30th Anniversary

Tiananmen Square massacre: How Beijing turned on its own people
By Ben Westcott

Hong Kong -- As the sun rose on the morning of June 4, 1989, the Chinese people woke to a country which had changed overnight.
For seven weeks it had seemed like China was on the brink of a massive social change, but in just one night the dreams of hundreds of thousands of protesting students and workers were brutally crushed.
For about a decade, China's economy had been steadily opening up and allowing small amounts of free enterprise in the Communist country, after years of strict state control under Mao Zedong.
Directing the change was then-Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping, who wanted to see China grow prosperous by embracing some pro-market liberalization.

Hundreds of thousands of Chinese gather on June 2, 1989 in Tiananmen Square demanding democracy despite martial law in Beijing.

But when large-scale protests in Beijing called for greater social freedoms, such as freedom of speech and even democracy, Deng would prove far less enthusiastic.
The protests first began in April, triggered by the death of former Chinese Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang at the age of 73. 

Seen by the public as a champion for liberalization, Hu had been deposed two years earlier and his death on April 15 was widely mourned.
Three days later, thousands of grieving students marched through Beijing, calling for a more democratic government in Hu's honor.

Chinese students hold aloft a banner calling for freedom, democracy and enlightenment on the Martyrs Monument in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, festooned with a giant portrait of Hu Yaobang, April 19, 1989.

The protesters occupied Tiananmen Square, the massive public space in the center of Beijing which faces onto the Forbidden City, former home of the Chinese emperors, and the Great Hall of the People.
Over the coming month and a half, the numbers of protesting students and workers steadily grew. 

A rally on May 19 in the square drew an estimated 1.2 million people, leading then-Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang to meet with them to plead for an end to the protests.
He began his now-famous speech by saying: "Students, we came too late. We are sorry."

A Chinese student leader reads a list of demands to students staging a sit-in in front of Beijing's Great Hall of the People on April 18.

But he was ignored and hardline Premier Li Peng imposed marital law on the city the same day. Trucks of soldiers began to arrive in Beijing, but still the protests didn't stop.
On May 30, in the center of the square, protesters built a 10-meter high statue called the Goddess of Democracy, to boost morale among the huge crowd.

More than seven thousand students from local colleges and universities march to Tiananmen Square, Beijing, May 4, to demonstrate for government reform.

In the end, the government moved swiftly. 

After a tense two weeks, on the night of June 3, convoys of armed troops entered Beijing with an aim to clear the square by whatever means necessary.
Blocked by civilians in the streets who were attempting to protect the students, the troops opened fire. Students, workers and other ordinary citizens fought back, setting fire to some military vehicles, but they were overwhelmed.

Pro-democracy demonstrators surround a truck filled of People's Liberation Army (PLO) soldiers on 20 May 1989 in Beijing on their way to Tiananmen Square.

Witnesses told horrific stories of tanks driving over unarmed protesters and soldiers shooting indiscriminately into crowds.
No official death toll was ever released by the Chinese government, but human rights groups estimate it was the hundreds, if not thousands.

On June 4, a rickshaw driver pedals wounded people, with the help of bystanders, to a nearby hospital in Beijing after they were injured during clashes with Chinese soldiers in Tiananmen Square.

Many of the protest leaders were imprisoned, some of whom wouldn't be released for more than a decade, and the government has worked hard to remove all mention of the massacre from Chinese history and media, seeing it as a threat to the legitimacy of its continued one-party rule.
So far, at least, it appears to have worked. 

On the 30th anniversary in 2019, no public memorials or events marking the day are expected in mainland China.

30th Anniversary

New Documents Show Power Games Behind China’s Tiananmen Crackdown

By Chris Buckley

Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party general secretary, urging students to call off their hunger strike on May 19, 1989, in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

BEIJING — One by one, China’s shaken leaders spoke up, denouncing the student protesters who had occupied Tiananmen Square until the army rolled in. 

They heaped scorn on Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party leader purged for being soft on the demonstrators, and blamed the upheaval on subversives backed by the United States.
This scene was played out among Chinese Communist Party leaders soon after troops and tanks crushed pro-democracy protests on June 3-4, 1989, according to a collection of previously secret party speeches and statements published Friday in Hong Kong.
“Kill those who should be killed, sentence those who should be sentenced,” Wang Zhen, a veteran Communist with a famously fiery temper, said of the party’s opponents, according to the collection, “The Last Secret: The Final Documents From the June Fourth Crackdown.”
The newly published documents lay bare how after the massacre, party leaders quickly set about reinforcing a worldview that casts the party and China as menaced by malign and secretive forces. 

It is an outlook that continues to shape Chinese politics under Xi Jinping, the party leader facing off with President Trump in a trade war.
“This view that the Chinese Communist Party is surrounded by enemies has been dominant since 1989,” said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a professor of political science at Hong Kong Baptist University and author of “China Tomorrow: Democracy or Dictatorship?”

Student hunger strikers atop buses parked at Tiananmen Square on May 19, 1989.

The upheavals of 1989 are barely mentioned these days in China; censorship and security controls silence efforts at public commemoration. 

But that time left a deep mark on politics.
Students occupied Tiananmen Square after the April 1989 death of Hu Yaobang, a reformist party leader who had been sidelined, and their protests evolved into a passionate movement for cleaner government and more democratic rights.
Mr. Zhao and his supporters favored defusing the protests through negotiations. 

But hard-liners prevailed, and pushed Mr. Zhao from power. 

Overnight on June 3, 1989, soldiers fatally shot thousands of protesters and bystanders in Beijing, and bloody confrontations erupted in other Chinese cities.
The 209 pages of documents emerged from meetings called in June 1989 to consolidate support for the armed suppression. 

Each official stepped in line behind Deng Xiaoping, the elderly leader who ordered the crackdown, and each denounced Mr. Zhao, the Communist Party general secretary ousted for favoring compromise to end the months of protests.
“Dictatorship has its own tools; it’s not just lip service or something propped up there to admire — it’s there to be used,” said Bo Yibo, another powerful veteran official, in the collection issued by New Century Press, a small publisher that has defied China’s efforts to censor books about that time.

People Liberation Army soldiers leap over a barrier at Tiananmen Square in June 1989.

The comments suggest how close the leaders felt the Communist Party came to losing control.
“At that time the party had simply become an underground party, and our government also went underground,” Chen Xitong, the mayor of Beijing who defended the armed crackdown, told the other officials. 

“We were hemmed in everywhere.”
That deep-seated fear explains why the party moves quickly to crush any semblance of social unrest, most recently by quashing a small group of students who turned to militant Marxism as a solution to China’s yawning inequalities.
Even officials such as Hu Qili and Yan Mingfu who had backed Mr. Zhao’s more moderate policies turned on him, criticizing him for poor leadership, said Warren Sun, an expert on Chinese Communist Party history at Monash University in Australia.
Bao Pu, the publisher of New Centry Press whose father is a former top aide to Mr. Zhao, said “the ultimate secret found in these documents is how the party has this mechanism so that officials disregard their own beliefs and morals, and obey the No. 1 leader.”
“When Deng Xiaoping shows his cards, everyone falls into line,” he said.
Since coming to power in 2012, Xi Jinping has redoubled demands for obedience to himself as the top leader, and entrenched his power in 2018 by abolishing a term limit on the presidency, meaning that he can hold power indefinitely.

Bao Pu, founder of New Century Press, in Hong Kong on Thursday.

The new collection of documents joins a succession of books smuggled out of China that have shed light on the upheavals of 1989, a subject that the Communist Party subjects to ruthless censorship.
In 2001, scholars published “The Tiananmen Papers,” a collection of reports and documents that drew controversy, especially because some researchers challenged the authenticity of its accounts of high-level meetings. 

Mr. Bao, the publisher in Hong Kong, also helped issue the memoirs of Mr. Zhao, the fallen party leader, and a diary-like account by Li Peng, the Chinese premier who energetically supported the crackdown on the protests.
The new collection showed how Chinese officials asserted the view that China was threatened by subversive forces from abroad, particularly the United States. 

The public security minister singled out George Soros — still a target of conspiracy theories — as a supporter of liberal party officials.
“In demonizing domestic critics and exaggerating the role of foreign forces, the victorious conservatives revealed their blindness to the real problems affecting the regime,” Andrew J. Nathan, a professor of Chinese politics, writes in an introduction to the documents. 

While the hard-line officials acknowledged public ire about inflation and corruption, they treated political demands for more open government as nothing more than a tool of Western subversion.
For all the vitriol directed at Western influence in the newly published speeches, Deng, the party patriarch, wanted China to plow ahead with opening up to foreign investment. 

The officials were quick to voice their support.
“As for this fear that foreigners will stop investing, I’m not afraid,” Mr. Wang, the elderly party leader, said. 

“Foreign capitalists are out to make money, and they’ll never abandon a big market for the world like China.”

The Great Dictator

Xi Jinping should heed the lessons from history, former official says
By Simon Denyer

Bao Tong, the most senior Communist party official to be jailed for sympathizing with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, at his apartment in Beijing. 

BEIJING — Twice Bao Tong rose within the Chinese Communist Party’s hierarchy, and twice he was dramatically cut down. 

He has endured long spells in jail and “re-education” for failing to fall into line behind the hard-liners holding power.
So it is perhaps no surprise that this 85-year-old views the Chinese president’s latest attempt to impose his dogma on the entire nation — under the banner of Xi Jinping Thought — with a considerable degree of skepticism.
“In China’s history of more than 3,000 years, there were other leaders who tried to use their own thoughts to regulate the thoughts of others,” he said in an interview in his modest Beijing apartment. “But none were successful. There were only failed attempts.”
Bao was the most senior Communist Party official to be incarcerated for sympathizing with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, thrown into jail May 28, a week before a military crackdown that left hundreds if not thousands dead.
He was to remain in solitary confinement for seven years, and even today lives under constant surveillance, with three agents following him on foot and others in a car whenever he leaves his home. 

Yet he still manages an occasional interview with the foreign media, his manner affable, his opinions trenchant, and with a cigarette never far from his lips.
In the late 1980s, Bao had worked as a top aide to Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, helping push China in a more liberal, reformist direction — until the June 4 crackdown ended that dream. 

Zhao was demoted, purged and placed under house arrest for expressing sympathy for the students’ demands and opposing Deng Xiaoping’s decision to send in the troops.
Bao was thrown into Beijing’s maximum-security Qincheng Prison, a destination for many of the nation’s most important political prisoners.
Today, a photograph of Zhao sits proudly on a shelf in his apartment, and he talks affectionately of a man who “treated everyone as equals” and wanted to turn over decision-making power from the party to the people.
There is no such affection in his comments about Xi Jinping, whom he describes as a “hard-liner” and a throwback to Mao Zedong.
Last month, the Communist Party enshrined Xi’s name in its constitution as it granted him five more years in power: Xi Jinping Thought now sits alongside Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory in the party’s ideological canon.
“It is called Xi Jinping Thought, the new thought, but they are just old ideas, not new ideas,” said Bao. 

“Ideas like ‘the party leads everything’ — they are exact quotes from Mao Zedong. Why call them new ideas?”
Bao knows only too well the madness that can be unleashed when one man rises to absolute power over the Chinese people, and when officials are too scared to tell him when he is wrong.
“The mistakes Mao made were all huge,” he said. 

“Mao didn’t recognize his mistake when the Great Leap Forward led to a famine that caused millions of deaths; he didn’t recognize his mistake in the Cultural Revolution in which tens of millions were purged.”
In 1966, only days after the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Bao, who was working as a bureaucrat, was denounced as a “capitalist roader.”
Barred from his office, he spent a year cleaning toilets, another year doing hard labor in a re-education camp and the better part of a decade working the fields of rural China. 

He was only rehabilitated, like millions of others, after Mao’s death in 1976.
“There was only one slogan at that time — ‘Down with anyone who opposes Chairman Mao,’ ” he said. 

“But in the end Mao failed, too. He failed so badly his wife was labeled a counterrevolutionary, and so he himself became part of a counterrevolutionary family.”
Mao’s widow Jiang Qing was arrested after his death for her role in the Cultural Revolution and sentenced to life imprisonment, finally committing suicide in 1991.
Bao also draws lessons from much further back in his nation’s history to warn of the dangers of unchecked power, starting with King Li of the Zhou dynasty, who ruled in the 9th century B.C. 

The General History of China, an 18th-century text by French Jesuit historian Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, describes Li as proud, conceited and cruel.
Indeed, so conscious was he of how much he was hated, he forbade his subjects “on pain of death to converse together, or even whisper to one another,” Du Halde wrote, so that people could be seen walking the streets with downcast eyes, “in mournful silence.”
Eventually, peasants and soldiers rose up against Li, and he died in exile.
Emperor Qin Shi Huang is remembered as the first ruler of a united China in the 3rd century B.C., and for his mausoleum guarded by the Terracotta Army, but he also banned and burned books, and executed scholars.
The Hongwu Emperor, who established the Ming dynasty in the 14th century, expected total obedience from his subjects, inflicting torture and death on those who opposed him, including, it is said, some of his own advisers.
But in the end, Bao said, these rulers’ dynasties foundered and were overthrown.
“If you want to imitate Chairman Mao, that’s okay, but the problem is whether you will succeed,” Bao said, referring to Xi. 

“I can’t say whether his attempt will succeed or not. Only time will tell.”
Bao blames Deng for ending the dream of political change in China, and for instigating an era of corruption and growing economic inequality that “broke” Chinese society.
But he has no faith in Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, which the government says has led to some form of punishment for more than a million officials.
“It’s a selective anti-corruption campaign. Its nature is the selective protection of corruption,” he said. 

“When you purge some corrupt officials, you are protecting the others. You protect the corrupt system, and you protect corrupt people who support you.”
Bao was one of the first signatories of Charter 08, a manifesto for democratic changes issued in late 2008. 

The only way to fight corruption properly, he says, is for independent supervision of the effort.
“Power tends to corrupt,” he said, quoting Britain’s Lord Acton, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”