Beijing’s bloodiest night

On most spring days, Tiananmen Square in central Beijing, the world’s largest city square, hums with high-decibel life. Tourists from all over China and many parts of the world pose for pictures, adorable Chinese children fly kites or race around shrieking joyously, pesky salesmen peddle Mao Zedong memorabilia — and con artists size up prospective victims to ambush.

But for seven weeks in the spring of 1989, Tiananmen Square held the attention of a rivetted world not for its tourist attractions but for being the epicentre of one of the largest, most explosive and spontaneous demonstrations of “people’s power” that very nearly toppled the Communist Party regime that has ruled China since 1949.

1989 was a year of intense economic turmoil in China, adjusting itself to the consequences of post-Mao economic reforms: that year, inflation ran at over 30% and over a million factories closed down because of severe austerity measures.

Simultaneously, winds of change were blowing in the erstwhile Soviet Union, where Mikhail Gorbachev had ushered in a programme of economic reforms and political openness. In China, students who craved similar freedoms began a movement to commemorate a reformist leader, occupied Tiananmen Square, and demand speedier economic freedom and action against corruption. But such was the disaffection against the government that their actions set off a prairie fire of protests in over 400 cities, and triggered demands for democracy.

“It was a national uprising by a great many people who had different agendas, but many of them wanted to get rid of the Communist Party - and with good reason,” recalls journalist Jasper Becker, who reported on the Tiananmen Square movement of 1989.

The Communist Party was paralysed into inaction by internal division between conservative hardliners who pushed for a crackdown of the “counter-revolutionary riot”, and reformist-minded leaders who sought to open a dialogue with the student demonstrators. In the end, however, the hardliners won the day, and on the night of June 3-4, martial law troops forcibly evicted the students from the square. An estimated 2,500 people were killed that night in the area around Tiananmen Square, many of them Beijing residents who had put up roadblocks to thwart troop advances, and bystanders.

With blood on his hands, with the Communist Party’s legitimacy shot to pieces, and facing international condemnation for the massacre, China’s supreme leader Deng Xiaoping embarked in 1992 on a bold economic reform that would transform China economically over the next 15 years. “It’s inconceivable that the Communist Party would have launched reforms if not for June 4,” reasons human rights researcher Robin Munro. 

Twenty years on, though China has changed economically and socially, the ghostly memory of Tiananmen continues to haunt China’s authoritarian rulers. “Everything that happens in China today has the ‘Tiananmen effect’ written into it,” says China labour activist Vincent Kolo.

And the basic weaknesses in China’s party-state system that were revealed by Tiananmen “are still built into the system,” says Andrew J. Nathan, China scholar and co-editor of The Tiananmen Papers. “Whenever it hits a crisis, it can easily lose public support quickly since it doesn’t allow channels of dialogue with society.”

The power of one

One of the most inspirational scenes from the movement was played out on June 5, a day after the massacre. Troops had cleared Tiananmen re-established control.

As a column of tanks left the square, one solitary man holding shopping bags stepped onto the road and stood in front of the tanks. The tanks tried to get around him, but again & again he stood in their path, daring the soldiers inside to run over him. He even clambered onto it and banged on the turret before he was hustled away by residents concerned for his safety.

To this day, the identity of the man, known only as Tank Man, isn’t known. It was speculated that troops executed him, but that theory has been discounted. Whoever he was, the Tank Man’s act of defiance, which inspired protesters in Europe & USSR, represents a shining moment in the Tiananmen struggle, when one man confronted the power of a state —and triumphed.

Myths

Massacre: Tiananmen Square was the focal point of the student-led movement in 1989, but even independent investigators acknowledge there was no ‘massacre’ in the square on the night of June 3-4. There was a bloodbath, but much of the killings happened on the roads to the west of the square, when troops approaching Tiananmen found their way barricaded by residents and workers

Role of students: It’s true students initiated the movement, but it spread to all walks of life —industrial workers and trade unions, intellectuals, even housewives incensed by inflation. They didn’t always share the same goals and, in fact, student protesters went to great lengths to disassociate themselves from workers’ demands

The toll: Accounts of the number of people who died vary. Govt claims 241 deaths, including 218 civilians. Media reports spoke of 3,000 deaths. Students accounted for a small proportion; many of the dead were Beijing residents who blocked the troops from advancing — and bystanders