John Gittings
The tiananmen papers edited by Andrew Nathan and Perry Link (Little, Brown)
The sound of gunfire woke me three days after the Beijing massacre, in my hotel on the Avenue of Everlasting Peace. Rolling out of bed, I saw through the window an army column that had crossed the junction below. A gunner on the tail truck had fanned his machine gun, spraying a crowd with fire.
By the time I reached ground level, the army had disappeared and bodies were being rushed away. All that remained was a satchel on an abandoned bike, some bloodstains and projectile holes, and suitcases belonging to a man who had come from the railway station. His friend urged me to note that “he came from Qiqihar”.
This casual episode of military brutality dramatised in miniature the huge shock three nights earlier when much larger army units barrelled into Tiananmen Square, shooting down protesters and bystanders on the way. How, asked the citizens of Beijing, could the People’s Army treat the people like this?
The Tiananmen Papers, which claims to be based on documentation of the time, may help us find a fuller answer to this question. The volume is an edited selection with commentary, containing only a small percentage of the “several thousand” documents to which the pseudonymous compiler Zhang Liang described as a former civil servant says he had access. Putting doubts aside, I have found several gripping passages which may explain why “the man from Qiqihar” was mown down.
The 38th Group Army, which did most of the killing, submitted a self- justifying report to the Central Military Commission giving a partial account of its advance into Tiananmen Square on June 3-4 1989. It hailed the bravery of its officers and soldiers faced with “rioters with clubs and steel reinforced bars”. It said (correctly, I believe) that “in clearing the square the officers and soldiers … did not kill a single person with rifle fire”. But it was silent about the people killed on the way.
All armies of all nationalities lie when reporting to their superiors. Information from security agents is usually more reliable, because informing is their job. The most illuminating material here comes from agents of the state Security Ministry, who sometimes seem to show sympathy for the students. In their version of the slaughter, the protesters hurled bricks and rocks, and pushed vehicles in the army’s way. The troops then “turned their weapons on the crowd … People began crumpling to the ground.” Whenever rocks were hurled, or verbal insults were shouted, the soldiers “fired into the crowd”.
Did the man from Qiqihar, or another bystander on the morning of June 7, utter a “verbal insult”? There is another clue in a report from Martial Law headquarters to the ruling Communist Party Politburo three days before the massacre. It admitted that “the troops … are entering an urban centre [for the first time]”. Perhaps the tail gunner was a raw recruit and panicked.
The Tiananmen Papers allows us to follow more closely than before the events that led China’s “party elders” to order in the troops. The students had first occupied the square after the death of the pro-reform former party secretary general Hu Yaobang, sacked two years before by the conservatives. The elders, headed by Deng Xiaoping, were officially retired, but continued to be “consulted”. When the politburo standing committee split over how to handle the protest, the elders took over.
The documents confirm that there was considerable sympathy for the students among more liberal party leaders. The conciliatory position of Hu’s successor Zhao Ziyang eventually sacked by the elders is well known. But several others favoured dialogue, too. “I still believe that the great majority … mean well,” said Vice-Premier Wan Li, who was heavily leant on to prevent him taking their side.
Yet it is also clear that the learning curve that the student protests inflicted upon the party elders was simply too steep and too swift. The elders’ sympathy towards the original complaints about corruption waned as calls for democracy grew. What was China coming to when thousands joined in a “demonstration by bicycle” and students suggested officials should wear bikinis “to increase the transparency of government”?
The enthusiasm of the foreign press which enjoyed during those weeks a freedom it has never since recovered also alarmed the leaders. They were even more alarmed when the students began to “network” across the country, bringing back memories of the Red Guards. They were disconcerted by the hunger strike in the square, and baffled when student leaders confessed that they could no longer control their own supporters.
The most wounding blow to the elders came after a failure to persuade the students to clear the square for the visit of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. “What do we look like if the square’s a mess?” Deng Xiaoping complained. Yang Shangkun, a moderate figure, exploded that “pretty soon we won’t be able to call this capital our own any more”. This led to the decision to declare martial law. This in turn stiffened the students’ determination and brought outraged Beijing citizens to their side.
In retrospect, the sending in of the tanks after two weeks of stalemate seems inevitable. In theory, the leadership struggle between Zhao Ziyang and then-premier Li Peng a struggle between moderates and hardliners could have gone the other way. But the documents show that, from the perspective of 40 years’ party rule, Li’s arguments were bound to prevail. It had become a question of “us or them”. Losing patience, Deng decided that the West was “stirring up turmoil” by its support for people who were “the scum of the Chinese nation”.
A preliminary attempt to infiltrate army units peacefully was frustrated by the Beijing citizens who chased them away, allowing the premier to insist that “we have to be absolutely firm”. The Beijing military commander told the elders that his troops were “swallowing their anger and fuming inside”. The decision to send in the army authorised the use of force, although not under any circumstances in the square. The Tiananmen Papers is billed as “an astonishing account … from inside the heart of the politburo”. The documents said to have been brought out by Zhang have been culled, according to the American editors, to highlight “the decision-making process”. Though fascinating in detail, the only area on which they cast new light is the way that Jiang Zemin (now supreme leader), who had handled protests in Shanghai firmly but without bloodshed, was secretly chosen by the elders to replace moderate Zhao Ziyang.
Sooner or later, China is going to “reverse the verdicts” on what happened in June 1989. The Tiananmen Papers has brought the issue back into focus at the right time, when the leadership is facing a new round of change in the next two to three years. Yet we cannot gloss over the problems raised by the documents. Firstly, we do not yet have the original Chinese texts. More seriously, the quotes given may not be real quotes at all. Zhang “has combined information [from different sources] to reconstruct most of the accounts of conversations throughout the book”; the editors have used quotation marks because the materials come from “immediate participants” and are “often mutually corroborative”. To put it mildly, this is not best scholarly practice.
Also serious is the fact that the editors have not seen a single photocopy of an original document. In a careful postscript on authentication, another well-known American China academic, Orville Schell, says that Zhang clung to a distinction between passing on original documents (which would be “unpatriotic”) and “merely [passing] the reformatted contents on to foreigners like us and hence to the world at large”. The editors thought this was “illogical” but decided to respect Zhang’s “terms of the game”. I find this touching, but a shade naive. It also raises another question: how did Zhang manage to “reformat” what we are told were “several thousand documents” apparently chosen from an even larger number in a situation where he risked execution for copying even one?
The character of Zhang is also puzzling. We are told that he is or was an insider who speaks for a broader pro-reform constituency in the party. Yet on the first page of the book, he writes more like an outsider, recalling “the blood of thousands of young people spilled on the streets” of Beijing. This is hyperbole, and dated hyperbole too.
I believe these documents are, broadly speaking, “genuine”, but within limits. The next step should be to produce the full texts of the documents. If they already exist in a “reformatted” version, millions of Chinese would be the gainers and some sympathetic but concerned China scholars too.