Despair and Death In a Beijing Square

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Some protesters held fast, fighting with rocks and Molotov cocktails. Near a hotel entrance, a group of demonstrators saw two soldiers kill a civilian, then pounced on the pair and beat them to death. An armored personnel carrier that had sped into the square half an hour before the main assault was blocked by a barricade of bicycle racks. Protesters mummified the APC in banners and cloth, then set it ablaze with Molotov cocktails, trapping its crew of eight or nine soldiers.

The fighting spilled out of the Tiananmen area and into other Beijing neighborhoods. Trucks were set afire, and the sound of shooting filled the air. Troops firing from the rooftops and upper floors of Radio Beijing and the Minzu Hotel wounded and killed people who were asleep in their homes. Across town, reporters sighted tanks on the move, some of them firing their cannon indiscriminately down what appeared to be near-empty thoroughfares. Huge blazes swept across residential districts.

It was all too much for the overpowered civilians. By 5 a.m. Tiananmen Square was virtually emptied of all protesters; only the carcasses of smoldering vehicles and debris remained. Elsewhere in the city, sporadic skirmishes continued, but by then the great, peaceful dream for democracy had become a horrible nightmare. Hospitals reported receiving scores of dead and hundreds or even thousands of wounded. One anguished doctor reported at least 500 dead. When the government radio announced that 1,000 had died, the station's personnel were quickly removed, and no further death toll was broadcast. Reports circulated that many bodies were being trucked away to be cremated, so the real count may never be known.

At sunrise the sky was enveloped in smoke. Some residents bravely regrouped and taunted the troops occupying the square, crying, "Beasts! Beasts!" Again shots were fired, and some 5,000 fled for their lives, scrambling into the narrow hutungs, or alleys, that snake through the city. On Sunday the P.L.A. newspaper Liberation Daily proclaimed a great victory over a "counterrevolutionary insurrection." Still, reports of shooting and fighting in Beijing continued to pour in the following day. Additionally, citizens' blockades have begun to go up in Shanghai, China's largest city.

From his weekend home in Kennebunkport, Me., where he had arrived only a day earlier after his triumphant NATO meeting, a sorrowful President Bush said, "I deeply deplore the decision to use force against peaceful demonstrators and the subsequent loss of life." A White House official told TIME that Bush, a former Ambassador to China, felt "personal anguish and even anger." Secretary of State James Baker called the affair "ugly and chaotic," and his department sent a message to China's leaders urging them to "return to restraint."

The Bush Administration feels it is in an acute dilemma. While the Administration wants to make clear that the U.S. Government is outraged over the brutality in Tiananmen Square, it does not want to jeopardize the ten- year-old "strategic partnership" between Beijing and Washington. Already there is congressional pressure to act. On hearing of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Senator Jesse Helms called for a cutoff of American military cooperation with the People's Republic.