Beijing Diary : EYEWITNESS AT TIAN AN MEN SQUARE

A YOUNG STUDENT, HIS GLASSES a bit askew, his clothes wrinkled and unwashed, waved at me from under the army-green awning of his tent on Beijing’s Tian An Men Square on Saturday afternoon, June 3. He looked tired, the weariness of the past weeks of marches, hunger strikes and speeches slowing his words, weighing his shoulders down. He motioned me into the tent, lifting the strand of twine that demarcated the inner sanctum of his university’s encampment. We stepped over soiled padded mattresses and patterned cotton quilts and settled onto low, three-legged stools in a corner. He lit a cigarette from a package I pushed toward him and exhaled a cloud of bluish smoke as if expelling a last worry from the recesses of his soul.

Nearby, students sat on quilts, silently playing cards, the soft slap of cardboard on a makeshift table somehow audible through the din of loudspeakers in the square. My friend--he and I had met a week or so earlier as I wandered among the tents of Tian An Men Square--produced two aluminum cans of warm soda, a carbonated orange concoction that had become the principal beverage of China’s democracy movement. We sat quietly. The jubilation of the previous weeks, the exhilaration of speaking freely, of proclaiming to the world that China, too, wanted democracy, was being gnawed away by uncertainty, by the wait for the forces of the state to act.

It had been two weeks since Li Peng, the uncompromising and doctrinaire premier whose resignation the Tian An Men demonstrators were demanding, had appeared on national television to announce the imposition of martial law in the capital. “It must be stressed,” Li had said, his face bathed in sweat, stumbling occasionally in the harsh staccato delivery of his orders, “that even under such circumstances, we should still persist in protecting the patriotism of the students, make a clear distinction between them and the very, very few people who created the turmoil, and we will not penalize students for their radical words and actions in the student movement.”

Beyond the shadowed cool of the tent, shimmers of heat like crinkled cellophane rose from the baked concrete expanse of the square. About 100 feet from where we sat, a 30-foot-tall, almost luminescent white statue of a stylized woman, her short hair puffed as if by a gust of wind, her hands holding aloft a flaming torch, stood amid a small sea of blue and red nylon igloo tents. Four ideograms, cut from fabric and sewn on a curtain of white cloth that hung at the base of the sculpture, read minzhu zhi shen, the Goddess of Democracy.

I asked my friend about the statue. He nodded as he talked, smiling slightly and tugging on his cigarette. He was nervous, more nervous than I had ever seen him, and less willing to chat. “Many people have come to see the statue,” he said. “I think when they see it, they understand. This statue is a symbol against feudalism, against anti-democratic tendencies. It is face to face with the portrait of Mao Tse-tung. That picture is the face of tyranny. The statue represents the mass image of the people.” He stopped speaking and I thought it best to leave.

That night, the army came, with tanks and guns. I never saw my friend again.

PRELUDE

Friday night and Saturday morning, June 2-3. For two weeks, the people of Beijing--steelworkers, old men with wooden canes, swaggering young taxi drivers, aproned shop girls, grandmothers with gray hair wrapped into buns, college students in bold T-shirts reading ji shao shu, ji shao shu (“very, very few”)--had stopped the Chinese army from entering their city.

They swarmed over the Liberation-brand trucks, arguing, cajoling, pleading with the soldiers not to advance, not to raise their weapons against their own people. At critical intersections and main trunk roads, barricades of red-and-yellow public buses, blue-and-white-striped water trucks, coal trucks and garbage trucks blocked the march of the People’s Liberation Army into Beijing, a city it had taken without firing a shot in the autumn of 1949.

Now, in the middle of the night, 5,000 young, unarmed recruits were double-timing down Changan Avenue toward Tian An Men Square.

The phone jolted me awake. I was staying with another journalist in an apartment in Jianguomenwai Compound, the largest of the four walled residential areas for diplomats and journalists, on Changan Avenue a little more than a mile from Tian An Men Square. It was a reporter, a friend of mine, saying that troops were moving from the east. I telephoned two other American journalists, and in minutes we were dashing down the stairs--the elevators, as usual, were broken--and speeding from the compound to catch the army.

In soft-soled boots, the soldiers moved almost silently, just the thump of rubber on the asphalt of the six-lane road that slices Beijing in half from east to west. They wore white shirts and green pants and carried small backpacks and metal thermoses. They moved swiftly, urged on by platoon leaders counting cadence in the night air.

It was 2:30 in the morning, yet almost magically, the citizens of Beijing materialized on the streets. Youngsters on bicycles swept up the avenue raising the alarm, windmilling their arms as they rode. From the hutongs, the alleys that burrow into the old residential areas of the capital, people rushed, some still in pajamas or nightgowns.

I was in a car full of journalists, and we raced abreast of the jogging troops, trying to outrun the column, to witness what we believed would be a major confrontation. We screeched into the parking lot of the Beijing Hotel, a few hundred yards east of Tian An Men Square, 10 minutes or so ahead of the column of soldiers.

I bolted from the car. Looking back, I still could not see the soldiers we had passed. At the western edge of the hotel, a convoy of civilian trucks roared up, horns blaring, to block the width of Changan Avenue. A wave of applause surged through the rapidly filling streets, and bare arms sprouted above the sea of heads, two fingers forked in V signs. Then, in front of the hotel, students and citizens, men and women, linked arms in a line across the avenue, perhaps 50 in all, facing the wave of troops. A young woman with a ponytail and glasses was crying, large tears dropping darkly onto her pink blouse. A man who put his arm through hers hushed her, “Don’t be afraid.”

Under the hazy yellow glare of street lights, everyone was still. At first faintly and then louder, the sound of thousands of pounding feet swept over the crowd. A student shouted through a hand-held electronic megaphone, “The whole people have stood up,” a paraphrase of Mao Tse-tung’s line when he declared the establishment of the People’s Republic some 40 years earlier from atop Tian An Men, the Gate of Heavenly Peace. “Let the whole world know.”

I circled through the crowds in front of the Beijing Hotel. Cars of foreign journalists squeezed through the throng, and the lights of television cameras bathed clots of people in eerie white pools. The head of the column came into sight, and the line of people across Changan Avenue huddled closer. A chant burst from the crowd: “Go back, go back, go back.”

As the troops moved forward, still tightly bunched, five or six abreast, in a moving river of humanity, the crowd pushed against the column, funneling it toward the line of protesters linking arms. Almost instantly, the soldiers were swallowed by the mass of people, surrounded like an invading organism and pushed back. The young soldiers grabbed each other, their eyes fearful, astonished, uncomprehending. They stumbled sideways, backward, the column disintegrating into clumps of sweating troops wildly looking about for a place to hide.

A soldier fainted next to me, caught by two companions before he fell to the pavement. The crowd took up another chant: “Sit down, sit down.” Others countercalled, “Down with Li Peng.” Then, as if on command, the soldiers hunched down, some on the street, many more on the sidewalks.

Two teen-agers, perhaps 18, a boy and girl arm in arm, drifted over to me, innocence and wonder on their faces. “It’s marvelous,” the girl said in carefully syllabled English. “The people of Beijing are marvelous. I don’t think these soldiers have ever seen anything like this, never since liberation. It’s like the Philippines. It’s really people power.”

The tension of the crowd had dissipated like air rushing from a balloon. It was 3 o’clock. Once again the people of Beijing had stopped the army from reaching Tian An Men Square, from moving against the students who protected the Goddess of Democracy.

Everywhere, soldiers crouched on the sidewalks or in front of buildings, and people talked softly to these frightened youngsters in uniform. “Don’t be afraid of the people,” someone said. “With the people, the country has hope. The people don’t want you to hurt them.” Some soldiers cried, wiping their eyes with the backs of their hands. “They’re not from Beijing, you know,” a man pushing a bicycle told me. “They’re from Liaoning. They know nothing. They don’t even know why they are here.”

Popsicle vendors maneuvered their wheeled ice chests through the crowds crying, “ Bing guan, bing guan. “ Two young women shoved a wad of bills into the hands of one and marched off with two cartons filled with popsicles, which they began passing out to soldiers huddled along the east side of the Beijing Hotel under a propaganda banner reading, “Firmly oppose turmoil. Maintain order and stability.”

Gradually, the young soldiers rose, urged on by the people, and began straggling back east on Changan Avenue. I walked with a group of soldiers for the first mile, tracing my route home, their ragged retreat cheered by bystanders who lined the sidewalks in the predawn hours. Rhythmic clapping and laughter carried the soldiers on, out of the heart of Beijing, away from Tian An Men Square and what the students called “the throat of democracy.”

Saturday afternoon and evening, June 3. In my student friend’s tent, I recounted the events of the previous night. He had slept through it, too exhausted to venture over to the Beijing Hotel to witness the river of soldiers staunched by a determined citizenry. Like many of the students in the square, he possessed a tough optimism, but an optimism that often collapsed into doubt. In the space of a few minutes, he would insist that the students would triumph, then he would turn gloomy. “I think the Communist Party in China is the shadow of feudalism,” he said. “They will not compromise with the students. Maybe the government will win. They have the guns.”

Great swaths of the square, only a week before crowded with blanket-covered lean-tos, tents and cardboard shacks, were now empty. Small mounds of discarded clothes or books or crumpled quilts dotted the 100-acre field of concrete. Still, perhaps a hundred crimson banners of China’s colleges and universities flapped above the dwindling clusters of settlements.

I walked north from the tent, toward the towering red walls of the Forbidden City, an immense portrait of Mao hanging over the central portal, which edges Changan Avenue and the northern boundary of the square. Looking to the right, I could see the Revolutionary History Museum, and to the left the Great Hall of the People. After Mao’s death, a blocky columned mausoleum was erected in the southern half of the square to display the preserved corpse of the Great Helmsman. Curiously, during the entire occupation, the mausoleum remained undisturbed. One day, I had even managed to buy from a souvenir seller a blue polyester baseball hat imprinted with a rendering of the mausoleum.

On the west side of the Great Hall of the People, a pink-columned edifice where the rubber-stamp parliament gathers, a contingent of 5,000 soldiers armed with AK-47 assault rifles was surrounded by singing, chanting, hectoring crowds. Some soldiers passed their canteens to protesters to have them refilled. Others accepted proffered sticks of ice cream. An officer stood and tried to lead his troops in song, a futile effort to drown out choruses of the socialist hymn the Internationale from the crowd. A student orator lectured the troops. There was no sense of crisis, of impending cataclysm. It was, as far as I could tell then, another in what had become a series of routine nonviolent victories over the army.

I left the square sometime after 6 o’clock, in time to get back to my friend’s apartment for the half-hour evening television news program, which provided not only the sole window into China’s leadership but also an excuse to eat. We threw together a bowl of pea and bacon soup and some toast.

At precisely 7 o’clock, the broadcast opened with a dour-faced Li Peng, oddly attired in a Western jacket and tie, reading a bizarre speech about global environmental problems. “What in the hell. . . ?” I muttered. My friend, who works for a Hong Kong magazine, had stopped taking notes, the surprise evident on his face. Even as Li spoke, it would turn out, armored vehicles were grinding into Beijing from the west.

As darkness crept over the city, the streets and boulevards teemed with restless, skittish streams of bicyclists and pedestrians. By 8:30, the inner city, what was once contained by the old city wall, was electric with tension. I walked outside the compound to talk to people pedaling west, toward the square. “There’s been shooting at Muxidi,” someone said, referring to one of the distant western districts of the capital. Truckloads of workers in yellow hard hats--looking tough, alert and confident, to my eyes--sped down the Second Ring Road, a six-lane highway that encircles the inner city and skirts the diplomatic compound, on their way to man the people’s roadblocks, I figured.

At the Jianguomenwai Bridge, I watched a procession of about 40 canvas-backed army trucks lumber north, jolting to a halt at a roadblock, where they were swallowed up by chanting crowds waving fists and V signs. “This isn’t the people’s army, it’s a traitor’s army,” a man shouted as he pounded on the fender of an army truck. These troops clutched rifles between their legs. At one point, a group of workers burst from the crush around the truck waving steel helmets and webbed bandoliers taken from one of the trucks.

THE MASSACRE

Late Saturday and early Sunday. At midnight, while I was doing some work in the apartment, I got another phone call. A reporter yelled into my ear, “The army’s moving from the west.” I immediately called two other reporters, one of whom had an almost-new Toyota sedan. “Let’s go,” I shouted. “They’re moving on the square, the army.” I rushed around collecting my camera and notebook. I stuck a flask of Scotch in my back pocket, thinking that it might serve as a last-recourse antiseptic if someone was shot.

It was impossible to drive across the city on Changan Avenue, now a sea of barricades. So we sped north and west on the Second Ring Road, careening through roadblocks, a sign in our window reading jizhe --journalists. As we circled the center of the city and headed south toward the Fuxingmen Bridge, the commotion in the streets was intense. Bicyclists, who in Beijing usually crawl sedately along the road, were tearing along highways and down side streets in packs. People were running away from the bridge. We rounded a curve that brought the bridge into sight.

A wall of flaming buses down the entire length of the bridge lit the sky like day. The reporter driving the car slammed on the brakes, sliding the car into the curb along the highway. We ran, crouched over, toward the on-ramp that led to the inferno. The other two reporters hung back, talking to a group of people at the base of the ramp. The stutter of automatic weapons crackled in the air, mixing with the low whoomph of a bus’s exploding gas tank. As I got closer, I could see a column of armored personnel carriers crashing through the flaming blockade. “They’re firing at children,” someone hollered at me as I ran past. People were lying next to the hedges that lined the ramp but I couldn’t tell whether they were dead or alive. A man who had followed me up the ramp, shaking in anger, screamed, “Kuomintang fascists!” The gunfire was too intense for me to get closer, so I retreated to where my two friends were waiting. A man, almost hysterical, said that he had seen 30 people shot--”old people, young people.”

“Are you a journalist?” a woman asked, her words clutching at me in despair.

“Yes, yes, I am,” I said.

“Thank you,” she exhaled, “thank you.”

I could see the alarm and shock on my friends’ faces. They said they had been told that people who had been killed were brought down the ramp just before we got there. We stood for a moment behind a telephone pole, stunned, peering at the column of armor roaring over the bridge. It was simply too dangerous to stay where we were, so we jogged back to the car. In the years I lived in Beijing, it was never more than a gray, placidly boring city where people’s public emotions were confined to drinking games and cooing over babies. A wave of student protests that swept the country in 1986 had petered out when the government shook the fist of repression. It was inconceivable that the army would actually fight its way into Beijing.

We decided that we had to get to Tian An Men Square before the first assault troops. We were scared, but we only talked of that much later.

We wound east through the inner city streets, dense with people. At one roadblock, we slowed to weave through barricades lined with thousands of people. Suddenly, someone pointed at our “journalist” placard and started clapping. Then another, and another. Applause swept us along. V signs were waved in front of our car. The people of Beijing wanted us to be there to record that night.

“God, I can’t believe it,” one of the reporters said. “I can’t believe it.” She said it again and again as we drove.

A reporter on a motorcycle drew up alongside and handed me a soldier’s hat. “Hang on to this for me,” he shouted. I stuffed it under the front seat. He pulled away. Days later, the cap was discovered under the seat. It was soaked with blood.

We parked the car just north of Changan Avenue, next to Zhongnanhai, the old imperial compound where the Chinese communist leadership lives and works, a couple of blocks west of the square. Hurrying toward Changan, we were ahead of the army. The next day, I learned that many people had died at Xidan Road, just to the west.

We ran toward the square, rushing along with a tide of retreating people, some on foot, others pedaling furiously on their black bicycles. Breathing heavily, unsure of escape routes, the other two reporters and I stopped under the portrait of Mao affixed to the face of the Forbidden City. We agreed that if we were separated, we would meet by one of the stone lions that guard the archway to the ancient city.

As I looked east, about 30 or 40 yards away, I could see an armored personnel carrier ablaze. I ran over to take some pictures. People were heaving cardboard boxes and blankets on the searing metal surface. I could see the fractured silhouette of a 50-caliber machine gun pointed crazily into the starless sky.

“They killed too many people,” cried a young girl who grabbed my sleeve as I scribbled notes. “We hate them. We hate them.” It was 1:30 a.m., June 4.

Still the army had not made it to the square. Then, loudspeakers on the massive floodlight stanchions edging the square blared to life. “A serious counterrevolutionary rebellion is taking place in the capital tonight,” a voice echoed. “Rioters have furiously attacked soldiers and stolen their weapons and ammunition. . . . The counterrevolutionary rebellion must now be resolutely counterattacked. . . . Residents should strictly abide by the specific regulations as provided by the martial law. . . . Safeguard the constitution and defend the security of the socialist motherland. . . . The personal safety of anyone who ignores this warning cannot be guaranteed.”

I wandered along the northern edge of the square, watching. Buses were on fire, their window frames white with flames that billowed from the vehicles’ innards. Nearby, the Goddess of Democracy flickered with each surge of fire. A bus rocketed through the crowd on Changan Avenue, its driver wrestling with the huge steering wheel as he pointed it toward the main gate of the Forbidden City. The bus sliced through the gate, jackknifing across the inner entrance in what seemed to be an effort to block soldiers from charging through. Over the heads of the horde of people, blue flashing ambulance lights spun as the white vans crept toward the square from the east. A woman with long black hair wearing a white satin dress clacked past me on white spiked heels, swinging a white patent-leather purse. I watched her for a moment, stopped by the sight of her effortless saunter, her studied obliviousness to the building storm.

To the west, I heard the thunder of engines and the churn of tank treads; the crowd turned to watch as a wave of closely set pairs of headlights came into view. I looked at my watch. It was 1:45. Dozens of tanks, the barrels of their cannons almost parallel to the ground, shuddered to a halt almost 100 yards from the western edge of the square. I heard sporadic cracks of rifle fire. Behind the headlights, through my binoculars, I could make out the shadows of troops, thousands of steel helmets glinting faintly in the darkness as the soldiers moved behind the tanks, running toward the wall of the Forbidden City. I hurried to where my two friends were to meet me. They were not there.

People walked or ran aimlessly through the square, across Changan Avenue, as if they did not know where to go. I trotted toward the lights of the tanks. There, about 100 yards from the wall of armor that spread across the avenue, not more than a hundred people formed a thin line, not linking arms, but standing quietly. I ran up behind them. I wanted to see their faces, to look in their eyes, to see these people who stood unarmed in front of the Chinese army. The people, baby-faced students and weathered workers, gazed toward the army that had come for them, some vacantly, some worried, some, it seemed, without fear. Suddenly there was a sharp popping sound, then a rattle, like firecrackers going off in a neighbor’s back yard. Some people in front of me fell to the ground, awkwardly, as if broken apart. I dove onto the pavement and began crawling backward. I bumped into another American journalist who was also on all fours, holding his bicycle upright. The bicycle seemed to tower over us, a target for the bullets flying over our heads. I suggested that he abandon the bicycle, that perhaps we needn’t draw attention to ourselves. “It’s not your $500 bicycle,” he shot back.

The crowd retreated, some running bent over, some crawling. Two young men ran by me furiously pushing a bicycle cart. On the flatbed of the cart a man lay, bathed in blood. More people ran by, carrying a woman whose shoulder was soaked red. There were some screams, but now I cannot remember many. Instead, there was a silent anger and a frenzy to move the wounded to the ambulances. A chant of “ ji shao shu, ji shao shu, “--”very, very few”-- erupted from the mob, which regrouped in straggly lines of 40 or 50 to face the troops. Again, a wave of people moved to meet the army, and again the rifles cracked. More people fell.

I ran farther east, past the edge of the square. Behind me, helmeted troops ran around the line of tanks, their engines thundering as they crept forward. Another bus sped through the retreating crowd, young men leaning from the windows waving bamboo poles fixed with crimson flags, the driver, in a snow-white headband, barreling suicidally toward the oncoming tanks.

“ Ba gong, ba gong, ba gong, “ the crowd chanted. “Strike, strike, strike.”

People swarmed by me, some moving to the square. Many were weeping. Now the sound of gunfire was almost continuous. Threads of yellow light shot from the southern edge of the square, machine-gun tracer bullets, I later learned.

I stopped a young man to talk for a moment. “I don’t believe it,” he said, his voice shaking. “How is this possible? How could we prepare?” He stopped abruptly as another young man lying face down on a cart, blood seeping through his clothing, was pushed past us. The first young man put his hands on his face. “You must support the Chinese people,” he said, turning to me. “You must go to your country and support the Chinese people.”

“ Si duo le, si duo le “--”Many are dead, many are dead”--I heard this again and again as the crowd fell back under the crackle of gunfire, retreating eastward, down Changan. I was caught between my desire to see what happened on the square and the gunfire from the troops to the west. I ran, then walked with the throng, too frightened to figure out how to get back to the square. The journalist with the bicycle weaved toward me through the crowd. I hopped on the back and we rode east, back to the diplomatic compound.

I learned what happened later at Tian An Men by talking with students and the few foreign reporters who stayed till dawn. As the avenue on the north side of the square emptied of people, a strange quiet enveloped the square. Bicyclists circled over the expanse of concrete. In the tents that had been set up earlier to treat hunger strikers and ailing students, doctors in stained white coats worked furiously. Students filtered out of their tents, away from the edge of the square where the growling APCs were assembling. In some tents, they told me, despite the gunfire, the roar of tanks, students slept. I could only understand it as a response of catatonic, paralyzing fear.

Near 3:30 a.m, Taiwanese rock singer Hou Dejian, who was on a hunger strike at the Monument to the People’s Heroes, a squat pillar set atop friezes of socialist heroism in the middle of the square and for weeks the command center for the student leaders, walked over to the row of soldiers at the north end of the square. There, I later learned from several eyewitnesses, he managed to negotiate time for a retreat for the thousands of students still huddled on the steps of the monument and in the tents scattered across the square.

At 4 o’clock, the floodlights on the square were doused and only the headlights of APCs and an occasional television light pierced the darkness. A wave of soldiers moved from the Great Hall and marched onto the southern half of the square, their rifles, bayonets fixed, pointed before them. Twenty minutes later, the lights came on again.

“I remember the APCs moving,” a Western reporter told me days later. “It was eerie, the dark outlines of the APCs against the floodlights, the elongated shadows stretching into the square.” As the APCs churned over the northern edge of the square, a column of students started pouring toward the southeast corner through a gantlet of student marshals holding hands, forming a tunnel to apparent safety. It was 5 a.m.

Five minutes later, the first soldier was on the monument. Five minutes after that, about 100 yards away, the Goddess of Democracy toppled forward, ground under the tracks of an APC.

What happened in the next 60 minutes may never be fully known. The next day, many students told of APCs rolling over tents filled with students, grinding their bodies to a pulp. A senior American diplomat said later that many students were crushed to death. There have been dozens of firsthand accounts of bodies being burned on the square with flame throwers, of soldiers shoveling bodies into piles “like cordwood,” one Chinese told me.

There is, too, a tale--maybe apocryphal--of students standing to protect the Goddess of Democracy. In the days that followed, as I visited university campuses, I heard the story over and over: A dozen students had linked arms around the statue, facing the armor that would devour them. “They were run over,” a student said to me, tears streaming down his face. “They were all killed.”

Somehow, though, the students who retreated south escaped the square unharmed. A Western reporter who walked the last yards with the students said that he saw no one shot during the withdrawal, that even the last stragglers made it off the square alive. “I was impressed by the calm,” he told me, “indeed the serenity of the students.”

At the same time, the Chinese army fanned throughout Beijing, the rattle of machine guns and automatic rifles filling the air. Tanks pushed through the streets, bashing through barricades, retaking the city from its own citizens.

AFTERMATH

Sunday morning, June 4. It was 4:30 when I made it home. I could barely absorb what I had seen, and, somehow, I slept for several hours. The morning sun, rising through Beijing’s gray-brown haze, brought little solace. The continuing, sporadic gunfire reminded me of what had happened the night before, and what was still taking place. I talked to a fellow reporter about going back out on the streets, something we regarded as dangerous, but something we thought we should do. We took bicycles--the road was impassable to cars--and gingerly headed back toward the square where we could hear gunshots.

Changan Avenue bore the scars of battle. Twisted steel lane dividers pretzeled across the road. Flattened garbage cans, gutted buses and pulverized concrete barriers lay like the entrails of madness the entire distance to the square. As we weaved through the debris, Beijing’s residents peered from the mouths of the hutongs, staring at the wreckage. There were few bicyclists. One, a tough, grizzled youth, pumped up behind us. “It’s dangerous,” he informed us. “Aren’t you scared?” I assured him that I was.

I did not see what happened next, just the result. But four people, three flight attendants from Air France and a Portuguese reporter for a Hong Kong magazine, described the scene.

Beginning in the morning, about 10:25, a frail line of about 60 protesters, unarmed, walked past the Beijing Hotel toward the army, pleading with their eyes to stop the slaughter. Rifles chattered. Dozens of people slumped onto the pavement. Another line of protesters pushed toward the wall of soldiers, and again the rifles crackled. More people fell, blood spreading across their chests, some wounded, some dead. In all, more than 50 people were killed or wounded.

“They just stood there and died,” the Portuguese reporter said. “The first time the troops started shooting, it lasted for 60 seconds. I was looking at my watch, counting the seconds.” There were, the reporter told me, four lines of protesters and four fusillades before the suicidal effort was extinguished.

We rode up to the Beijing Hotel just after the slaughter. There were still bodies on the street, some being hefted onto bicycle carts, others just lying there. The other reporter and I ran through the upper floors of the hotel, straining to find a better vantage point on the square. We tried locked door after locked door. One door opened into an office full of Chinese security officers with walkie-talkies. We rushed to the balcony, but the security people forced us back. Racing back down the hall, we found a stairwell to a fire escape that led to the roof. Shoving aside planks that had been piled on the exit to block access, we ran to the edge of the roof. Chinese security people on another corner of the roof began moving toward us. We stared for a minute, perhaps two, toward the square, the scene of the previous night’s carnage.

There, on the vast expanse of deathly gray, like a piece of chalk ground beneath a heel, was a stain of white, the shards of the Goddess of Democracy.

IN THE DAYS THAT followed, I tried to learn as much as possible about what had happened all over Beijing. I visited a few Chinese friends, but already the suffocating blanket of repression was falling on the city. Chinese were being told not to talk to foreigners.

At one campus, the Institute of Politics and Law, I saw a makeshift wake. In the rotunda of the administration building, the battered body of a student, his skull crushed, lay on a table surrounded by blocks of ice. Students filed slowly past, small swatches of black fabric pinned to their sleeves. No one knew the student’s name, only that he had died when the army moved into Beijing.

Three days after Tian An Men, as authorities began to round up worker and student leaders, some of whom were later executed, a radio broadcast from Hong Kong brought China, and the world, the voice of Chai Ling, a 23-year-old student at Beijing Teachers College and one of the most prominent student leaders.

“I am Chai Ling,” the voice said. “I am still alive. Ours was a peaceful protest. The ultimate price of a peaceful protest was to sacrifice oneself. Arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder, we sang the Internationale and slowly walked toward the Monument to the People’s Heroes. We sat quietly at the monument awaiting with dignity the arrival of our executioners. We realized that what was happening was a conflict between love and hate and not a battle of brute forces. My compatriots, even at the darkest moment, dawn will still break.”

photo credit for pg. 6