TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061289/06128900.022

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 14.2 KB | 275 lines

                ¢α                                                          NATION, Page 24

COVER STORY

Despair and Death In a Beijing Square


After weeks of hesitation, the regime cracks down, and an
unleashed military commits a massacre against its own people

By Jesse Birnbaum and Howard G. Chua-Eoan


    It was only a matter of time. For seven weeks the world had
marveled at the restraint demonstrated by both Beijing's rulers
and the thousands of demonstrators for democracy who had
occupied Tiananmen Square. The whole affair, in fact, had
developed the aura of a surrealistic ritual, with both sides'
forces stepping in circles as if they were performing some
stately, stylized pavane. Violence, it seemed, was out of the
question. And then, early Sunday morning, the dance ended in a
spasm of fury, the worst day of bloodshed in Communist China's
history.

    Until week's end it appeared that the army would continue
to hold back. On Friday unarmed soldiers in shirtsleeves made
a desultory pass at dispersing the crowds but quickly turned
back. By Saturday afternoon, however, the mood changed. At 2
p.m. troops popped tear-gas shells and beat up people trying to
stop them from moving into the center of Beijing. An hour later,
behind the Great Hall of the People, helmeted soldiers began
lashing out at students, bystanders and other citizens who, as
if summoned by some irresistible call to the barricades, rushed
to the district by the thousands. Soldiers stripped off their
belts and used them to whip people; others beat anyone in their
path with truncheons, bloodying heads as they tried to pry an
opening through the mob. For 5 1/2 hours the students held fast.
Then the army inexplicably vanished. Within an hour, off Qianmen
West Road on the southern end of the square, 1,200 more troops
appeared. Once again they were surrounded by civilians; the
soldiers again retreated.

    But those forays were only the prelude to death. At 2 a.m.
Sunday a convoy of 50 trucks with foot soldiers barreled along
the crowded streets that empty into the square. Advance troops
torched buses and trucks that had been set up as barricades,
enabling the convoy to pass through. Suddenly soldiers of the
People's Liberation Army seemed to be everywhere: pouring out
of the ancient Forbidden City, poised on the rooftops of the
Great Hall of the People and Mao Zedong's mausoleum, entering
the vast, 100-acre square from side streets in a triple-fanged
movement from the south, west and east. Ten thousand strong, the
army mounted a deliberately vicious assault.

    Leveling their AK-47 assault rifles, the soldiers began
firing away at the mobs. The gas tanks of commandeered buses
exploded. Huge streams of people fled in terror past blazing
trees along Changan Avenue -- the Avenue of Eternal Peace. As
helmeted soldiers mounted automatic machine guns on tripods
facing the square, policemen with truncheons chased people from
the sidewalks and the ornate marble bridges leading to the
Forbidden City.

    The shooting grew most intense by 2:15 a.m. A Belgian
tourist said he saw a hundred soldiers line up in front of the
Museum of the Revolution and fire into the crowd. Panic-stricken
people fell to the pavement or cowered behind the imperial
city's ornate stone lions. Many sought sanctuary at the Beijing
Hotel complex, where military officers later combed through
rooms searching for foreign journalists' notebooks and audio-and
videotapes.

    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.

    U.S. officials believe the attack on the students reflected
desperation on the part of the country's gerontocracy, led by
Deng Xiaoping. But though the crackdown was obviously meant to
intimidate the people-power movement, it could have the
opposite effect. Disaffected Chinese citizens are calling for
the people "to unite in the open or underground," as one of them
put it, "to seek revenge for all the deaths."

    Though of greater magnitude, the massacre was gruesomely
reminiscent of the Tiananmen Square riots of 1976. Widespread
revulsion over that bloodbath led to the downfall of the
infamous Gang of Four, headed by Mao's wife Jiang Qing, and the
ascendance to power two years later of Deng. Unable to accept
the new world crying out from the streets, Deng appears to have
reverted to a hoary Maoist maxim: "Political power grows out of
the barrel of a gun." With devastating carnage, Deng proved he
could unleash the firepower. But now that his regime is riding
the military tiger, can it dismount without being torn to
pieces?

    The troops brought to the capital from all over China
during the past few weeks are said to be loyal not to some
central command but to various factions in the leadership. Thus
while numerous units remained behind barricades, others, like
the 27th Army, wreaked destruction in the city. Reports of heavy
fire inside the Forbidden City, where police and P.L.A. units
are routinely billeted, led to speculation that the rival units
were shooting it out with one another. Furthermore, said a
Western academic in Beijing, "there was very clearly a battle
between two different army units on the road to the airport."

    The bloody denouement of the demonstrations seemed to be
the direct result of Deng's attempts to retain the upper hand
in a protracted power struggle among China's leaders. The
disarray was signaled by the failure in recent weeks of party
elders to reach consensus on the formal ouster of party chief
Zhao Ziyang, who had lost favor because he sympathized with the
student protesters. Within the party rank and file, the
hard-liners' attempts to brand Zhao a counterrevolutionary had
met with silent resistance and even mutters of bu dui (not
correct).

    Added to that was the sudden re-emergence early in the week
of a quartet of octogenarian revolutionaries, among them
economist Chen Yun and former President Li Xiannian. This seemed
to indicate that Deng was seeking support against Zhao from the
very men he had once sidelined for resisting his economic
reforms. Analysts in Beijing feared that Deng had cast his lot
with this ideologically rigid Gang of Elders, as the group was
dubbed. Such fears were buttressed by renewed government
denunciations of "bourgeois liberalization," the phrase that
presaged a conservative crackdown two years ago. Some Chinese
found a good deal of irony in the awkward situation. "The
80-year-olds," commented one wag, "are calling meetings of
70-year-olds to decide which 60-year-olds should retire."

    Apparently Deng's strategy prevailed. Throughout the week,
party documents circulated detailing the events that
contributed to Zhao's unofficial removal. As recounted by
President Yang Shangkun in these papers, Zhao's offenses
included failing to support a harsh editorial in the People's
Daily that condemned the demonstrators and refusing to join
other Politburo members in backing martial law.

    The rumor-heavy press in Hong Kong suggested an altogether
different scheme. Newspapers claimed that the ultimate target
of the Gang of Elders was not Zhao but Deng; the elders, it was
said, intended to force Deng out of his role and replace him
with the more conservative and orthodox President Yang. Beijing
analysts discounted the theory as overly sensational. In fact,
Deng is the most hard-line enemy of the students. Only the party
turmoil may have delayed him from lining up support for his
position. The massive sweep through Tiananmen could not have
been facilitated without the cooperation of the various military
factions that owe fealty to such veterans of the revolutionary
war as Yang, Li and Peng Zhen.

    Many suspect that Yang is the true champion of the military
push into Tiananmen. While Deng heads the shadowy but
omnipotent Central Military Commission, the President has placed
relatives in key positions in the military hierarchy; one of the
units involved in the Tiananmen massacre was under the personal
command of his brother Yang Baibing. If Deng, through loss of
face or life, ceased to rule China, Yang Shangkun might attempt
to maneuver himself into the leadership of the Central Military
Commission and replace Deng as China's most eminent leader.

    In the days before the attack, the government began to show
its desperation. It organized antiliberal rallies that became
unwitting parodies of the strident Red Guard style of the '60s.
The authorities tried to rein in the press. Foreign
correspondents were warned to stop covering student activities,
but few reporters took heed. Chinese television ceased live
coverage from Tiananmen Square and began carrying statements
from leaders expressing support for martial law. "Nobody takes
the news broadcasts seriously these days," said an office
secretary. "They are all a sham."

    Meanwhile, students holding out on the square knew that
their numbers were dwindling and that their protest was turning
into a minor sidelight to a power struggle. A few days ago, in
a flash of their earlier exuberance, they erected a "Goddess of
Democracy" at the northern end of the square. The 30-ft.-high
sculpture, fashioned from plaster-covered Styrofoam and bearing
a marked resemblance to the Statue of Liberty, drew contemptuous
comments from the government -- and admiration from thousands
of onlookers.

    The bloody assault by Deng's armed troops ended all that,
and also the Goddess of Democracy, which was crushed by a tank
once the troops gained control of the square. Even so, the
events of the past seven weeks immunized vast numbers of people
against the traditional propaganda bromides and convinced them
that the government was not invulnerable: it was only an agency
of brutal power. If the student campaign failed, it at least
succeeded in forging a historic new link between China's
intellectual community and its masses. As an observer said
earlier in the week, "It will be impossible to turn back the
clock."

    Although the link could prove tenuous, the observer just
may be right. And if he is, that bond between two once
disparate elements could haunt Deng and his successors for a
long time to come. A similar connection between intellectuals
and workers gave rise to the Solidarity movement that rocked
Poland in the early '80s. China's leaders had been fretting
about the similarities between the student movement and the
Solidarity campaign. Tellingly, when officials ordered arrests
last week, three of the 14 people who were briefly detained were
members of a new, unauthorized union.

    In the thousands of years spanned by Chinese history,
unspeakable atrocities have occurred. Millions have suffered
from the machinations of cloistered emperors, empresses and
eunuchs; whole cities have been slaughtered by marauding
invaders and warlords. Until Sunday, that all seemed safely in
the past. No one quite expected it to happen again. The shock
will ease with the passage of weeks. The tremors will be felt
for years.


-- David Aikman, Sandra Burton and Jaime A. FlorCruz/Beijing