The Shattered Dream: CHINA /1989 : CHAPTER 9 : ‘A Debt of Blood Has to Be Paid Back in Blood’

“This incident has impelled us to think over the future as well as the past sober-mindedly.”

--Deng Xiaoping

Early on the morning of Sunday, June 4, an American correspondent walked out of Beijing’s railway station after an overnight train trip from Shanghai to find an unexpected scene: There were no buses, no taxis, none of the usual bustle of a Chinese railway station. He noticed the faint smell of smoke and cordite in the air.

When he asked a pedicab operator to drive him less than half a mile, the driver demanded 100 yuan ($27), an astronomical sum for China, more than 10 times the usual fee. He asked why.

“They killed a lot of people,” the driver explained.

On the morning after the massacre, Beijing was a city under military occupation--but not yet under military control.

Troops, tanks and armored personnel carriers controlled the center of Beijing. The battle for the hallowed political turf of Tian An Men Square was over. But the People’s Liberation Army was now forced to deal with the consequences of its bloody assault.

Walking out of the Minzu Hotel that Sunday, Ralph Miller saw burned tanks, burned buses and burned people. Black columns of smoke rose from Tian An Men Square. Late in the day, the first time he was allowed past the troops and into the square, what Miller noticed most was the smell. Throughout Tian An Men Square, Miller could smell burning rubber, tear gas and burning flesh. The stench was awful.

Shops and stores were closed. Most residents remained inside or clustered on streets near their homes to talk quietly in small groups. Contingents of troops patrolled the main streets, sometimes firing volleys from AK-47 automatic rifles to make sure their authority was recognized.

In broad daylight, along the streets near Tian An Men Square, Chinese troops continued to shoot at unarmed civilians. In front of the Beijing Hotel that Sunday morning, troops fired four volleys at unarmed, youthful throngs. A foreign witness saw 50 people drop to the pavement, apparently wounded.

Near Jianguomen, at the old eastern entrance to the city, a 65-year-old woman practicing tai ji quan exercises was struck by a bullet and killed.

Residents of Beijing were enraged. And, as the news gradually spread, residents of other cities were equally aroused. For the following week, the regime found itself with an urban population in a state of virtual insurrection.

At Beijing University, students hung pictures on campus walls of those who had been killed. “A debt of blood has to be paid back in blood!” said one wallposter.

Over the next few days, some Beijing residents put up whatever resistance they could. They looked for abandoned military vehicles and stuffed burning cloth in their gas tanks. On June 5, along one thoroughfare, citizens managed to ignite eight armored personnel carriers. One contained ammunition, which exploded, crackling and booming for more than an hour.

In the streets, citizens continued to put up roadblocks of buses, street dividers and market stalls. It was a symbolic gesture; the tanks easily burst through the barricades.

It was clear that only outright terror could subdue the population of Beijing. Troops roamed the streets, firing into the air without reason or provocation. In some of the old neighborhoods near Tian An Men Square, soldiers ran into alleyways shooting at fleeing residents.

For two days, the terror campaign was compounded by rumors and fears of civil war. Troops positioned themselves in defensive formations at strategic points around the capital, as if guarding against a possible attack by rival military forces. About 20 tanks stood guard at the Jianguomen Bridge on the east side of the city.

Foreign military attaches suggested that some PLA units, including the air force, might have been so infuriated by the brutality of the Saturday night assault that they would try to invade the city and reconquer it from its occupiers.

The military could begin taking sides and become swept up in the continuing power struggle within China’s political leadership, the experts said. Buttressing their speculation were several reports of skirmishes between army units inside and on the outskirts of Beijing.

From Monday, June 5, through Wednesday, June 7, both inside Beijing and outside, convoys of troops and vehicles shuttled from position to position, as if maneuvering for battle. But the civil war never came. Despite the apparent divisions over the massacre, the People’s Liberation Army held together.

The news of the Beijing massacre brought the people of Shanghai into the streets by the hundreds of thousands. Students and workers together commandeered buses, deflating tires or sticking ice picks in them to block the city’s narrow streets, which are nearly impassable even in the best of circumstances.

Workers attacked and set fire to a passenger train that had struck protesters blocking the track, killing six people. Factories were brought nearly to a standstill early in the week. City authorities suggested they were on the verge of declaring martial law and urged foreign consulates to keep their nationals away from such public areas as the Bund along the waterfront.

In Chengdu, capital of the central province of Sichuan, at least 30 people were killed and 100 to 300 more were wounded when police, acting at about the same time as the PLA assault in Beijing, attacked protesters with truncheons, bayonets and guns. During the ensuing two days of unrest, crowds set fire to a market and movie theater and ransacked some vendors’ stalls and two tourist hotels.

Virtually all of the major cities in Manchuria, China’s northeast, had serious disorders. In Changchun, half the workers struck the No. 1 Auto Factory, China’s leading auto plant, in the days after the massacre.

A young American who rode a train from Canton to Beijing in the two days after the massacre was delayed in several cities by political turmoil and student demonstrations.

At the train station in Changsha, capital of Hunan province--where Mao Tse-tung once worked as a librarian, reading the works of Karl Marx--nearly 100 student demonstrators approached, chanting pro-democracy slogans and seeking to jump aboard the train to Beijing. At Wuhan, more students in the station tried to hop aboard, and train attendants ordered the riders to close their windows.

Leaving Wuhan, the train came to a halt again. The railroad bridge across the Yangtze River, one of the most strategically important transportation links in China, had to be cleared of student protesters.

When this American reached Beijing, he hopped on the city’s subway line and got off at the Jianguomen stop. Walking outdoors, he saw smoke rising from burned-out army trucks.

To complete its control of the population of Beijing, the martial-law authorities needed to scale back considerably on the number of foreigners in the city.

Virtually every university in Beijing had foreign students. Many academic research institutes and news organizations had foreign experts or visitors. These foreigners could constitute troublesome networks of information and become inconvenient eyewitnesses for a security apparatus seeking to carry out arrests and purges.

On June 4-5, Chinese troops had been patrolling and firing their weapons along main thoroughfares like Changan Avenue. At 1 p.m. June 5, the army trucks took a new route. A convoy swung by the residence of U.S. Ambassador James R. Lilley and the press and cultural section of the U.S. Embassy. There, the soldiers unloaded several volleys.

“They’re shooting right outside my office!” Andy Koss, the press spokesman for the U.S. Embassy, said in the midst of a phone interview. “. . . Oh, goddamn it! It’s unbelievable. They’ve got guns ready--they’re shooting up in the air.”

That night, visitors to the Jianguo Hotel, one of the leading foreigners’ hotels in Beijing, went in by a rear service entrance. There was army rifle fire on the street outside.

On June 7, Chinese troops shot directly into two of the main housing complexes for foreign diplomats and journalists in Beijing. Bullets shattered windows. “They shot up every apartment in the building,” said Fred Krug, chief of security for the U.S. Embassy. Krug’s Chinese maid threw her body over his children to protect them.

For nearly two hours, soldiers also surrounded one diplomatic complex and refused to let people leave. Chinese troops shot into the largest office building for foreign businesses in Beijing, shattering windows and leaving bullet holes and broken glass in the China-based headquarters of some of the largest corporations in the West.

Foreigners were leaving Beijing as fast as jumbo jets could accommodate them. Many Western embassies reduced their staffs to essential personnel. Lilley urged Americans to leave China, and other ambassadors did likewise.

“When the war is over, we will return to China,” declared a 5-year-old boy named David, the son of a British diplomat, as he played with his Tommy the Tank toy on a Cathay Pacific flight from Beijing to Hong Kong. “And it will be nice and clean.”

On Sunday, June 4, after the massacre, UCLA Prof. Perry Link visited Fang Lizhi and his wife, Li Shuxian. “They’ve gone crazy. They’ve gone berserk,” Fang said.

Link departed, but later that afternoon Li Shuxian phoned him. “Why don’t you bring the children over to play?” she asked.

It was a code, and it meant Fang and Li wanted to see him immediately. This time, they told him they wanted to leave their apartment for good. They wanted to talk about seeking safety in the U.S. Embassy.

The next day, Fang and Li, accompanied by Link, met with several American officials at the U.S. Embassy. On the streets outside, they heard volleys of gunfire.

The talks started at noon and went on for 5 1/2 hours. In a town stricken with a food shortage, their lunch was peanut butter and crackers. “Never mind,” Link told the apologetic embassy officials. “That’s a bigger meal than we got when President Bush was visiting.”

The embassy officials were full of caution. They raised three points for Fang to consider.

First, the United States had never granted protection in the embassy to a Chinese national, and the embassy officials were uncertain of the impact. Second, it was impossible to predict how long Fang and Li would have to remain inside the embassy. And third, Fang’s presence could give the Chinese government grounds to attack the democracy movement as linked with foreign powers.

The third argument weighed heavily on Fang. Everyone in the room stared at him. Finally, he decided: He would not ask the Americans to protect him.

Link, Fang and Li went to a well-stocked restaurant for a large Cantonese dinner, with scallops, tofu and shredded pork. They talked in general about China, but not about the embassy. Finally, Link left.

Fang, choosing not to go to his apartment that night, made plans to sleep elsewhere. The next day, he apparently reconsidered his decision. On June 6, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater announced in Washington that Fang and Li had taken refuge in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

Chinese officials were infuriated. Five days later, they issued an arrest warrant for Fang and Li, charging them with “counterrevolutionary propaganda and instigation” in connection with the student demonstrations. The Chinese regime labeled Fang a “traitor,” which is tantamount to a death sentence.

Deng Xiaoping had not been seen in public since his summit meeting with Soviet President Gorbachev. Throughout the imposition of martial law, the massacre and its aftermath, Deng was variously rumored to be dead, dying, hospitalized or helpless. It was said that perhaps he was now under the influence of President Yang Shangkun, or that Yang had led a successful coup against him.

But on June 9, six nights after the massacre, Deng reappeared on nationwide television, surrounded by elderly conservative allies in the Communist Party and a flock of army generals. He looked frail and drawn--but animated.

The People’s Liberation Army, Deng said, “is always the defender of the state, the socialist system, and the people’s interests. . . . (It is) the bastion of iron of the state.”

The army had crushed a “counterrevolutionary rebellion,” Deng said. “This incident has impelled us to think over the future as well as the past sober-mindedly. It will enable us to carry forward our cause more steadily, better and even faster, and correct our mistakes faster.”

Over the next few days, the Chinese regime launched an intense propaganda campaign aimed at showing that the army, in its assault in Beijing, had merely responded to violent “thugs” and “rioters” with the minimum force necessary to put down the “rebellion.”

Chinese officials said that the original student protest movement and its comparatively reasonable demands were exploited by enemies of the state, some of them outside China, seeking to overthrow the socialist system and the authority of the Communist Party. This, they said, would have led to chaos in the world’s most populous country, with grave implications for other nations.

The armed troops that moved toward the square on June 3 to suppress the “counterrevolutionary rebellion” had orders not to fire their weapons, Chinese officials said, but were forced to shoot to defend themselves when they were attacked by people trying to stop them in the streets leading to the square.

The arrests and purges began on the weekend of June 10.

That Saturday night, a week after the massacre, Chinese television announced the arrests of more than 400 people in Beijing, along with additional arrests in other cities. Television news programs showed film of young men in custody who seemed to have been beaten.

On June 13, Chinese police put out a nationwide dragnet for 21 student leaders involved in the demonstrations. Those who had led the largest nonviolent protests in modern Chinese history were accused, like Fang Lizhi, of inciting “counterrevolutionary rebellion.”

Wuer Kaixi, the student who had dared to talk so boldly to Li Peng on nationwide television, remained at large but was reduced to China’s version of a most-wanted poster.

“Wuer Kaixi . . . ,” said the Chinese police in a nationally televised broadcast. “Male. Born Feb. 17, 1968. Uighur minority from Xinjiang autonomous region. Beijing Teachers University education department student. Height: 174 centimeters. Big eyes. Thick lips. Fair skin. Often wears green military pants.”

The authorities dealt severely with those who were apprehended. On June 15, three men accused of torching a train during the demonstrations in Shanghai were sentenced to death. Two days later, eight people in Beijing were sentenced to die for resisting the army’s assault on the city.

The United States and several Western European nations pleaded for clemency for the condemned. White House spokesman Fitzwater issued a statement June 20 declaring that carrying out the death sentences “could only deepen the wounds of the past few weeks.”

The appeals were to no avail. On Wednesday, June 21, only six days after their sentence was handed down, the three young men in Shanghai were executed, the first of more than two dozen protesters to be put to death around the country.

Yuan Mu, a spokesman for China’s State Council, or Cabinet, explained in a televised interview that the nation should expect the ferocious crackdown to continue. “In coming months,” Yuan said, “a small number . . . of people of this kind will also be duly punished because of their heinous crimes.”