1989 Tiananmen Square Protest

The '''Tiananmen Square protest''' of 1989 was a student protest and the apex of a [[color revolution]] attempt in China's Tiananmen Square from April 15th to June 4th, 1989.

Background

These protests were comprised of Chinese student activists who called for the overthrow of Deng Xiaoping and the People's Republic of China in favor of a bourgeois democratic republic. Their activism was supported with donations from Peking University, the Chinese University in Hong Kong, Wan Runnan, Shekou special economic zone, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, George Soros' Open Society Foundations and China Fund, an all-day event held by supporters in Hong Kong, the United States, Britain, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, and other countries in Europe.

The protests began in mid-April with students from Peking University, Tsinghua University, China University of Political Science and Law mourning the death of Hu Yaobang. He was the former General Secretary of the CPC who was forced to resign in 1987 due to his support for the foreign agenda of bourgeois liberalization of China. Thousands of students attended and assembled with bourgeois democratic slogans on hanging banners and large portraits of Hu. On April 20th, most students peacefully left Xinhua Gate, while the 200 or so that remained had minor struggles with police before leaving the square. The police were only armed with batons.

On April 21st, 100,000 students marched on Tiananmen Square despite officials closing it for Hu's funeral on April 22nd. The funeral lasted 40 minutes and protesters watched its broadcast from outside the Great Hall where it was held. His successor and close friend, General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, gave the eulogy. That same day students organized formal protest groups, and the Beijing Students' Autonomous Federation was created in a meeting of 40 students from 21 universities. The Union was made up of students who had not recruited nor organized working people for their cause. The Union immediately called for a classroom boycott at all universities.

April 22nd saw riots break out in Changsha and Xi'an, China. In Changsha, 38 stores were looted, and in Xi'an rioters committed arson, burning cars and houses; over 350 arrests were made between the two towns. University students in Wuhan simultaneously organized protests against the provincial government. Meanwhile, Zhou called multiple meetings of the CPC's Politburo, during which he proposed the Party: first, encourage students to go home and continue their studies; second, use all necessary measures to stop the rioting; and third, open lines of dialogue between students and representatives at all governmental levels. Premier Li Peng called for Zhou to denounce the protesters and take immediate and serious action, which Zhou rebuffed, instead traveling to North Korea for a scheduled visit on April 23rd.

Li Peng was thus left in charge by Zhou, and on April 24th, he met with Politburo members and Beijing's mayor and Party Secretary to discuss a plan of action. The group agreed to take decisive action against the protesters. The next day, April 25th, Li Peng and President Yang Shangkun met with Deng Xiaoping, where Deng recommended taking a hardline stance against the protests publicly, and calling for demonstrators to peacefully disperse across the PRC. Li Peng returned to the Politburo and ordered the stance to be written into official documents and adopted by the Party. On April 26th, the Party's official newspaper expressed their stance in a front-page editorial. The Students' Union organized a march through Beijing to Tiananmen Square on April 27th, which 50-100,000 in attendance, during which they broke through police barricades. While some of the students remained pro-Party, adopting an anti-corruption message, the anti-Party protesters grew more influential. This protest won a meeting with Party representatives but few concessions.

By April 30th, Zhou had returned from the DPRK. He rejected the hardline approach taken thus far, and called for a softer approach with the granting of concessions. He requested the press be allowed to write positively on the protests, and gave two sympathetic speeches on May 3rd and 4th. 100,000 students commemorated the bourgeois-democratic May Fourth Movement while Zhou called their corruption concerns legitimate and their protest movement patriotic. On May 4th, all universities in Beijing except Peking and Beijing Normal Universities ended the classroom boycotts, causing most students to return and lose interest in the movement.

These memorials and protests were broadly peaceful at first, but intensified in May. The contradiction between the soft- and hard-line camps within the Party intensified as well. With the student protest movement forming a delegation to meet with Party officials, the movement splintered, and since their leaders distrusted the Party's offers of negotiation and dialogue, they called for a return to more confrontational tactics.

The students began a hunger strike on May 13th, which gained support in hundreds of cities. They aimed to force the Party to meet their demands by occupying Tiananmen Square, where Mikhail Gorbachev was to be welcomed on the 15th of May. Speeches given by the students rallied supporters of the bourgeois-democratic movement against the Party, and 300,000 (many from outside Beijing) gathered in the square by the afternoon of May 13th. Deng ordered the square to be cleared for Gorbachev's visit, and Zhou again used a softer approach to do so, beginning attempts to negotiate based on a shared patriotism. The head of China's United Front, Yan Mingfu, called an emergancy meeting of intellectuals and student leaders, at which he expressed the Party's willingness to negotiate with the student movement. Yan informed them that their bargaining chip (the disruption of Gorbachev's visit and the inter-national ramifications for the Party which would come of it) - were gone; the Soviet leader's welcoming ceremony was cancelled whether or not the protesters left the square. This enraged the students and their leadership.

Official state media began allowing for more favorable coverage of the demonstrations in mid-May. On May 14th, intellectuals were granted space in the Guangming Daily newspaper by a supporter of Zhou, Hu Qili, in which they aired their views and called for protesters to leave the square and deescalate. The students rejected such calls, accusing the intellectuals of speaking on behalf of the government. Later that day, Yan and student leadership held a formal meeting, during which Yan affirmed his belief that the students were motivated by patriotism and begged them to withdraw the square. The meeting quickly devolved into factions of the student leadership demanding various uncoordinated demands of Yan and the government, and the meeting ended after the students were informed that the meeting had not been televised as Yan had promised. Yan, desperate, went to Tiananmen Square himself to try and disperse the crowds, even offering himself as a hostage. The following day, he took the students' demands to Li Peng, whence Li refused to revise his assessment of the protests as "patriotic and democratic" and formally retract the April 26th editorial.

Gorbachev was welcomed in a ceremony at the airport in a monumental event; this was the reestablishment of Sino-Soviet relations thirty years after the Sino-Soviet split. However, the students remained in the square, causing harm to the Party's reputation. For the protesters, this achieved the opposite affect from what they intended - moderate Party officials were driven to adopt a more hardline stance.

When Zhou met with Gorbachev on May 16th, he told Gorbachev that Deng was still the "paramount authority" in China, knowing this information would reach the international press through the Soviet leader. This was seen by Deng as an attempt to shift blame for the continuance of student protests onto himself. Zhou said this reaffirmation of Deng as the leader of China in private meetings with world leaders was standard procedure, pointing to Li Peng, who made similar statements to George H.W. Bush in February 1989. However, Deng considered Zhou to be speaking out of both sides of his mouth, as evidenced by his soft approach and tacit support of the bourgeois-democratic movement.

Millions supported the hunger strike, and across Beijing Party members and Youth organizations were encouraged by supporters of Zhou to demonstrate in solidarity with the students. They demonstrated at provincial Party buildings in Fujian, Hubei, and Xinjiang, and across 400 cities. Various non-Communist political parties wrote to Li Peng to persuade him to support the students.

On May 17th the Politburo met to finalize the martial law declaration. According to Zhou, among the five PSC members present at the meeting, he and Hu Qili opposed the imposition of martial law, Li Peng and Yao Yilin firmly supported it, and Qiao Shi remained neutral. Deng appointed the latter three to carry out the decision. Yang Shangkun and Bo Yibo, Party elders, stood firm behind Deng. Zhou announced he was prepared to take leave, unable to carry out martial law; he also rejected the Politburo's decision as legally viable. Zhou maintained that this was Deng's plan for the rest of his life, all but confirming Deng's hypothesis that Zhou blamed him for the protests and their mishandling. Yang Shangkun mobilized the People's Liberation Army to the capital in his capacity as Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission.

Li Peng first met with students on May 18th, where the students again demanded the Party rescind the April 26th editorial and declare the movement patriotic. Li expressed the government's want to send hunger strikers to hospitals. The meeting bore little fruit, except for the protesters who got airtime on national television. Soon thereafter, the movement's protesters were calling for the overthrow of the Party, Li, and Deng. On May 19th, Wen Jiabao accompanied Zhou Ziyang to Tiananmen Square. Li also went but left shortly. Just before five o'clock in the morning, Zhou gave a speech using a bullhorn, in which eh ruged the students to disperse and not risk their lives and futures in the hunger strike. Some students applauded. This was Zhou's last public appearance.

Intensification

On May 20th, 1989, the Communist Party of China, then led by Deng Xiaoping, declared martial law. Estimates say up to 300,000 soldiers were mobilized from 30 divisions; 14 out of 24 army corps contributed troops from all over the PRC. According to cables obtained by Wikielaks, on May 21st, 10-20,000 protesters were in the square at noon, and they appeared "festive" and "confident". There were 50-80,000 onlookers nearby, and 1-200 hunger strikers according to a student. The students created elaborate blockades through which they controlled most of the city. There was an order for the PLA to move in on the square that morning at 2 AM, but the order was rescinded between 1 and 2 AM. The cables read "According to DAO observers, troops at Gucheng, on the western side of the city, stood down from their trucks and began mingling with the local populace at about 8:15 AM." The students believed the PLA would attempt to take the square on the night of May 21st, via the underground tunnel system or a military train through Beijing Station. In fact there was no evidence of the PLA at Beijing Station during these events. Further: "The FCS officer at Qinghau reported witnessing large crowds of students at the gates and Beijing and People's Universities. He did not report seeing any PLA troops in the vicinity of Beijing's university district, however." In the suburbs surrounding Tiananmen Square, troops were blocked by protesters; unable to get through, they retreated on May 24th, to bases outside Beijing.

The student movement became further disorganized and splintered as the square became overcrowded and filled with poor hygiene. Hou Dejian, a student leader, called for open elections of the movements leadership, which was met with opposition. Wang Dan, one of the foremost leaders, moderated his positions after the military mobilized. A series of claims to leadership among the students centered around the square's loudspeakers; whoever controlled the loudspeakers were the leaders. Students waited at train stations to recruit incoming youth to their faction. They began accusing one another of currying favor with the government or of opportunistically seeking personal fame from the protests. Some students even plotted to kidnap student leaders Chai Ling and Feng Congde in a failed coup attempt. Chai sought a violent ending to the conflict for the sake of anti-Communist acceleration. She said, in The Gate of Heavenly Peace , "What we actually are hoping for is bloodshed, the moment when the government is ready to brazenly butcher the people. Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes."

On June 1st, Li Peng issued a report called "On the True Nature of the Turmoil", which was sent to all members of the Politburo. The report blamed a "tiny minority" of the demonstrators for the incitement of turmoil that was meant to provoke an international reaction. It also read that these orchestrators connected with and made use of criminal elements and used funding from foreign and domestic sources to procure equipment and weapons.

Chinese Ministry of State Security chief Jia Chunwang submitted another report on the same day emphasizing the destructive and divisive effects of foreign influence on the students, viz. the US' promotion of bourgeois liberalism in China. This report was sent to Deng and other top leadership of the Party. It found that the United States had infiltrated the protests, especially through the use of the Voice of America news network as a means of psychological warfare, and breeding anti-Communist and pro-Western ideology among Chinese students who study abroad as a long-term strategy for color revolution. The report also determined that the Central Intelligence Agency attempted to establish contacts at the tops of several Chinese institutions; one CIA agent from the U.S. Embassy had almost fifty contacts between 1981 and 1988. The report thus advocated for immediate military action.

On June 2nd, protesters became more restless, and this was decided to be the time for military intervention. Newspapers called for the students to leave the square and end this movement, including a Beijing Daily article published June 1st, by a former student protester who became disillusioned with the movement. These articles only enraged the protesters. Three of their intellectuals - Liu Xiaobo, Zhou Duo, and Gao Xin - and their fellow protester Hou Dejian tried to revive the movement with a second hunger strike. The student movement was suffering internal power disputes, mismanagement, opportunism, and other turmoils.

After Zhou Ziyang and Hu Qili were ousted, Deng assembled the three Politburo members left - Li Peng, Qiao Shi, and Yao Yilin - and they unanimously agreed the square had to be cleared. They agreed that this should be done as peacefully as possible; however, if the protesters resisted harshly, they were authorized to use force. Newspapers reported that there were PLA troops in ten key positions in Beijing. Secretly, PLA troops were moved into the Great Hall of the People on the west side of the square, and the Ministry of Public Security building on the east side. On the evening of June 2nd an accident occurred in which a PAP (People's Armed Police Force) jeep which ran up on the sidewalk and killed three people and injured a fourth. Student leaders issued emergency warnings and protesters set up road blocks at major intersections to block off the inner city.

On the morning of June 3rd, students surrounded and interrogated a bus full of plainclothes PLA soldiers. They then beat the soldiers and the Beijing security who attempted to help the soldiers. Some of the soldiers who attempted to flee to the hospital were kidnapped. Subsequently, the students intercepted other buses bordering Tiananmen Square carrying weapons, military gear, and other supplies. Another bus was taken over by protesters at Liubukou; at 2:30 PM clashes broke out between police and protesters, and the police tried to disperse the crowd using tear gas, but students threw rocks at them and forced the police to retreat inside the Zhongnanhai compound. At 5:30 PM, thousands of troops awaited orders, but soon retreated from the Great Hall of the People while the government monitored the unfolding events. In the evening, the government made an emergency announcement, telling citizens to "stay off the streets and away from Tiananmen Square." Protesters, meanwhile, made broadcasts urging their fellow demonstrators to arm themselves and occupy the square and surrounding barricades. Clashes began around nine o'clock; according to another Wikileaks cable, Chilean Second Secretary Carlos Gallos and his wife gave police officers detailed eyewitness accounts of their movements around and in the square beginning around 9:30. Gallos, who took his wife back to their hotel after the Red Cross station in the square received gunshot wound victims, returned to the square to observe. He was able to move freely, speaking with students and crossing between police and army lines multiple times without hassle. He noted that while most fighting was on the western side of Tiananmen Square and he was observing mostly from the east, there were no mass shootings or random fire on the crowd. The most that the police did was beat protesters with batons until they finally left the square. He said most of the soldiers were armed only with riot gear, and were only backed up by armed soldiers. Gallos reported that the Red Cross station continued taking injured soldiers and protesters throughout the fighting and until the military moved in and cleared the square on June 5th. Another Chilean diplomat present at the square relayed a similar experience.

Outside the square itself, more clashes started. The advance of the 38th Army, using riot shields, rubber bullets, and tear gas, was met with rocks, bricks, and bottles from the students. Some soldiers fired warning shots into the air; then, an army officer called to the protesters to disperse over a megaphone. By 10:30 the army was still being pummeled with rocks; they decided to fire upon some of their assailants, causing them to retreat to Muxidi Bridge. After multiple forces attempted to break through the blockade at Muxidi Bridge, further lethal force was used, as in just the two miles of road from Muxidi to Xidan "65 PLA trucks and 47 APCs [...] were totally destroyed, and 485 other military vehicles were damaged." Demonstrators attacked troops with poles, rocks, and molotov cocktails; photojournalist Jeff Widener reported witnessing rioters setting fire to military vehicles and beating the soldiers inside them to death. The protesters in west Beijing sent a convoy of military vehicles up in flames; they also hijacked an armored vehicle and took it for a spin, which was captured on camera and broadcast by the Chinese government news agencies. At Shuangjing, a firefight erupted between the military and the student demonstrators.

On June 4th, Tiananmen Square was cleared. At first, the protesters showed some restraint and didn't resist much. However, soon they threw rocks at the army, which reserved itself even at that point. An APC finally entered the square early in the morning on June 4th, but it was shortly thereafter immobilized with molotov cocktails and a traffic divider. The students then covered the vehicle with gasoline-doused blankets. While Wu Renhua claimed that the three servicemen inside left the tank and were taken by the students to a hospital, multiple other eyewitnesses documented in cables reported seeing the mob of students burn two of the three alive in the tank, while the third escaped and was beaten to death in an organized swarm, a tactic consistently rehearsed and employed earlier in west Beijing. Troops began arriving at the square from the west at 1:30 AM on June 5th, and gradually also from other directions. They blocked the square and sealed all entry points.

On June 5th, as the Wall Street Journal reported, "As columns of tanks and tens of thousands of soldiers approached Tiananmen, many troops were set on by angry mobs who screamed, 'Fascists'. Dozens of soldiers were pulled from trucks, severely beaten, and left for dead. At an intersection west of the square, the body of a young soldier, who had been beaten to death, was stripped naked and hung from the side of a bus. Another soldier's corpse was strung up at an intersection east of the square." Beijing's Municipal Government broadcasted another emergency announcement that morning: "A severe counterrevolutionary riot has broken out in the capital tonight. Rioters have savagely attacked soldiers of the PLA, have stolen their weapons and burned their vehicles, have erected roadblocks, and have kidnapped officers and soldiers [...] Citizens and students must evacuate the Square immediately so that martial law troops can successfully carry out their mission. We cannot guarantee the safety of violators, who will be solely responsible for any consequences."

Following the announcements, most students left the square. A few leaders who were left - Hou Dejian, Gao Xin, Zhou Duo, and Liu Xiaobo - attempted to disperse the remaining students, while hardliner Chai Ling insisted that those who wished to stay would do so. The small group tried to convince Ling and the hardliners to negotiate a peaceful evacuation, and Hou asked them to surrender their rifles and other weapons. Hou and Zhou then left in an ambulance to meet troops before returning. Through Ji Xinguo, they negotiated a peaceful evacuation with Martial Law Headquarters around 4:00 AM. Feng Congde held a voice vote in the square since the protesters were reluctant to leave; he said the vote to leave had it, and they began to leave the square. Martial Law HQ announced over the louspeakers, "Students, we appreciate that you will leave the Square voluntarily. Students, please leave in the southeastern direction." The government turned on the lights in Tiananmen Square and shot out the loudspeaker around 4:35 AM, a few minutes after students began to leave. According to Hou Dejian, tear gas was used during this advance. The soldiers tore down the Goddess of Democracy and took its torch as a memento. According to Lim Luisa, the soldiers cleared the square by 7 AM, at which point they were ordered to relinquish their ammunition and given a two-hour break. They cleaned up debris, as seen by Secretary Gallos, by either burning it or collecting it in bags to be airlifted away by military helicopters. The troops stationed in the Great Hall of the People stayed inside for the next nine days. They slept on the floor and shared packets of noodles.

Wu Renhua again reported uncorroborated claims that, on June 4th, a PLA tank blasted three students walking away from the square with tear gas before running them over, killing 11 and injuring many others. Throughout the city, sporadic clashes between protesters and police flared up, and the sky was thick with smoke. Some demonstrators tried to reenter Tiananmen Square after regrouping, but gunfire drove them away. The square remained closed for the next two weeks. At 5 PM, the U.S. State Department told the U.S. Embassy that the PLA was "mopping up isolated resistance."

Aftermath and Legacy

On June 5th, 1989, the PLA began to clear and reassert control over various intersections and thoroughfares in Beijing. One lone man, now referred to as Tank Man, stood in front of a PLA tank, blocking the avenue. Tank Man, as shown in the full video climbs on top of the tank and speaks with the tank operators through the entry port on top. He then climbs down off the tank and is swept aside by concerned bystanders. Liars and propagandists claim, based either on total fabrication or on an edited version of the video, that Tank Man was run over and killed by the tank. Tank Man was made out to be a hero of the west who "stood up" to an "authoritarian Communist regime", and was even named one of the top 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

Throughout June 1989, the CIA and MI6 launched Operation Yellowbird (Siskin) to smuggle protesters out of the country through Hong Kong. The CIA kept contacts and informants among the students protesters for weeks prior to June, and actively aided the students by providing them typewriters and fax machines according to a U.S. official. In the days after the square was cleared, the Beijing government issued a wanted list of the protest leaders - in response, Hong Kong activists including the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, started a smuggling operation bankrolled by Hong Kong businessmen and celebrities. The planners of the operation put together a list of more than 40 protestors they believed could form "a Chinese democracy movement in exile" with the help of western intelligence and the Asian mafia, the Triads. The operation spent more than $65,000 USD per activist, depending on the number of attempts and fees paid to the Triads or their associates in the tens of thousands. Triads demanded $25,000 USD for every attempt, whether it succeeded or failed. The operation raised $2,000,000 USD in its early days, which was used to aid escapees. Diplomatic connections allowed HK businessmen to obtain visas for the escapees. Alan Tang, Lo Hoi-sing, and Anita Mui were among the financiers and supporters of Operation Yellowbird. In the posthumously published memoirs of Szeto Wah, leader of the Alliance, he stated "Tang had a lot of influence in Macau and got involved personally to save time but he remained low-key and never claimed his share of glory." Just 7 or the top 21 most wanted students escaped, while the other fourteen either turned themselves in or were captured. These seven were Wu’er Kaixi, Chai Ling, Feng Congde, Li Lu, Liang Qingtun, Wang Chaohua and Zhang Boli. In total, Yellowbird assisted over 400 Chinese dissidents in fleeing China and escaping persecution for their crimes through Hong Kong and to western nations. Turncoat PLA soldiers and police who assisted the operation, intellectuals, and supporters of Zhao Ziyang were also smuggled to western countries from China. The CIA provided escape equipment as well as weapons to the program. The operational details were only known to six Alliance members, the Triad smugglers under Chan Tat-Ching, a few elites from Hong Kong, and foreign intelligence agencies. The operation continued until Hong Kong was ceded to China in 1997. Chan write an 18-page pamphlet with routes, times, and other operation information in it, which he devised himself. Early on, two of Chan's men were killed in a boat crash, and their student cargo was killed too. Later, two more of his men were arrested after Chen Ziming and Wang Juntao were staged as escaping intellectuals in a sting operation. Chan later gave up the operation after his brother was arrested and he gave mainland officials the escape routes, compromising the operation. Chan was taken off the job and managed to negotiate freedom for himself and his two operatives, though he was sacked from the job after smuggling 133 escapees. The United States and France were the most accommodating countries for escapees.

The legacy of the Tiananmen Square protest is that of an attempted and failed color revolution, a bourgeois-democratic student activist movement, and a moment in the history of the PRC which underscored Western and particularly US intelligence meddling in countries it wants to destabilize and promote regime change in. It produced splits in the Party which consolidated Deng's support and caused Western intelligence and monopolists to reassess their tactics for overthrowing the PRC and Communist governments in general.

Idiotic, fat, and smug westerners such as Drew Pavlou have spread lies about the Tiananmen Square protests, branding the government response a "massacre" of student protesters and Party concerns about regime change in China and other Communist and heterodox nations "propaganda." They seek to distort the history and legacy of the PRC and Deng Xiaoping because they are historical nihilists.