Tiananmen Massacre or Battle of Beijing?by Eugene Ruyle, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, California State University, Long Beach, Institute for the Critical Study of Society at the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library (Oakland) cuyleruyle@mac.com
June 4, 2021 (various versions 1990-2021)
There was no massacre at Tiananmen Square on June 3-4, 1989. What happened at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890 was a massacre. What happened to Tulsa’s Black Wall Street between May 31 and June 1, 1921, was a massacre. What happened to the people of Jeju Island, Korea in 1948 was a massacre.
What happened in Beijing in 1989 was not a massacre. It was not the military killing unarmed civilians. It was a conflict in which soldiers and police as well as civilians were killed. It was played out on the streets of Beijing, not at Tiananmen Square, which remained non-violent, though tense. It might more appropriately be called the Battle of Beijing. On one side was the legitimate government of China; the other side included counter-revolutionary forces, though not exclusively.
As I understand them, the Tiananmen protests of 1989 occurred in two waves. The first started in late April and involved millions of students and workers protesting at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, a traditional center of protests in China. This first wave was primarily focused on Chinese domestic politics and broke out after the death of Hu Yaobang, a popular reform leader within the Communist Party. There were about seven weeks of peaceful, non-violent demonstrations with millions of people—students, workers, citizens—from all over China participating at different times and in different ways. Hundreds of students and others participated in hunger strikes. There were massive marches, demonstrations, and vigils in Beijing, centering on Tiananmen Square. Martial law was declared on May 20, but the government was unable to enforce it as over a million residents took to the streets in protest and the Army simply refused to act against them. To the best of my knowledge, there was no significant foreign involvement in this first phase. Although CIA agents were no doubt present, it does not appear they were behind the protests to the extent of the 2019 Hong Kong protests.
On May 28, a vote was taken among the protesters on whether to continue the protests. Most wanted to end them and did in fact leave. By the end of May, only about 10,000 students remained at Tiananmen Square, or less than one percent of the earlier demonstrators.
The situation changed on May 30, as some students assembled the 28-foot high “Goddess of Democracy” in the middle of Tiananmen Square. This clearly imitated the Statue of Liberty in the United States. It attracted many students and curious citizens, but it provoked the authorities, who correctly saw it as a sign of foreign intrusion into a domestic issue. There is also evidence of foreign funding for this second phase, and some of the student leaders later said their purpose was to provoke a confrontation that would lead to the overthrow the Communist Party. Most of the demonstrators did not know this and the role of the Communist Party itself had not been an issue in the first wave of protests. The authorities began to prepare for clearing the Square and troops were brought into Beijing for this purpose.
Accounts differ on what happened next, but the violence began on June 2, when three people were killed in an accident involving an army jeep causing widespread protests in Beijing. The violence began in earnest as troops established control of the city on the evening on June 3 and early morning of June 4. Hundreds were killed and thousands injured. None of this happened in Tiananmen Square itself.
In an eyewitness account, Hou Dejian (a popular singer from Taiwan who had defected to the PRC and who was also one of the hunger strikers) tells of his attempts to defuse the situation in the early morning of June 4, and that the protesters in the square had “a machine gun, two semi-automatic rifles, a pistol, and a case of incendiary bombs, which the students had made with beer bottles.” The students were persuaded to surrender their weapons and marched out of the square singing the Internationale in front of the largely unarmed soldiers.
One of the student leaders, Chai Ling, escaped, fled to the U.S. with a scholarship to Princeton, married and now has her own business near Boston, MA. She has been quoted as saying she wanted to provoke bloodshed which would lead to the overthrow of the CPC. She escaped from China through a CIA operation known as Yellowbird, was given a fellowship to Princeton. She later married, started her own business, and lives near Boston.
According to official Chinese sources, nearly 300 people died, including soldiers, students, “lawless ruffians,” “bad elements,” and “people who were killed by mistake.” About 5,000 police officers and soldiers and over 2,000 civilians were wounded. No one was killed in Tiananmen Square and no one was run over by tanks in the Square.
On June 9, Deng Xiaoping, appearing in public for the first time since the protests began, delivered a speech praising the “martyrs” (PLA soldiers who had died). Deng stated that the goal of the movement was to overthrow the Party and the state. “Their goal is to establish a totally Western-dependent bourgeois republic,” Deng said of the protesters. Deng argued that protesters had complained about corruption to cover their real motive, which was to replace the socialist system. He said that “the entire imperialist Western world plans to make all socialist countries discard the socialist road and then bring them under the monopoly of international capital and onto the capitalist road.” (Wikipedia, Tiananmen Square protests of 1989)
In view of the conflicting interpretations and contradictory “eyewitness” accounts, it is difficult to understand what really happened in Beijing from mid-April to mid-June, but talk of a Tiananmen massacre clouds our understanding. In my view, the fact that one the largest popular demonstrations in history continued for six weeks without the Communist Party being able to do anything to stop it until there was clear evidence of foreign involvement tells us a lot about Chinese society and the role of the Communist Party during the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
SOURCES:
I haven’t done any research on this topic for several years. My own primary source for the above is Crisis at Tiananmen, by Yi Mu and Mark V. Thompson, San Francisco: China Books and Periodicals, 1989. The quote from Hou Dejian is from page 243. Chai Ling is also quoted.
Here are some other worthwhile sources:
CHINA’S TIENANMEN SQUARE:
HISTORY CLARIFIES WHAT HAPPENED IN 1989
By Andy McInerney Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the June 20, 1996 issue of Workers World newspaper
http://www.workers.org/ww/tienanmen.html
WikiLeaks confirms it. Tiananmen Square ‘massacre’ was a myth
By Deirdre Griswold
Published Jun 29, 2011 2:53 PM
http://www.workers.org/2011/world/tiananmen_0707/
Why communists defend People’s China
From a talk by Richard Becker Dec. 6 to the New York conference on the “Communist Manifesto in the Age of Imperialism.”
http://www.workers.org/ww/1999/r_becker0114.php
The USA’s decades long war against China, by Robert S. Rodvik
VOLTAIRE NETWORK | VANCOUVER (CANADA) | 13 JANUARY 2013
PART II
http://www.voltairenet.org/article177116.html
PART I
VOLTAIRE NETWORK | VANCOUVER (CANADA) | 7 JANUARY 2013
http://www.voltairenet.org/article177063.html
But there are many more worthwhile and more recent sources which I haven’t had time to utilize, in particular The Great Reversal: The Privatization of China, 1978-1989, by William Hinton. Monthly Review Press. Full text available at: http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/TGR90.html
I have the greatest respect and admiration for Hinton’s work and used Fanshen as a required supplementary text for my Introductory Anthropology classes for many years. Unfortunately, his treatment of post-Mao China is fundamentally flawed. But developing this viewpoint will require much more work. Maybe next year.
Meanwhile, here’s a quote from Hinton’s Preface:
“June 4, 1989, stands as a stark watershed in China’s modern history. The slaughter of unarmed civilians by units of the Peoples Liberation Army as they blasted their way to Tiananmen Square illuminated the “reform” era as nothing else could. It lit up, like a bolt of cosmic lightning, the reactionary essence of China’s current leading group.” Hinton’s book is about how Deng went “from the status of admired hero, defiant yet irrepressible victim of the hated gang of four, to that of corrupt autocrat and bloodstained oppressor?”
There was no massacre at Tiananmen Square on June 3-4, 1989. What happened at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890 was a massacre. What happened to Tulsa’s Black Wall Street between May 31 and June 1, 1921, was a massacre. What happened to the people of Jeju Island, Korea in 1948 was a massacre.
What happened in Beijing in 1989 was not a massacre. It was not the military killing unarmed civilians. It was a conflict in which soldiers and police as well as civilians were killed. It was played out on the streets of Beijing, not at Tiananmen Square, which remained non-violent, though tense. It might more appropriately be called the Battle of Beijing. On one side was the legitimate government of China; the other side included counter-revolutionary forces, though not exclusively.
As I understand them, the Tiananmen protests of 1989 occurred in two waves. The first started in late April and involved millions of students and workers protesting at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, a traditional center of protests in China. This first wave was primarily focused on Chinese domestic politics and broke out after the death of Hu Yaobang, a popular reform leader within the Communist Party. There were about seven weeks of peaceful, non-violent demonstrations with millions of people—students, workers, citizens—from all over China participating at different times and in different ways. Hundreds of students and others participated in hunger strikes. There were massive marches, demonstrations, and vigils in Beijing, centering on Tiananmen Square. Martial law was declared on May 20, but the government was unable to enforce it as over a million residents took to the streets in protest and the Army simply refused to act against them. To the best of my knowledge, there was no significant foreign involvement in this first phase. Although CIA agents were no doubt present, it does not appear they were behind the protests to the extent of the 2019 Hong Kong protests.
On May 28, a vote was taken among the protesters on whether to continue the protests. Most wanted to end them and did in fact leave. By the end of May, only about 10,000 students remained at Tiananmen Square, or less than one percent of the earlier demonstrators.
The situation changed on May 30, as some students assembled the 28-foot high “Goddess of Democracy” in the middle of Tiananmen Square. This clearly imitated the Statue of Liberty in the United States. It attracted many students and curious citizens, but it provoked the authorities, who correctly saw it as a sign of foreign intrusion into a domestic issue. There is also evidence of foreign funding for this second phase, and some of the student leaders later said their purpose was to provoke a confrontation that would lead to the overthrow the Communist Party. Most of the demonstrators did not know this and the role of the Communist Party itself had not been an issue in the first wave of protests. The authorities began to prepare for clearing the Square and troops were brought into Beijing for this purpose.
Accounts differ on what happened next, but the violence began on June 2, when three people were killed in an accident involving an army jeep causing widespread protests in Beijing. The violence began in earnest as troops established control of the city on the evening on June 3 and early morning of June 4. Hundreds were killed and thousands injured. None of this happened in Tiananmen Square itself.
In an eyewitness account, Hou Dejian (a popular singer from Taiwan who had defected to the PRC and who was also one of the hunger strikers) tells of his attempts to defuse the situation in the early morning of June 4, and that the protesters in the square had “a machine gun, two semi-automatic rifles, a pistol, and a case of incendiary bombs, which the students had made with beer bottles.” The students were persuaded to surrender their weapons and marched out of the square singing the Internationale in front of the largely unarmed soldiers.
One of the student leaders, Chai Ling, escaped, fled to the U.S. with a scholarship to Princeton, married and now has her own business near Boston, MA. She has been quoted as saying she wanted to provoke bloodshed which would lead to the overthrow of the CPC. She escaped from China through a CIA operation known as Yellowbird, was given a fellowship to Princeton. She later married, started her own business, and lives near Boston.
According to official Chinese sources, nearly 300 people died, including soldiers, students, “lawless ruffians,” “bad elements,” and “people who were killed by mistake.” About 5,000 police officers and soldiers and over 2,000 civilians were wounded. No one was killed in Tiananmen Square and no one was run over by tanks in the Square.
On June 9, Deng Xiaoping, appearing in public for the first time since the protests began, delivered a speech praising the “martyrs” (PLA soldiers who had died). Deng stated that the goal of the movement was to overthrow the Party and the state. “Their goal is to establish a totally Western-dependent bourgeois republic,” Deng said of the protesters. Deng argued that protesters had complained about corruption to cover their real motive, which was to replace the socialist system. He said that “the entire imperialist Western world plans to make all socialist countries discard the socialist road and then bring them under the monopoly of international capital and onto the capitalist road.” (Wikipedia, Tiananmen Square protests of 1989)
In view of the conflicting interpretations and contradictory “eyewitness” accounts, it is difficult to understand what really happened in Beijing from mid-April to mid-June, but talk of a Tiananmen massacre clouds our understanding. In my view, the fact that one the largest popular demonstrations in history continued for six weeks without the Communist Party being able to do anything to stop it until there was clear evidence of foreign involvement tells us a lot about Chinese society and the role of the Communist Party during the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
#
SOURCES:
I haven’t done any research on this topic for several years. My own primary source for the above is Crisis at Tiananmen, by Yi Mu and Mark V. Thompson, San Francisco: China Books and Periodicals, 1989. The quote from Hou Dejian is from page 243. Chai Ling is also quoted.
Here are some other worthwhile sources:
CHINA’S TIENANMEN SQUARE:
HISTORY CLARIFIES WHAT HAPPENED IN 1989
By Andy McInerney Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the June 20, 1996 issue of Workers World newspaper
http://www.workers.org/ww/tienanmen.html
WikiLeaks confirms it. Tiananmen Square ‘massacre’ was a myth
By Deirdre Griswold
Published Jun 29, 2011 2:53 PM
http://www.workers.org/2011/world/tiananmen_0707/
Why communists defend People’s China
From a talk by Richard Becker Dec. 6 to the New York conference on the “Communist Manifesto in the Age of Imperialism.”
http://www.workers.org/ww/1999/r_becker0114.php
The USA’s decades long war against China, by Robert S. Rodvik
VOLTAIRE NETWORK | VANCOUVER (CANADA) | 13 JANUARY 2013
PART II
http://www.voltairenet.org/article177116.html
PART I
VOLTAIRE NETWORK | VANCOUVER (CANADA) | 7 JANUARY 2013
http://www.voltairenet.org/article177063.html
But there are many more worthwhile and more recent sources which I haven’t had time to utilize, in particular The Great Reversal: The Privatization of China, 1978-1989, by William Hinton. Monthly Review Press. Full text available at: http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/TGR90.html
I have the greatest respect and admiration for Hinton’s work and used Fanshen as a required supplementary text for my Introductory Anthropology classes for many years. Unfortunately, his treatment of post-Mao China is fundamentally flawed. But developing this viewpoint will require much more work. Maybe next year.
Meanwhile, here’s a quote from Hinton’s Preface:
“June 4, 1989, stands as a stark watershed in China’s modern history. The slaughter of unarmed civilians by units of the Peoples Liberation Army as they blasted their way to Tiananmen Square illuminated the “reform” era as nothing else could. It lit up, like a bolt of cosmic lightning, the reactionary essence of China’s current leading group.” Hinton’s book is about how Deng went “from the status of admired hero, defiant yet irrepressible victim of the hated gang of four, to that of corrupt autocrat and bloodstained oppressor?”
Johnson Choi Biz 