JANUARY 15, 2001 VOL. 157 NO. 2

Liu Heung Shing/AP. The hard-liners prevailed, and troops moved toward Tiananmen Square on June 4. They opened fire, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of demonstrators.

What Really Happened?
The world has never known exactly what transpired behind the scenes during the protests that rocked China in 1989. A new book, based on documents smuggled from Beijing, gives an inside look
By MATTHEW FORNEY Beijing

ALSO
Sourcing
Orville Schell analyzes the evidence

The world remembers the Chinese students protesting in Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989, and their earnest faces as they demanded democracy and freedom, ideals they didn't fully understand. It certainly remembers what happened to them—the young man in the white shirt halting a line of tanks remains one of the defining images of bravery in the past century. We remember the students because they made their stand and met their fate in the open, in the square and on the streets of Beijing. China's unnerved leadership, on the other hand, remained cloistered in its high-security compounds or in the home of Communist Party patriarch Deng Xiao-ping. The gunshots of June 4, 1989 told us what those old men ultimately decided, but we never knew how they reached that fatal point. Until now.

The U.S. editors of a new book, The Tiananmen Papers, compare their work—a trove of memos, speeches, notes and other secret documents that reveal what the decision makers were thinking—to The Pentagon Papers leaked during the Vietnam War. The book contains six months' worth of private communiquEs, evidently uncensored, that detail how China's leaders reached their decisions during the hottest days of the uprising, up until the early-morning hours of June 4 when soldiers shot their way to Tiananmen Square and the final bedraggled students marched out. No similar collection of documents has come out of China before. Whoever smuggled these papers obviously had the keys to China's most well-protected footlocker, and the political explosion will surely reverberate through a succession struggle that is already under way. "I think this release will influence people at the top of the party," says Bao Tong, who once was near the pinnacle himself as a leading political reformer before being purged during the 1989 crackdown, after which he spent seven years in jail.

These are not the stupefying meetings shown on China's state-run television, where senior leaders intone 50-page speeches while rows of underlings frantically scribble everything down. What we read is electrifying. Watch as Li Peng, then China's 61-year-old Premier, reveals his hard-line heart and moves his comrades inexorably toward a final confrontation. There's Deng Xiaoping at a Politburo Standing Committee meeting ordering the army into Beijing to quash the protests. We get to listen as the enraged elders, a group of eight doddering revolutionaries who dread having their socialist victory overturned by a bunch of cocky students, sweep aside all pretense of a legal system and demand a crackdown. "Give 'em no mercy!" hollers hard-liner Wang Zhen. "The students are nuts if they think this handful of people can overthrow our party and our government!"

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The fallout from this document will no doubt blanket the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in central Beijing, where most of China's senior leaders live. For China's top man, party chief Jiang Zemin, the release couldn't have come at a worse time. He is trying to organize a political succession, and it's already rocky. Jiang faces trouble lining up his people and is struggling to maintain his position as the head of China's military after the next leadership reshuffle, expected late next year, and thereby retain substantial power. His adversaries want him to drop all titles. At such a critical moment of inside maneuvering, somebody has jerked open the closet door allowing the skeletons of Tiananmen to spill out. The bones will become impossible to ignore in a few months, when the Chinese version will be released in Hong Kong and copies will inevitably make their surreptitious way into the rest of China. And here's the funnybone: the documents strongly hint that Jiang had more knowledge of the June 4 crackdown than he has ever let on. That will surely tickle his enemies.

Who would, or could, spirit such documents into the public domain? The only name mentioned is a pseudonym: Zhang Liang. While his real identity remains cloaked, his motive is clear: to undermine China's conservative leaders by forcing a rethink of the Tiananmen Massacre, which is still classified as a "counter-revolutionary rebellion." A press release by Foreign Affairs magazine, which will publish a 15,000-word excerpt this week, describes Zhang as "representative of reform elements within the communist hierarchy who say they believe that opening the political process is essential to successfully continuing a difficult modernization of the Chinese economy." In other words, the heist was an inside job.

Assuming, of course, that the papers are real. Remember the Hitler diaries? They made a spectacular splash in 1983, until they were exposed as the handiwork of an amateur forger. And the world knew loads about Hitler. Knowledge of the inner workings of China's leadership is virtually nonexistent. Charlatans have worked this paucity of information about China to their advantage for years. Sir Edmund Blackhouse, an oddball British Sinologist who later hinted that he copulated with the corpse of the Empress Dowager, claimed to have uncovered The Jing Shan Diary in 1914, and said it revealed the inner workings of the imperial Dragon Throne. The book's contents are now widely dismissed as fake. A controversial 1983 book, The Conspiracy and Death of Lin Biao, claimed to disclose the inside story of a power struggle against Chairman Mao that ended in the fiery death in a plane crash of his chosen successor. The book's veracity has since been credibly challenged by the daughter of China's top air force officer at the time.

Still, more recent examples of tell-all literature from China seem to have held up. In 1994, Chairman Mao's personal doctor, Li Zhisui, released a scathing biography of his famous patient. In The Private Life of Chairman Mao, Li charged that the Great Helmsman kept a stable of peasant girls who regularly contracted venereal disease from him, that he led an opulent life while most of the country went hungry, and that he cleaned his rotting teeth by munching on tea leaves. China's government huffed with indignation, but no one has convincingly discredited Li's portrait.

The fact-checking of The Tiananmen Papers seems to have gone smoothly. Zhang Liang made himself available to three American China scholars, who spent months probing for weak points in the documentation. "I originally approached this with skepticism, but the details all dovetailed with what we know and, more importantly, there are no discernible polemics," says Orville Schell, a China expert who runs the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley. Schell edited The Tiananmen Papers with two other respected China scholars: Andrew J. Nathan of Columbia University and Perry Link of Princeton. All speak Chinese, and two were in Beijing during the crackdown a decade ago. All three scholars have staked their considerable reputations that they are right—with the caveat that, as Schell says of the documents, "we still have no basis for proclaiming their authenticity with absolute authority."

But let's assume the thing is real. What does the book tell us? It's the afternoon of June 3. China's top leaders are trying to decide how to handle a deteriorating situation on the streets. The day before, Deng had recommended that "the martial law troops begin to carry out the clearing plan and finish it within two days." That failed when ordinary citizens blocked the troops' path, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not. A day later, an outraged Premier Li Peng bellows that "in broad daylight and right under our noses, the rioters seized armored cars and set up machine guns on top of them, just to show off." General Yang Shangkun, apparently having just spoken by phone with Deng, pipes in: "The troops should resort to 'all means necessary' only if everything else fails... they are to open fire only as a last resort. And let me repeat: No bloodshed within Tiananmen Square—period... This is not just my personal view; it's Comrade Xiaoping's view, too. So long as everybody agrees, then it will be unanimous." A day later, hundreds, perhaps thousands, lay dead. None was shot in the square: the slaughter took place on the avenues leading to it.

The Tiananmen Massacre, which passed its 11th anniversary last year with little fanfare, suddenly looms large. The Communist Party still officially regards the event as a "counter-revolutionary rebellion," but it's a frightening phrase that suggests treason, and the leaders generally try to avoid it. Instead they tend to refer to the 1989 events a "political upheaval." Yet more is at issue than phraseology. The events of 1989 are like a bludgeon lying on the table during a Politburo meeting. Anybody, at any time, can pick the thing up and clobber his comrades. In practical terms, that could mean airing a public message that the crackdown was wrong, that the students were not counter-revolutionary but patriotic, that the people who were punished should have their records cleared. Deng returned to power in 1978 by reassessing a similar demonstration in Tiananmen Square that had taken place in 1976. When such things happen, every party member in China must immediately choose sides.

In Their Own Words

DENG XIAOPING Paramount Leader "After thinking long and hard about this, I've concluded that we should bring in the People's Liberation Army and declare martial law in Beijing... to suppress the turmoil once and for all." ZHAO ZIYANG Communist Party Chief "It's always better to have a decision... But Comrade Xiaoping, it will be hard for me to carry out this plan." WANG ZHEN Vice President "Those goddamn bastards! Who do they think they are, trampling on sacred ground like Tiananmen so long? They're really asking for it... What's the People's Liberation Army for, anyway?" LI PENG Premier (To Deng Xiaoping) "The spear is now pointed directly at you and the others of the elder generation of proletarian revolutionaries."

The man with the most to lose in a reassessment would be Li Peng, who issued the martial law order as Premier in 1989 and still retains the No. 2 position in the party. Li is the leader that foreign dignitaries most loath shaking hands with. He's the butt of the best political jokes, and vast numbers of Chinese revile him. The Tiananmen Papers won't burnish his image. We're flies on the wall as he manipulates Deng at an early conclave, according to minutes dated April 25, 1989. "Some of the protest posters and the slogans that students shout during the marches are anti-party and anti-socialist," he says to Deng, then adds: "the spear is now pointed directly at you and the others of the elder generation." Deng, then 83, takes the bait: "Saying I'm the mastermind behind the scenes, are they?" The next day, Deng placed a now-famous editorial in the party's mouthpiece, the People's Daily, accusing the students of creating "turmoil." In response, students felt they couldn't leave the square until the editorial was recanted, and an opportunity for defusing tension tragically slipped away.

The man with the most to gain is Zhao Ziyang, the party's former leader who sided with the students and was purged on May 17. Again, we are there. "I think Comrade Ziyang must bear the main responsibility for the escalation of the student movement," says Li. "The political schemes of people with ulterior motives are becoming more and more obvious," seconds Qiao Shi, who has been viewed as sympathe-tic to reformers but appears otherwise in the book. Then Deng says he wants to bring in the army. Zhao demurs. "Comrade Xiaoping," he says, "it will be hard for me to carry out this plan. I have difficulties with it." Deng, outraged, yells, "The minority yields to the majority!" Zhao agrees, saying, "I will submit to party discipline." A day later, he visited students on a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square—and has lived under house arrest ever since.

China's current leader, Jiang Zemin, may be more vulnerable to a reassessment than anybody had previously suspected. Jiang served as Shanghai Mayor through the first half of 1989. He managed to curtail widespread protests there without calling in the army and without bloodshed. Because he remained unstained by the events in Beijing on the fateful June 4, it was widely assumed that Jiang would benefit from any official reassessment of Tiananmen. Yet such thinking will have to change with the release of minutes from an "important meeting" on May 21, two weeks before the crackdown. A party elder, Li Xiannian, is quoted proposing Jiang for the party's highest post: "I like the idea of him as General Secretary." Previously, it was thought that Jiang was considered as a candidate for the top job only after the slaughter was over. "This shows Jiang Zemin was probably in Beijing," according to Wu Guoguang, a senior political reformer who fled China in 1989 after his patron, then-party chief Zhao, was purged, "and certainly knew about the policy-making process leading to the crackdown. Now we can better understand his attitude toward those events."

Jiang is already fighting the battle of his political career. He wants to follow in the steps of his predecessor, Deng, and cling to a few top, behind-the-scenes positions, specifically as chairman of the Central Military Commission. His opposition has already mobilized. Jiang failed recently to place his right-hand man, Zeng Qinhong, onto the Politburo despite an open seat there. "That was a real slap in the face," says a Western diplomat in Beijing. The documents might help explain why. It appears that Jiang operates among leaders who are far less united than most observers believed. The Tiananmen Papers themselves prove that. In all likelihood, no one person could have smuggled so many documents out. It must have taken a coterie of highly placed, highly secretive and extremely well organized people. "The leakage of these papers is a very strong indication of the extent of the internal conflict within the Communist Party," says Liu San Ching of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of the Patriotic Movement in China.

In hindsight, the events of 11 years ago are still a great tragedy. But it's also clear that the students actually got a lot of what they demanded, with the exception of democracy. One of their biggest complaints was a job allocation system. Back then, students didn't float resumEs to employers. The state assigned them jobs. For those without political connections, that often meant spending their lives in remote provinces, with little to do and no hope of promotions. Today, nearly all students find work on their own. Their elder cousins in 1989 sensed economic despair, and feared they would be the first to slide through the cracks in the Iron Rice Bowl. That's one reason the Communist Party has so energetically promoted economic development as the last pillar of its crumbled legitimacy. A decade of astounding economic growth has swept student fears away. For today's freshmen with a social conscience, who were seven years old when the army opened fire, worries about the environment far outweigh concern for those in Beijing's graveyards.

It's hard to imagine a replay of Tiananmen in today's China. But the party can still be hard-as-nails. In late 1998, it decimated the Chinese Democracy Party, a network of hundreds of activists who formed the first real opposition grouping in 50 years. Two years ago it began a crackdown on the spiritual movement Falun Gong, and dozens of people have died in police custody for refusing to renounce their beliefs. When threatened, the party strikes hard.

And on the night of June 3, 1989, it struck hardest. As the hours wore on, the Martial Law Command sent "bulletins" to the party's top elders, who gathered in the Zhongnanhai compound as the Thirty-Eighth Group Army attempted to enter the city from the east. "Believing the troops would not use live ammunition, the citizens grew increasingly bold," reads one bulletin. "Infantrymen led the way, firing into the air. Then the soldiers—with the first two rows in a kneeling position and those in the back standing—pointed their weapons into the crowd. Approximately 10:30 p.m., under a barrage of rocks, the troops opened fire." The leaders could surely hear the shots.

With reporting by Jen Wei Ting/Hong Kong

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