Ex-Official Blames Tiananmen Deaths on Shortage of Riot Gear

A shortage of tear gas and rubber bullets forced China’s military to fire on demonstrators 10 years ago in Tiananmen Square, a former top Communist Party member said Friday.

Keeping to the party’s official version of the 1989 incident, Zhu Muzhi said the troops were justified in firing on “thugs” who killed soldiers and threw rocks and gas bombs. But he acknowledged that “innocent” people were also killed in the crackdown on democracy advocates.

Zhu suggested that with better anti-riot equipment and more experience in dealing with civil unrest, the Chinese government might have avoided heavy loss of life.

“We never imagined there would be such an incident, that so many thugs would surround and beat the People’s Liberation Army,” Zhu, then a member of an advisory commission of party elders, told reporters. “The police at the time had no rubber bullets, no tear gas canisters, they had nothing. In the end, the only weapon they had at hand was guns.”

In the assault, “many people on the streets who were watching the goings-on possibly were hit by flying bullets. They, in fact, were innocent,” said Zhu, who now heads a government-backed society for human rights studies.

Hundreds were killed when Chinese troops shot their way through Beijing on June 4, 1989, to quell seven weeks of peaceful protests in Tiananmen Square calling for democratic reform.

The government said the protests were an anti-government rebellion that needed to be put down with force. It has never given a credible account of the number of dead and injured, or of the thousands imprisoned in the wave of arrests that followed.