CHAPTER 15
Tiananmen
CRACKS IN THE Soviet monolith began to emerge in
Eastern Europe at the start of 1989, leading to the fall of the
Berlin Wall in November and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet
Union itself. But China seemed stable, and its relations with the
rest of the world were the best since the Communist victory in 1949
and the proclamation of the People’s Republic. Relations with the
United States especially had made major progress. The two countries
were cooperating in thwarting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan;
the United States was selling significant levels of arms to China;
trade was increasing; and exchanges, from cabinet members to naval
vessels, were flourishing.
Mikhail Gorbachev,
still presiding over the Soviet Union, was planning a visit to
Beijing in May. Moscow had met to a significant extent the three
conditions put forward by Beijing for an improvement in Sino-Soviet
relations: withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan;
redeployment of Soviet forces away from the Chinese border; and a
Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia. International conferences were
routinely scheduled for Beijing—including a meeting that April of
the board of directors of the Asian Development Bank, a
multilateral development organization that China had joined three
years earlier, which unexpectedly provided a backdrop for the
unfolding drama.
It all began with the
death of Hu Yaobang. Deng had overseen his rise in 1981 to General
Secretary, the highest leadership post of the Communist Party. In
1986, when conservative critics blamed Hu for indecisiveness in the
face of student demonstrations, he was replaced as General
Secretary by Zhao Ziyang, another protégé of Deng, while remaining
a member of the ruling Politburo. During a Politburo meeting on
April 8, 1989, the seventy-three-year-old Hu suffered a heart
attack. His stunned colleagues revived him and rushed him to the
hospital. He suffered another heart attack there and died on April
15.
As with Zhou Enlai’s
passing in 1976, Hu’s death was the occasion for politically
charged mourning. However, in the intervening years, the
restrictions on permissible speech had been relaxed. While Zhou’s
mourners in 1976 had veiled their criticisms of Mao and Jiang Qing
in allegorical references to ancient dynastic court politics, the
demonstrators over Hu in 1989 named their targets. The atmosphere
was already tense due to the upcoming seventieth anniversary of the
May Fourth Movement, a 1919 campaign by nationalist-minded Chinese
protesting the weakness of the Chinese government and perceived
inequities in the Treaty of Versailles.1
Hu’s admirers laid
wreaths and elegiac poems at the Monument to the People’s Heroes in
Tiananmen Square, many praising the former General Secretary’s
dedication to political liberalization and calling for his spirit
to live on in further reforms. Students in Beijing and other cities
took the opportunity to voice their frustration with corruption,
inflation, press restrictions, university conditions, and the
persistence of Party “elders” ruling informally behind the scenes.
In Beijing, seven demands were put forward by various student
groups, which threatened to demonstrate until the government had
implemented them. Not all the groups supported every demand; an
unprecedented confluence of disparate resentments escalated into
upheaval. What had started as a demonstration evolved into an
occupation of Tiananmen Square challenging the authority of the
government.
Events escalated in a
manner neither observers nor participants thought conceivable at
the beginning of the month. By June, antigovernment protests of
various sizes had spread nationwide to 341 cities.2 Protesters had taken
over trains and schools, and main roads in the capital were
blocked. In Tiananmen Square, students declared a hunger strike,
attracting widespread attention from both local and international
observers and other nonstudent groups, which began to join the
protesters. Chinese leaders were obliged to move Gorbachev’s
welcoming ceremony from Tiananmen Square. Humiliatingly, a muted
ceremony was held at the Beijing airport without public attendance.
Some reports held that elements of the People’s Liberation Army
defied orders to deploy to the capital and quell the
demonstrations, and that government employees were marching with
the protesters in the street. The political challenge was
underscored by developments in China’s far west, where Tibetans and
members of China’s Uighur Muslim minority had begun to agitate
based on their own cultural issues (in the Uighur case, the recent
publication of a book claimed to offend Islamic
sensibilities).3
Uprisings generally
develop their own momentum as developments slide out of the control
of the principal actors, who become characters in a play whose
script they no longer know. For Deng, the protests stirred the
historical Chinese fear of chaos and memories of the Cultural
Revolution—whatever the stated goals of the demonstrators. The
scholar Andrew J. Nathan has summed up the impasse
eloquently:
The students did not set out to pose a mortal challenge to what they knew was a dangerous regime. Nor did the regime relish the use of force against the students. The two sides shared many goals and much common language. Through miscommunication and misjudgment, they pushed one another into positions in which options for compromise became less and less available. Several times a solution seemed just within reach, only to dissolve at the last moment. The slide to calamity seemed slow at first but then accelerated as divisions deepened on both sides. Knowing the outcome, we read the story with a sense of horror that we receive from true tragedy.4
This is not the place
to examine the events that led to the tragedy at Tiananmen Square;
each side has different perceptions depending on the various, often
conflicting, origins of their participation in the crisis. The
student unrest started as a demand for remedies to specific
grievances. But the occupation of the main square of a country’s
capital, even when completely peaceful, is also a tactic to
demonstrate the impotence of the government, to weaken it, and to
tempt it into rash acts, putting it at a disadvantage.
There is no dispute
about the denouement, however. After hesitating for seven weeks and
exhibiting serious divisions within its ranks over the use of
force, the Chinese leadership cracked down decisively on June 4.
The General Secretary of the Communist Party, Zhao Ziyang, was
dismissed. After weeks of internal debates, Deng and a majority of
the Politburo ordered the PLA to clear Tiananmen Square. A harsh
suppression of the protest followed—all seen on television,
broadcast by media that had come from all over the world to record
the momentous meeting between Gorbachev and the Chinese
leadership.