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Asia Buzz: China's Shame
Clear thinking on the
Tiananmen Massacre
By ADI IGNATIUS
May
29, 2000
Web posted at 11:00 p.m. Hong Kong time, 11:00 a.m. EDT
The anniversary of the Chinese government's slaughter of protesters and onlookers on June 4, 1989 is almost upon us. Normally this column attempts to be satirical or otherwise humorous, but this is a topic that precludes levity.
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There isn't much new to say about the horror that Deng Xiaoping and the Communist Party unleashed in Beijing that night. But it's worth remembering a few facts so that our fading memories don't deceive us. There has been a disquieting revisionism in recent years, both inside and outside China. With the passing of time and the dying of passion, the massacre (and if you value the meaning of words, it's senseless to call it anything but that) is increasingly viewed in a more "balanced" way. The images are jumbled.
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Thanks to CNN and other eyewitness reports, we recall the tanks, the murderous troops with the glazed look in their eyes, the grieving mothers in the makeshift morgues. But we've stored other, somewhat conflicting images as well: chaos on Tiananmen Square, rock-throwing mobs, soldiers lynched by the protesters. As the years tick by, these memories tend to cancel each other out. Both sides made mistakes, it's tempting to conclude, so let's just move on. Or, worse: any government would have done the same to quell such unrest.
Don't be tempted into such revisionism. To untangle what happened, it's worth recalling just a few things. First, Tiananmen was not in chaos at that time. Although students were continuing to come to Beijing from the provinces, the vast majority from the capital itself had returned to campus. It had rained for many days, and the movement on the Square had dwindled into a pathetic, almost irrelevant spectacle. On June 2 there was only a motley contingent of 5,000 water-soaked protesters. Many international journalists took that moment to head off on much-needed R. and R. breaks: there was no story, for the moment, on Tiananmen Square. There was no chaos that needed to be put down.
What happened next surely reflected a power struggle at the very top reaches of the Communist Party. China's hard-liners, having vanquished the squishy liberal faction, took the transparently provocative decision to dispatch 5,000 soldiers toward the Square; they jogged in, unarmed, from the city's outskirts. They were ineffective, of course, but their appearance served a purpose: whipping up hysteria and bringing citizens back into the streets. The students had long become a sideshow. The Party's hard-liners needed a decisive victory, one that required a military crackdown that would leave no doubt in anyone's mind who was in charge. For that, they needed targets, and the soldier joggers brought them out.
With the city thus enraged, the tanks and troops moved in with terrifying brutality the following night. Of course citizens were angry; of course they threw rocks; of course when they saw their friends and children being mowed down they turned on the advancing army, and indeed several military men were brutally killed. And these were the images that China's authorities used, over and over again in their post-massacre propaganda, to seed the doubts that persist to this day.
The Tiananmen Massacre did not have to happen. It was the Communist Party's doing. The world should deal with China, trade with China. But it should never forgive, never forget.
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