Foreign Affairs January / February 2001 (continued)
<<<<<<<
JUNE FOURTH
Tiananmen Square lies at the geographic center of the capital
city and just southeast of Zhongnanhai, where the last
dynasty's emperors had their hunting park and where top
Communist Party leaders now work. Beginning with the May
Fourth movement against imperialism and for democracy in 1919,
Tiananmen has also become a traditional site for popular
protests. These protests have often been led by university
students, who are especially numerous here because Beijing is
the country's preeminent center of higher education.
As soldiers entered the city in plainclothes and in uniform,
instead of meeting with popular understanding they encountered
anger and some violence. The party leaders' hopes of avoiding
bloodshed foundered on this resistance and the troops'
emotional reaction to it.
The government's internal reports claimed that Deng Xiaoping's
goal of no deaths in Tiananmen Square was achieved. Most of
the deaths occurred as troops moved in from the western
suburbs toward Tiananmen along Fuxingmenwai Boulevard at a
location called Muxidi, where anxious soldiers reacted violently
to popular anger. In the following days the government
confronted international and domestic reactions so vociferous
that they threatened to fulfill Deng Xiaoping's worst fear: that a
bloody denouement would make it impossible to continue reform
at home and the open-door policy abroad.
NATIONWIDE PROTESTS CONTINUE
Between June 5 and 10, Zhongnanhai received nearly a hundred
reports from the provinces on local reactions and on emergency
meetings and police deployments undertaken in response. There
were demonstrations in 181 cities, including all the provincial
capitals, the major cities, and special economic zones. Many
forms of protest, some of them violent, emerged. By June 8, the
situation had begun to stabilize in some cities.
On the afternoon of June 9, Deng Xiaoping gave a talk to
high-ranking officials of the martial law troops, and the State
Council and the Public Security Ministry issued directives that
led municipal public security offices to launch an all-out
campaign to arrest student leaders and citizen activists.
By June 10, this campaign effectively throttled protest activities
everywhere, and an outward calm set over the country.
THE LEADERS TAKE STOCK
On June 6, two and a half days after what was now officially
called "putting down the counterrevolutionary riots," the
healthier elders (Deng Xiaoping, Li Xiannian, Peng Zhen, Yang
Shangkun, Bo Yibo, and Wang Zhen) met with the currently
serving members of the Politburo Standing Committee (Li Peng,
Qiao Shi, and Yao Yilin), plus National People's Congress head
Wan Li and the incoming Party general secretary, Jiang Zemin.
Excerpts from Party Central Office Secretariat, "Minutes of the
CCP Central Politburo Standing Committee meeting," June 6, with
a small number of supplements added from a tape recording of
the meeting:
Deng Xiaoping: If we hadn't been firm with these
counterrevolutionary riots -- if we hadn't come down hard --
who knows what might have happened? The PLA has suffered a
great deal; we owe them a lot, we really do. If the plots of the
people who were pushing the riots had gotten anywhere, we'd
have had civil war. And if there had been civil war -- of course
our side would have won, but just think of all the deaths! ...
Li Xiannian: If we hadn't put down those counterrevolutionary
riots, could we be talking here now? The PLA soldiers really are
the brothers of the Chinese people, as well as the sturdy pillars
of the Party and the state. ...
Yang Shangkun: We've paid a high price for putting down these
counterrevolutionary riots. Restoring social order in Beijing
should be our top priority now, and that means we've got a lot
of political thought work to do.
Bo Yibo: I've got some material here -- reports from all the big
Western news services and TV networks about the so-called
June 4 bloodbath at Tiananmen and the numbers of dead and
wounded. Let me read it. Associated Press: "At least five
hundred dead." NBC: "Fourteen hundred dead, ten thousand
wounded." ABC: "Two thousand dead." American intelligence
agencies: "Three thousand dead." BBC: "Two thousand dead, up
to ten thousand injured." Reuters: "More than one thousand
dead." L'Agence France-Presse: "At least fourteen hundred
dead, ten thousand injured." UPI: "More than three hundred
dead." Kyodo News Agency: "Three thousand dead, more than
two thousand injured." Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun: "Three
thousand dead."
The impact is huge when numbers like these get spread all over
the world! We need to counterattack against these rumors right
now.
Deng Xiaoping: We should mete out the necessary punishments,
in varying degrees, to the ambitious handful who were trying to
subvert the People's Republic. ... But we should be forgiving
toward the student demonstrators and petition signers, whether
from Beijing, from elsewhere in China, or from overseas, and we
shouldn't try to track down individual responsibility among them.
We also need to watch our methods as we take control of the
situation.
We should be extra careful about laws, especially the laws and
regulations on assembly, association, marches, demonstrations,
journalism, and publishing. Activities that break the law must be
suppressed. We can't just allow people to demonstrate
whenever they want to. If people demonstrate 365 days a year
and don't want to do anything else, reform and opening will get
nowhere. ...
ROUNDING UP DEMOCRACY ACTIVISTS
The work of hunting down activists of the democracy movement
in Beijing was shared by the martial law troops, the People's
Armed Police, and the Municipal Public Security Bureau.
Guidelines like the following help explain why most of those
detained suffered physical abuse.
Excerpt from Martial Law Headquarters, "Unify thinking,
distinguish right from wrong, complete the martial law task with
practical actions," June 10:
In order to dissipate the anger and antagonism that martial law
troops feel toward the residents of Beijing, to clarify the
muddled understanding that many people have, to isolate the
tiny minority of rioters from the vast majority of Beijing
residents, and to establish correct attitudes toward the people,
we need to ask all the officers and soldiers to concentrate their
hatred on the small handful of thugs and rioters, to smash their
evil nests, to punish the rioters, and to wrap up their martial law
duties through concrete actions.
Issues number 26, 31, and 37 of the Beijing Public Security
Bureau's Public Order Situation (Zhi'an qingkuang) show that 468
"counterrevolutionary rioters and creators of turmoil" had been
arrested by June 10. On June 17, eight of these were sentenced
to death for "beating, smashing, robbing, burning, and other
serious criminal offenses during the counterrevolutionary riots in
Beijing." By June 20, the number of "counterrevolutionary rioters"
and "turmoil elements" who had been arrested was 831; by June
30, it was 1,103. Most of the arrestees were held in temporary
detention centers or makeshift jails.
Once the situation in Beijing was under control and
province-level authorities throughout the country had expressed
their support, Party Central unfolded a series of measures
against activists throughout the country.
THE MOOD ON CAMPUS
A national survey conducted by the Xinhua News Agency at the
end of June found university students everywhere in a mood of
terror and resistance blanketed in silence.
Excerpt from Xinhua News Agency, "The ideological condition of
college students nationwide," Proofs on domestic situation
(Guonei dongtai qingyang), June 29:
Terror: A tense mood, under fear of punishment or arrest,
pervades the universities. Leaders of the student movement
have departed their campuses, and rumors are rampant about
who is being picked up and when. The students who were most
active in the movement are the most nervous. Some provinces
have stipulated that even students who sat in to block traffic
should be arrested, and many students have grown so insecure
they cannot sleep well at night. ... Now the common mood is
worry; the students are all wondering, 'Am I going to get
punished?'''
Resistance: Nationwide about one in five university students
remains defiant. These students scornfully resist government
decrees and oppose efforts to put down the riots. Some have
adopted a "four don'ts" policy toward the domestic media: don't
listen, don't read, don't believe, don't ask. Some students make
obscene comments while they watch television. Some write on
the walls of their dormitories and classrooms things like "Shut
up!" "Thunder from the silent zone!" "China is dead!" "Where is
justice?" "The government caused the turmoil!" "The truth will
out some day!" "Yet another Tiananmen incident!" and so on.
The students at many schools -- especially the boys --
sometimes seem crazed. When the lights go out at night they
vent their rage with wild yelps and cries.
Silence: About one in three students maintains a purposeful
silence. After June Fourth all the universities required students
to reflect on their roles in the student movement. Many
students kept going around in circles, willing to address only a
limited number of concrete questions. On the matter of how to
turn their own thinking around, they just kept silent. "I don't
know" became the answer to every question, silence the shield
against every arrow.
Chinese society fell into a deep anomie after June 4. Numbed,
people everywhere turned away from politics. The sensitive
intellectual class, and especially the young students with their
exuberant idealism, entered the 1990s with nothing like the
admirable social engagement they had shown in the 1980s. The
campuses were tranquil, and China seemed shrouded in a dour
mist that harbored a spiritual emptiness. Money ruled
everything, morals died, corruption burgeoned, bribes were
bartered, and when all this became known on the campuses it
turned students thoroughly off politics. They had lost the
idealism of the 1980s and now concentrated only on their own
fates.
Andrew J. Nathan is Professor of Political Science at
Columbia University and the author of numerous
books, including China's Transition. He is co-editor
with Perry Link, Professor of Chinese language and
literature at Princeton University, of The Tiananmen
Papers, to be published around the world this month
by PublicAffairs and in a Chinese version later this
year. Documents in the book were compiled by
Zhang Liang (a pseudonym).
...
>>>>>>> end
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