Papers Provide Inside Look at Tiananmen Crackdown

A previously secret collection of documents released Friday provides the first inside account of the power struggle within China’s Communist Party leadership that led up to its bloody 1989 crackdown on protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

The internal documents, which are being published in a book and in magazine excerpts, show in detail how Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and a group of party elders overcame opposition from others in the leadership who favored placating the student demonstrators.

The papers also demonstrate how China’s current leader, Jiang Zemin, landed his job through irregular processes that violated the party’s own constitution. In the midst of the Tiananmen crisis, Deng and other elders handpicked Jiang to replace Communist Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang, who opposed the imposition of martial law in Beijing.

“The Western world, especially the United States, has thrown its entire propaganda machine into agitation work and has given a lot of encouragement and assistance to the so-called democrats or opposition in China--people who in fact are the scum of the Chinese nation,” Deng told top party leaders at a meeting June 2, 1989, the day before the army was ordered to march into the city.

“No one can keep China’s reform and opening from going forward,” he said. “Why is that? It’s simple. Without reform and opening, our development stops and our economy slides downhill.”

The number of people killed in Beijing during the 1989 crackdown remains in dispute. Western estimates have put the figure at about 700, and some calculations have been as high as 2,700. The newly published materials show that the Chinese leadership believed, as it has long said publicly, that only about 200 people died during the upheavals.

The documents, which include transcripts and recordings of internal meetings, are being published in a book, “The Tiananmen Papers,” by Public Affairs Press. Extensive excerpts from the documents are being published in the next issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

According to the publishers, the materials were compiled and smuggled out of the country by an unidentified Chinese activist. The documents were then authenticated and put into narrative form by two China scholars in the U.S., Columbia University professor Andrew Nathan and Princeton University professor Perry Link, and writer Orville Schell, who is the dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

The Chinese intermediary who obtained the documents was described as someone interested in promoting political reform within China today--that is, movement toward democracy or limits on the power of the Communist Party.

Under Jiang, who continues to hold the top job within the Chinese Communist Party and has become China’s most powerful leader since Deng’s death in 1997, the regime has continued to repress dissent and has steadfastly refused to change its official view of the demonstrations that swept the nation nearly 12 years ago.

The party’s formal verdict on those protests remains unchanged: that they amounted to a “counterrevolutionary rebellion” aimed at seizing power. Demonstrators claimed at the time that they weren’t trying to topple the Communist Party but were merely trying to persuade it to adopt some reforms.

Nathan said he thinks that the leak of the documents suggests there is renewed skirmishing inside China today over the issue of political reform.

“The power struggle in Beijing is so intense today that these documents came out,” he said. One underlying issue, he noted, is political succession: The Communist Party will hold a party congress in 2002 to decide on a new slate of leaders.

The focus of the 1989 power struggle was Zhao, the Communist Party chief, who that spring consistently favored a flexible, conciliatory approach to the students gathering in Beijing and many other Chinese cities.

“Martial law could give us total control of the situation, but think of the terror it will strike in the minds of Beijing’s citizens and students,” Zhao said May 27, 1989. “Where will that lead?”

Deng had chosen Zhao for the job, and he was being groomed as Deng’s successor. But Zhao ran afoul of a group of octogenarian party stalwarts, elders who had relinquished their formal positions but nonetheless held extraordinary influence with Deng and the People’s Liberation Army.

“Zhao Ziyang’s never paid a whit of attention to people like us,” one of the elders, Wang Zhen, complained at a party meeting May 21, 1989, the documents show. “. . . What he really wants is to drive us old people from power. We didn’t mistreat him--he’s the one who picked the fight. When he falls, it’ll be his own fault.”

At the time, Jiang was serving as the Communist Party leader for the city of Shanghai. In that job, he had taken care to court the party elders.

“Every time I’ve gone down to Shanghai, [Jiang] always sees me, and he strikes me as a modest person with strong party discipline and broad knowledge,” said one elder, Chen Yun, according to the May 21 transcript.

Officially, the top-ranking organ of the Communist Party was the five-man Standing Committee of the Politburo. But the documents confirm that two members of that committee, Zhao and his ally Hu Qili, strongly opposed the use of force. And a third, Qiao Shi, abstained from the crucial decision on martial law.

Instead, Deng and seven other party elders called the shots. They called the army into Beijing, and they also brought in Jiang to take Zhao’s place as party secretary.

According to the materials, on June 3, 1989, Deng’s senior ally, Yang Shangkun, told the other party elders, “I’ve also just been in touch with Comrade Xiaoping, and he has asked me to relay two points to everyone.

“The first is: Solve the problem before dawn tomorrow. He means our martial law troops should completely finish their task of clearing the square before sunup. The second is: Be reasonable with the students. . . . The troops should resort to ‘all means necessary’ only if everything else fails.”

That night, the People’s Liberation Army shot its way into the center of Beijing.

The general outlines of the power struggle have been described before. But the new documents are the first extensive account of what happened from within the Chinese leadership.

“The contents didn’t revolutionize my view of what happened,” Link said Friday. “But they’re much more detailed than anything I’ve seen.”