesitation, the regime cracks down, and anunleashed military commits a massacre against its own peopleBy Jesse Birnbaum and Howard G. Chua-Eoan
It was only a matter of time. For seven weeks the world had
marveled at the restraint demonstrated by both Beijing's rulers
and the thousands of demonstrators for democracy who had occupied
Tiananmen Square. The whole affair, in fact, had developed the aura
of a surrealistic ritual, with both sides' forces stepping in
circles as if they were performing some stately, stylized pavane.
Violence, it seemed, was out of the question. And then, early
Sunday morning, the dance ended in a spasm of fury, the worst day
of bloodshed in Communist China's history.
Until week's end it appeared that the army would continue to
hold back. On Friday unarmed soldiers in shirtsleeves made a
desultory pass at dispersing the crowds but quickly turned back.
By Saturday afternoon, however, the mood changed. At 2 p.m. troops
popped tear-gas shells and beat up people trying to stop them from
moving into the center of Beijing. An hour later, behind the Great
Hall of the People, helmeted soldiers began lashing out at
students, bystanders and other citizens who, as if summoned by some
irresistible call to the barricades, rushed to the district by the
thousands. Soldiers stripped off their belts and used them to whip
people; others beat anyone in their path with truncheons, bloodying
heads as they tried to pry an opening through the mob. For 5 1/2
hours the students held fast. Then the army inexplicably vanished.
Within an hour, off Qianmen West Road on the southern end of the
square, 1,200 more troops appeared. Once again they were surrounded
by civilians; the soldiers again retreated.
But those forays were only the prelude to death. At 2 a.m.
Sunday a convoy of 50 trucks with foot soldiers barreled along the
crowded streets that empty into the square. Advance troops torched
buses and trucks that had been set up as barricades, enabling the
convoy to pass through. Suddenly soldiers of the People's
Liberation Army seemed to be everywhere: pouring out of the ancient
Forbidden City, poised on the rooftops of the Great Hall of the
People and Mao Zedong's mausoleum, entering the vast, 100-acre
square from side streets in a triple-fanged movement from the
south, west and east. Ten thousand strong, the army mounted a
deliberately vicious assault.
Leveling their AK-47 assault rifles, the soldiers began firing
away at the mobs. The gas tanks of commandeered buses exploded.
Huge streams of people fled in terror past blazing trees along
Changan Avenue -- the Avenue of Eternal Peace. As helmeted soldiers
mounted automatic machine guns on tripods facing the square,
policemen with truncheons chased people from the sidewalks and the
ornate marble bridges leading to the Forbidden City.
The shooting grew most intense by 2:15 a.m. A Belgian tourist
said he saw a hundred soldiers line up in front of the Museum of
the Revolution and fire into the crowd. Panic-stricken people fell
to the pavement or cowered behind the imperial city's ornate stone
lions. Many sought sanctuary at the Beijing Hotel complex, where
military officers later combed through rooms searching for foreign
journalists' notebooks and audio-and videotapes.
Some protesters held fast, fighting with rocks and Molotov
cocktails. Near a hotel entrance, a group of demonstrators saw two
soldiers kill a civilian, then pounced on the pair and beat them
to death. An armored personnel carrier that had sped into the
square half an hour before the main assault was blocked by a
barricade of bicycle racks. Protesters mummified the APC in banners
and cloth, then set it ablaze with Molotov cocktails, trapping its
crew of eight or nine soldiers.
The fighting spilled out of the Tiananmen area and into other
Beijing neighborhoods. Trucks were set afire, and the sound of
shooting filled the air. Troops firing from the rooftops and upper
floors of Radio Beijing and the Minzu Hotel wounded and killed
people who were asleep in their homes. Across town, reporters
sighted tanks on the move, some of them firing their cannon
indiscriminately down what appeared to be near-empty thoroughfares.
Huge blazes swept across residential districts.
It was all too much for the overpowered civilians. By 5 a.m.
Tiananmen Square was virtually emptied of all protesters; only the
carcasses of smoldering vehicles and debris remained. Elsewhere in
the city, sporadic skirmishes continued, but by then the great,
peaceful dream for democracy had become a horrible nightmare.
Hospitals reported receiving scores of dead and hundreds or even
thousands of wounded. One anguished doctor reported at least 500
dead. When the government radio announced that 1,000 had died, the
station's personnel were quickly removed, and no further death toll
was broadcast. Reports circulated that many bodies were being
trucked away to be cremated, so the real count may never be known.
At sunrise the sky was enveloped in smoke. Some residents
bravely regrouped and taunted the troops occupying the square,
crying, "Beasts! Beasts!" Again shots were fired, and some 5,000
fled for their lives, scrambling into the narrow hutungs, or
alleys, that snake through the city. On Sunday the P.L.A. newspaper
Liberation Daily proclaimed a great victory over a
"counterrevolutionary insurrection." Still, reports of shooting and
fighting in Beijing continued to pour in the following day.
Additionally, citizens' blockades have begun to go up in Shanghai,
China's largest city.
From his weekend home in Kennebunkport, Me., where he had
arrived only a day earlier after his triumphant NATO meeting, a
sorrowful President Bush said, "I deeply deplore the decision to
use force against peaceful demonstrators and the subsequent loss
of life." A White House official told TIME that Bush, a former
Ambassador to China, felt "personal anguish and even anger."
Secretary of State James Baker called the affair "ugly and
chaotic," and his department sent a message to China's leaders
urging them to "return to restraint."
The Bush Administration feels it is in an acute dilemma. While
the Administration wants to make clear that the U.S. Government is
outraged over the brutality in Tiananmen Square, it does not want
to jeopardize the ten-year-old "strategic partnership" between
Beijing and Washington. Already there is congressional pressure to
act. On hearing of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Senator Jesse
Helms called for a cutoff of American military cooperation with the
People's Republic.
U.S. officials believe the attack on the students reflected
desperation on the part of the country's gerontocracy, led by Deng
Xiaoping. But though the crackdown was obviously meant to
intimidate the people-power movement, it could have the opposite
effect. Disaffected Chinese citizens are calling for the people "to
unite in the open or underground," as one of them put it, "to seek
revenge for all the deaths."
Though of greater magnitude, the massacre was gruesomely
reminiscent of the Tiananmen Square riots of 1976. Widespread
revulsion over that bloodbath led to the downfall of the infamous
Gang of Four, headed by Mao's wife Jiang Qing, and the ascendance
to power two years later of Deng. Unable to accept the new world
crying out from the streets, Deng appears to have reverted to a
hoary Maoist maxim: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a
gun." With devastating carnage, Deng proved he could unleash the
firepower. But now that his regime is riding the military tiger,
can it dismount without being torn to pieces?
The troops brought to the capital from all over China during
the past few weeks are said to be loyal not to some central command
but to various factions in the leadership. Thus while numerous
units remained behind barricades, others, like the 27th Army,
wreaked destruction in the city. Reports of heavy fire inside the
Forbidden City, where police and P.L.A. units are routinely
billeted, led to speculation that the rival units were shooting it
out with one another. Furthermore, said a Western academic in
Beijing, "there was very clearly a battle between two different
army units on the road to the airport."
The bloody denouement of the demonstrations seemed to be the
direct result of Deng's attempts to retain the upper hand in a
protracted power struggle among China's leaders. The disarray was
signaled by the failure in recent weeks of party elders to reach
consensus on the formal ouster of party chief Zhao Ziyang, who had
lost favor because he sympathized with the student protesters.
Within the party rank and file, the hard-liners' attempts to brand
Zhao a counterrevolutionary had met with silent resistance and even
mutters of bu dui (not correct).
Added to that was the sudden re-emergence early in the week of
a quartet of octogenarian revolutionaries, among them economist
Chen Yun and former President Li Xiannian. This seemed to indicate
that Deng was seeking support against Zhao from the very men he had
once sidelined for resisting his economic reforms. Analysts in
Beijing feared that Deng had cast his lot with this ideologically
rigid Gang of Elders, as the group was dubbed. Such fears were
buttressed by renewed government denunciations of "bourgeois
liberalization," the phrase that presaged a conservative crackdown
two years ago. Some Chinese found a good deal of irony in the
awkward situation. "The 80-year-olds," commented one wag, "are
calling meetings of 70-year-olds to decide which 60-year-olds
should retire."
Apparently Deng's strategy prevailed. Throughout the week,
party documents circulated detailing the events that contributed
to Zhao's unofficial removal. As recounted by President Yang
Shangkun in these papers, Zhao's offenses included failing to
support a harsh editorial in the People's Daily that condemned the
demonstrators and refusing to join other Politburo members in
backing martial law.
The rumor-heavy press in Hong Kong suggested an altogether
different scheme. Newspapers claimed that the ultimate target of
the Gang of Elders was not Zhao but Deng; the elders, it was said,
intended to force Deng out of his role and replace him with the
more conservative and orthodox President Yang. Beijing analysts
discounted the theory as overly sensational. In fact, Deng is the
most hard-line enemy of the students. Only the party turmoil may
have delayed him from lining up support for his position. The
massive sweep through Tiananmen could not have been facilitated
without the cooperation of the various military factions that owe
fealty to such veterans of the revolutionary war as Yang, Li and
Peng Zhen.
Many suspect that Yang is the true champion of the military
push into Tiananmen. While Deng heads the shadowy but omnipotent
Central Military Commission, the President has placed relatives in
key positions in the military hierarchy; one of the units involved
in the Tiananmen massacre was under the personal command of his
brother Yang Baibing. If Deng, through loss of face or life, ceased
to rule China, Yang Shangkun might attempt to maneuver himself into
the leadership of the Central Military Commission and replace Deng
as China's most eminent leader.
In the days before the attack, the government began to show
its desperation. It organized antiliberal rallies that became
unwitting parodies of the strident Red Guard style of the '60s. The
authorities tried to rein in the press. Foreign correspondents were
warned to stop covering student activities, but few reporters took
heed. Chinese television ceased live coverage from Tiananmen Square
and began carrying statements from leaders expressing support for
martial law. "Nobody takes the news broadcasts seriously these
days," said an office secretary. "They are all a sham."
Meanwhile, students holding out on the square knew that their
numbers were dwindling and that their protest was turning into a
minor sidelight to a power struggle. A few days ago, in a flash of
their earlier exuberance, they erected a "Goddess of Democracy" at
the northern end of the square. The 30-ft.-high sculpture,
fashioned from plaster-covered Styrofoam and bearing a marked
resemblance to the Statue of Liberty, drew contemptuous comments
from the government -- and admiration from thousands of onlookers.
The bloody assault by Deng's armed troops ended all that, and
also the Goddess of Democracy, which was crushed by a tank once the
troops gained control of the square. Even so, the events of the
past seven weeks immunized vast numbers of people against the
traditional propaganda bromides and convinced them that the
government was not invulnerable: it was only an agency of brutal
power. If the student campaign failed, it at least succeeded in
forging a historic new link between China's intellectual community
and its masses. As an observer said earlier in the week, "It will
be impossible to turn back the clock."
Although the link could prove tenuous, the observer just may
be right. And if he is, that bond between two once disparate
elements could haunt Deng and his successors for a long time to
come. A similar connection between intellectuals and workers gave
rise to the Solidarity movement that rocked Poland in the early
'80s. China's leaders had been fretting about the similarities
between the student movement and the Solidarity campaign.
Tellingly, when officials ordered arrests last week, three of the
14 people who were briefly detained were members of a new,
unauthorized union.
In the thousands of years spanned by Chinese history,
unspeakable atrocities have occurred. Millions have suffered from
the machinations of cloistered emperors, empresses and eunuchs;
whole cities have been slaughtered by marauding invaders and
warlords. Until Sunday, that all seemed safely in the past. No one
quite expected it to happen again. The shock will ease with the
passage of weeks. The tremors will be felt for years.
-- David Aikman, Sandra Burton and Jaime A. FlorCruz/Beijing
