The Shattered Dream: CHINA /1989 : CHAPTER 8 : Tell the World: ‘They Kill the People’

“We will stay here and resist with all our strength.” --Student in Tian An Men Square

It began with a farce, a military expedition that seemed so hapless it made both the pro-democracy protesters and onlookers giddy with disbelief.

The night of Friday, June 2, was cool and pleasant, the sort of gentle June evening that draws residents of Beijing out of their cramped apartments. In other years, under other circumstances, lovers would have flocked to the parks and hidden in bushes to try to stay the night after the gates closed.

But on this evening, tens of thousands of Beijing residents were already in the streets.

Tensions had been rising in Beijing for three days. On the city’s outskirts, the regime had begun to sponsor its own counterdemonstrations, although the participants appeared bored and listless even on government-controlled television. Some of the demonstrators freely admitted to foreign correspondents that they had been paid to attend.

Still, as a clue to the thinking of the leadership, the demonstrations had a distinctly ominous tone. At one, about 10,000 peasants watched in a sports stadium as three men dressed up as Uncle Sam, with oversized noses and top hats with stars and stripes, sent pieces of white paper labeled “American dollars” to a black heart labeled “Fang Lizhi.”

It was a blatant form of scapegoating. Fang had purposely kept his distance from the pro-democracy demonstrators. He had not been near Tian An Men Square throughout the weeks of turbulence.

During the same days, huge red pro-government banners were unfurled over the downtown hotels where foreigners stay. “Oppose bourgeois liberalization with a clear-cut stand!” said a banner over the Beijing Hotel. “Maintain unity and stability!” said another hanging over the front of Kentucky Fried Chicken and extending down the nose of a picture of Colonel Sanders.

The protesters were active as well. The crowds at Tian An Men Square swelled again Friday night after having dwindled to well below 10,000 in the middle of the week. A popular singer named Hou Dejian, who had moved from Taiwan to China a few years earlier, announced that he would start a new hunger strike.

A traffic accident early in the night brought more people onto the streets. On the western side of the city, a police jeep struck four bicyclists, killing three of them and injuring the other. Word of the incident spread through the streets; the students’ version was that a police officer heading for Tian An Men Square had run over and killed four students.

Shortly after midnight, the troops began to advance.

Columns of People’s Liberation Army soldiers began marching toward the center of Beijing from the east, the west and the north. It was the military move everyone had been fearing for more than two weeks, an advance by troops toward Tian An Men Square.

From the east, the main contingent of about 5,000 soldiers marched down Changan Avenue. The troops came from the PLA’s 24th Army, based in the old imperial summer retreat of Chengde, about 120 miles northeast of Beijing, foreign military attaches later said. The troops were young, inexperienced and unarmed. They wore plain white shirts over khaki pants.

From the west, another, smaller contingent moved toward Tian An Men Square in an army truck and several buses. While most of these troops, too, were unarmed, Beijing residents found AK-47 automatic rifles and clubs inside some of the vehicles. On this evening, however, the troops apparently were under orders not to use their weapons.

And from the north, a still smaller contingent, apparently unarmed, advanced toward the square.

Beijing residents were suddenly aroused from their homes as if by a citywide alarm clock. Motorcyclists, modern-day Chinese versions of Paul Revere, carried the word from neighborhood to neighborhood: “Troops! Troops!”

Along Changan Avenue, young bicyclists pedaled quickly toward Tian An Men Square. Older men and women stood along the avenue, all of them gazing toward the square, seeing little, wondering what was going to happen.

Before long, each of the columns of troops was pinned down, blocked by residents and by the new barricades of trucks they hastily threw across the streets. On the west side of the city, citizens surrounded the army truck and buses and slashed the tires. At one location, Liubukou, a crowd seized some guns and ammunition out of a military vehicle.

“People, rise up!” shouted a young man to the crowd as he stood on top of one of the troop buses.

At Tian An Men Square, a voice over the student loudspeaker blared: “We will stay here and resist with all our strength! We will struggle for democracy and freedom!”

At about 3 a.m., the column from the east stalled in front of the Beijing Hotel, a few hundred yards from the square. The street itself was barricaded by trucks, and a crowd of about 8,000 Beijing residents confronted the troops. Some of the protesters began shoving the front lines of the soldiers.

Little struggle was necessary. There was a brief standoff. And then, amazingly, the troops began to retreat.

“The citizens have blocked the approaching soldiers!” announced a jubilant voice over the student loudspeaker at Tian An Men Square.

The soldiers from the 24th Army seemed utterly bewildered and humiliated. Some of them began to weep as citizens asked them what they were doing, why the People’s Liberation Army was moving against the people.

Tired and sweaty, they turned around and began to walk back, slowly, to the east. They moved in groups of seven to 10, in squads often without a leader. Some of them stopped to rest along Changan Avenue and fell asleep. Others talked quietly with residents of the city or stood silently while people lectured them.

At dawn on Saturday, June 3, they could still be seen along the streets, bedraggled, slow moving and pitiful. They looked less like a professional army than a Boy Scout troop on its way home from an exhausting camping expedition.

Some foreign defense experts now believe the entire operation was a classic military probe to see how Beijing residents would react if the army drove toward Tian An Men Square. Others believe it could have been a genuine, if grudging, effort to recapture the square without the use of force.

The official Chinese view, later explained in an account by the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party Central Committee, was that the troops “were heading for their outpost positions, according to schedule.”

Whatever the purpose, the reaction in the streets was exhilaration. Once again, just as two weeks earlier, the citizenry had frustrated efforts by the regime to move troops into the center of Beijing.

“An enthusiastic send-off!” shouted someone in the crowd as the troops retreated.

This time, the jubilation was short-lived.

During the daylight hours of June 3, Chinese troops stepped up their activity in and around the capital. They were not retreating. In fact, they demonstrated a new willingness to move forward against resistance.

In the afternoon, about 5,000 troops emerged from the rear of the Great Hall of the People. They were quickly surrounded by demonstrators, some of whom threw bricks, stones and bottles at the soldiers. Some of the soldiers picked up the projectiles and threw them back. Dozens of demonstrators and soldiers were injured.

Nearby, at Zhongnanhai, several thousand more residents confronted tense, steel-helmeted soldiers who stood three deep in front of the entrance to the leadership compound.

For the first time, troops used tear gas in an unsuccessful effort to disperse the crowds. There were too many people. On this sunny, muggy afternoon, tens of thousands of Beijing residents getting off work pedaled their bicycles through the downtown area, crossing Tian An Men Square and in many cases stopping for a look at the “Goddess of Democracy.” Some of them joined the crowds confronting the soldiers.

After a second tear-gas attack, the troops outside Zhongnanhai began using truncheons and belts to flail at some of the demonstrators. Authorities said the soldiers were seeking to seize the guns and supplies that had fallen into the hands of residents early that morning. Some students said that they had already offered to give back the equipment voluntarily but that efforts to negotiate a peaceful turnover had failed.

Early that night, Beijing television and radio aired a menacing new warning. “From now on, please do not come onto the streets, and do not go to Tian An Men Square,” the announcement said. “ . . . Stay at home, so as to secure the safety of your life and to avoid unnecessary losses.”

A separate announcement seemed to threaten any troops who refused to follow orders. “PLA troops must carry out the martial-law tasks as planned, and none should prevent them,” this proclamation said. “Should they be prevented, the martial-law enforcement troops will take various self-defensive measures and all means to remove the resistance.”

Like all the other martial-law edicts, these were issued on behalf of unnamed “martial-law authorities.” No Chinese leader, political or military, was willing to have his name directly linked to the martial-law command. That night, China’s national news broadcast opened with Premier Li Peng, alone in a room, reading a speech on the global environment, seemingly divorced from the reality surrounding him.

Despite the martial-law edict, the army made no effort to set up barricades to block bicyclists, spectators and others from traveling downtown. There was no attempt to limit the number of people who would be present for the planned military operation.

Throughout the early hours of that Saturday evening, the crowds at Tian An Men Square swelled. Once again, there were well over 100,000 people in the square and the surrounding streets.

It was a humid night, and an ugly undertone pervaded the square. The mood of peaceful tranquility had vanished. This was no longer the Chinese Woodstock. There had already been violence that afternoon, and quite a few of those on the streets were preparing for more.

The crowd contained fewer students and more workers, fewer teen-agers and more tough-looking adults. Some groups roamed the streets carrying metal or wooden pipes, apparently seized from construction sites. Others picked up rocks and threw them at the gate of Zhongnanhai.

By 10 p.m., crowds to the east of Tian An Men Square began pulling metal fences onto the streets to serve as barricades. A truck was also positioned across Changan Avenue as a further roadblock. Some unarmed troops tried to approach the square from the east, as they had the previous night, but they were quickly stalled by people and roadblocks.

The fateful, bloody assault on the square came primarily from the west--from the 27th Army, the unit commanded by the nephew of President Yang Shangkun. Some foreign intelligence specialists believe that this army had been kept in total isolation for weeks, devoid of all news, out of contact with television and radio, barred even from making phone calls to their families.

The principal attack was launched at 10 p.m. Saturday, June 3. Over the next three to four hours, the troops, armed with AK-47 automatic rifles and advancing from the west in armored personnel carriers and tanks, fought a series of pitched battles as they drove their way along Changan Avenue, and its western extension, toward Tian An Men Square.

Against them, the crowds began to use rocks, sticks, pipes and, in some cases, crude Molotov cocktails that could ignite the military vehicles.

Ahead of the tanks, even before they arrived, the streets were already full of chaos and violence. And as the army proceeded eastward toward Tian An Men Square, the scene became one of utter devastation.

At around midnight, Ralph Miller, an independent television producer from San Francisco, was returning from Tian An Men Square to his room at the Minzu Hotel, a few hundred yards to the west, when bicyclists began speeding by, pedaling as fast as they could, shouting, “The army is coming!” On the streets, people began to run.

In the Minzu Hotel parking lot, Miller saw a crowd beating a man with 2-by-4s.

“He’s a spy! He’s a spy!” people in the crowd were screaming. Miller and others helped the man get away from the mob. The crowd began throwing rocks at the hotel. But soon, its attention was diverted: The army was approaching.

Citizens ran off and sat down in the street, trying to block the soldiers. They threw rocks, sticks and metal at the troops. The soldiers responded first with tear gas, then with bullets from their automatic rifles.

Miller ran back into the Minzu Hotel. It was transformed first into an infirmary and soon into a morgue. Civilians dragged the wounded inside the lobby, including soldiers who had been injured. One of the first to be brought in was a young soldier. Miller saw that his eyes had popped out and his entire face was smashed. He could see only blood and bone.

More wounded came in, and still more. The more fortunate were wrapped in blankets.

Returning to his hotel room, Miller looked out his window and saw troops passing, trying to reach Tian An Men Square. They were shooting people to get them out of the way. Some people fell to the ground, dead or wounded. Others picked themselves up and ran off, in some cases following in the direction of the troops.

At Tian An Men Square, a student loudspeaker announced at midnight that a student at Beijing Teachers University had been killed by troops firing on civilians as they shot their way into downtown from the west.

Less than half an hour later, the first armored personnel carrier appeared near the northwest corner of the square, careening around a corner by the Great Hall of the People and stopping in front of the building. Crowds threw rocks at it and banged on it with metal rods.

Finally, a few protesters jumped on top of the vehicle, broke off part of the machine gun and held it over their heads in a gesture of victory. “Our government deceives us!” they shouted, heading toward Tian An Men with their captured prize.

A few minutes later, another armored personnel carrier arrived across the way on the northeast side of the square. It was driving slightly faster than a bicycle can be ridden, careening around metal-fence barricades and, where possible, barreling over them. Hundreds of people swarmed around it and chased it. Finally, it stopped, surrounded by so many people that it was immobilized.

The crowd threw burning blankets and Molotov cocktails onto the vehicle. A few men jumped on top and banged at the armor with pipes and rocks until they broke through. Then they threw burning objects inside the personnel carrier until, after about 10 minutes, three soldiers jumped out.

The crowd severely beat one of the soldiers with pipes or sticks. The soldier ran off in a ragged pattern, switching directions, blood dripping from his head, terror and panic on his face. Finally, two or three students grabbed him from the crowd and whisked him away to a nearby ambulance, which sped off past his burned-out vehicle.

“Who set it on fire?” a Western correspondent asked a Chinese man in the crowd who was wearing a T-shirt that said “Mac” with the symbol of the Apple computer company on it.

“The citizens,” the man answered.

“Why?”

“Because it ran over and killed three people,” he said. “The army and the Chinese leaders are brutal. They can’t control the situation, so now they are killing people, using any means.”

“What should the people do?”

“They should beat the soldiers, because the soldiers killed three people and they completed their leaders’ orders. If I were a soldier, I would not fulfill the order,” said the man.

Then he paused. “No, they shouldn’t kill the soldiers yet. First, they should be brought to court. If I were giving the sentence, I would sentence them to death.... But it’s the Chinese leaders who are really brutal, not the army and not the citizens. In the end, we will be defeated, because the government controls the military. How can we fight against their tanks and guns?”

Between midnight and 2 a.m., the troops fought, stormed, smashed and shot their way from the west toward Tian An Men, encountering ferocious resistance from the citizens of Beijing. Other army contingents fought similar skirmishes as they advanced from the south. At the south gate of the sacred Temple of Heaven, where Chinese emperors once worshiped, several army vehicles were destroyed and burned.

The greatest violence, and some of the heaviest casualties, occurred along Changan Avenue, which runs across the north side of Tian An Men Square.

Battling their way from western Beijing along Changan Avenue and its western extension, troops fought several bloody battles with crowds assembled along barricades. Along the avenue near the square, troops repeatedly shot their automatic weapons into the crowds that were seeking to prevent them from reaching Tian An Men Square and ending the pro-democracy protests.

Yang Jianli, 26, a Chinese student at UC Berkeley, had been among the demonstrators at Tian An Men Square early Saturday night but left for a brief stop at Beijing Teachers University. When he returned sometime after midnight, he found he could not enter the square because the troops had already arrived.

Yang joined a group of about 100 citizens near the square who were trying to prevent more troops from reaching Tian An Men Square. “Down with fascism!” they shouted. “Down with Deng Xiaoping!”

The troops began shooting at the students. Yang heard bursts of gunfire for several seconds at a time, da-da-da-da-da-da. People in the crowds either ran or huddled on the ground. Yang found himself lying in the middle of the street, with bodies of the dead next to him.

The bursts of gunfire would stop after a few seconds. When they did, Yang and others in the crowd would get up, begin shouting slogans again and throwing stones toward the troops. The troops would then begin firing again.

At first, Yang was afraid he would be killed. Then, after he saw people near him being hit, his fear went away. He couldn’t understand why, but he wasn’t afraid of anything.

The skirmishing lasted for roughly an hour. Yang then moved to another intersection, even nearer the square, where another group of residents was engaged in a similar skirmish.

Yang noticed that some of the protesters were trying to set fire to tanks and buses. Others threw bottles of gas in an attempt to set the tanks on fire. The soldiers shot at them and hit some, but still they kept trying to burn the tanks. The military vehicles did not explode, but they started to burn.

At 1:30 a.m. June 4, the main column of the 27th Army’s troops was still a few hundred yards west of the square. Over the loudspeakers, the “Martial Law Headquarters” issued a new “emergency notice.”

“A serious counterrevolutionary rebellion occurred in the capital this evening,” the loudspeakers said. “Rioters furiously attacked soldiers and robbed them of their weapons and ammunition, burned military vehicles, set up roadblocks and kidnaped officers and men in an attempt to subvert the People’s Republic of China and overthrow the socialist system.

“The People’s Liberation Army has kept an attitude of restraint for some days. However, the counterrevolutionary rebellion must now be resolutely counterattacked.”

For the next three hours, that broadcast was aired again and again at Tian An Men Square.

Yet the announcement had little effect. As the troops sought to secure Tian An Men Square, swarms of residents resisted. As crowds formed, the troops emptied their automatic weapons into them. Some in the crowds fell, some ran, and some got up to join the next crowd.

“Ba gong! Ba gong!” the crowd chanted. “Strike! Strike!”

The wounded and dead were taken away on carts and pedicabs.

Chinese rushed up to any foreigner they saw, urging them, even begging them to get out the news of what had happened. “They kill the people,” said a 30-year-old worker named Yang. “You should tell the world this is a reactionary government.”

Tell the world. To foreigners, that seemed like such a simple, obvious request; of course, foreigners would report what they had witnessed. Yet to the Chinese, who have over the past four decades seen countless brutalities remain “internal”--unnoticed and unrecorded--it was a plea of desperation.

At 3:15 a.m., some of the troops formed a line across Changan Avenue, between the Beijing Hotel and the square. An angry crowd faced off against them about 50 yards to the east. The soldiers crouched, their weapons ready. They held that way for a full 15 minutes.

Then they opened fire on the crowd. The volley lasted for several minutes. Witnesses saw Chinese in the crowd begin to fall. One witness said he saw roughly half a dozen people who appeared to be killed. Another, witnessing the same attack, figured that about 50 people were shot and wounded, though he had no idea how many were killed.

Still, the crowds formed and formed again. And the troops fired and fired again.

All the while, television cameras and print reporters were free to record the carnage. Chinese authorities made no attempt to keep journalists away from the action. The immediate reaction worldwide was a predictable outpouring of shock and outrage.

Did the regime lack the resources to shut off foreign news coverage? Perhaps. But another theory held that hard-liners intentionally let the world watch the events in Tian An Men Square, to scare away the foreign business interests that had interfered with their goal of making China economically self-sufficient.

Hard-liners such as Li Peng, a senior U.S. diplomat said, “don’t really want to be in the world economy. . . . They don’t want foreigners to influence what their prices are.”

A young American English teacher who arrived at the relatively small Beijing Second Hospital in the pre-dawn hours of that endless night saw seven dead bodies on the floor, all bloodied, their shirts torn open. Most of the bodies were nameless; many of the protesters had come from out of town.

A man in his 20s, from the Canton Foreign Language Institute, began shouting to the American in English: “The Chinese government are animals! Seven students killed all by machine guns. How cruel our government is.

Sitting on a hallway floor was a recent graduate of Qinghua University, China’s leading science institution. He had a bloody right thigh. He had come to the hospital with two other wounded friends that evening, he said. One of them had already died.

The American visited several hospital rooms. The wounded were kept seven to a room. Most hospital beds had two people in them. One victim, a student, told the American: “Our government has turned into wild beasts. They have no heart, and they have no brain.”

At 4 a.m., the lights at Tian An Men Square were suddenly turned out.

There were still a few thousand students left. Most of them were gathered around the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the center of the square, where there was a strange calm--the calm of the cataclysm. For the previous hour or so, the singer Hou Dejian and others at the monument had been trying to arrange with troops a withdrawal of the protesters from the square.

Now a contingent of at least 200 soldiers emerged from the Great Hall of the People. Armed with rifles, bayonets at the ready, they moved quickly around the square, south of the monument. Armored personnel carriers had moved across the north of the square, positioned in front of Tian An Men, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, and facing south. The protesters were surrounded.

At 4:30 a.m., the loudspeakers broadcast a new notice: “It is time to clear the square, and the Martial Law Headquarters accepts the request of the students to be allowed to withdraw. . . . All the people in the square should leave at once.”

Some did. “There is no more time. We can’t let any more blood flow,” someone said over the student loudspeaker. “We must leave.” Holding hands, weeping, many of the students filed safely out of the square. Some of the students who left swung around to the west, starting back toward the Beijing campus district, when they were subjected to heavy gunfire.

But some students--no one is sure exactly how many--stayed behind, guarding, clinging to the last to the monument. A few others may have stayed behind in their tents or sleeping bags. A foreign eyewitness who had seen many young people still lying in their tents two hours earlier believes that these people left the square. Some of them may have departed in Hou Dejian’s negotiated withdrawal.

Shortly after 5 a.m., the armored personnel carriers moved across the square. At high, murderous speeds, they crushed the tents against the concrete. Using gasoline or flame-throwers, the personnel carriers ignited the tents, along with whatever or whoever was inside them.

The armored personnel carriers took aim at another target: They knocked down the “Goddess of Democracy.” It was a classic case of military might destroying art. Some students later said, though without substantiation, that several protesters clung to the goddess to the very end and were crushed.

Troops then moved against the remaining students. There were several reports that they sprayed bullets into the last students huddled around the base of the Monument to the People’s Heroes, although amid the din, the confusion and the terror, no witnesses have come forward.

A Reuters correspondent, who was in the square until these last minutes and reported that the remaining students had been shot, said the last holdouts begged him to get out the news. Tell the world what is happening, the students said. Tell the world.

By early morning June 4, at 7:40 a.m., the regime announced to a deserted square that the “rebellion has been suppressed and the soldiers are now in charge of Tian An Men.”

The toll had been enormous. Official U.S. estimates are that at least 3,000 people, and perhaps as many as 5,000, died in that night of carnage, and that many thousands more were wounded. A source in the Chinese Red Cross, basing his estimate primarily on hospital figures, reckoned that there had been 2,700 deaths.

Some of the victims never made it to hospitals. One witness saw a freight car with bodies on a Beijing rail line. Another claimed to have seen troops cremating bodies at Tian An Men Square. And there were reports of trucks removing bodies to the crematory at Babaoshan Cemetery in western Beijing.

With a paucity of proof, foreigners were forced to compile estimates based on known numbers of bodies at some hospitals, combined with eyewitness accounts of the shooting and deaths at scenes of heavy fighting or firing. Such estimates ranged from several hundred protesters dead to several thousand.

A press release issued by the Propaganda Department of the Beijing Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party offered a different account.

“Nearly 100 soldiers and policemen died and thousands of soldiers and policemen were wounded . . . ,” it said.

“In order to carry out their duty of quelling the insurrection and restoring law and order in the capital, the martial-law troops finally were forced to fire on the rioters. The result was that some 100 civilians were killed and nearly 1,000 were injured. The government and the martial-law troops share the grief of the families of those killed and injured in this unavoidable tragedy.”