Thirty years ago, in the early morning of Sunday 4 June 1989, I saw the People’s Liberation Army in Beijing’s vast Tiananmen Square mow down doctors and nurses from the Peking Union Hospital medical school. In their white smocks and caps they had climbed out of an ambulance to aid the mothers and fathers of students shot in the square a few hours before. The parents wanted to find either surviving children or their dead bodies. A column of smoke rose from the square where the parents feared – as I did – that the bodies of the dead were being burned.
Late the night before I had seen PLA soldiers shooting – murdering – some of the thousands of students and workers I had watched peacefully demonstrating in Tiananmen since the middle of April. Many were crushed by tanks. Many were arrested.
I was the Observer’s China correspondent but neither I nor anyone else watching that day knew that violence was being unleashed in more than 200 cities and towns all over China.
At three in the morning I feared I might be killed, but I knew I must file the story for the paper. As the silver streaks of bullets lighted the darkness, a student next to me said: “Don’t worry. The soldiers are using blanks.” A few seconds later he slumped over, dead, with a wet red circle on his chest.
As I began to leave the square I came to a knot of armed police whose trouser bottoms had been ignited by Molotov cocktails thrown by workers. When they saw me passing they shouted at me to stop. I said: “Don’t hit me. I’m a journalist.” Their officer shouted back, in Chinese: “Fuck you, we’re going to kill you.”
In April 1989, popular Chinese reformist leader Hu Yaobang died. Two days after his death, on 17 April, several hundred students marched to Tiananmen Square and laid a wreath to him. They called for greater freedom of speech, economic freedoms and curbs on corruption. The demonstrations spread to hundreds of cities.
On 26 April, an editorial in the Communist Party’s People’s Daily denounced the student demonstrations as a ‘premeditated and organised conspiracy and turmoil’. The next day, tens of thousands of students in Beijing staged a demonstration to protest against the editorial. On 13 May, just two days before the arrival of Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev for a state visit, hundreds of students began a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square. The protests forced the cancellation of the welcoming ceremony. On 20 May, martial law was declared in parts of Beijing. Troops moved in, but were blocked by the civilians and demonstrations continued.
In the early hours of 4 June, Chinese troops launched a two-pronged attack with orders to put down the protests. Armoured cars and tanks smashed through the citizens’ barricades. Some forty workers who went to plead with the soldiers were shot. On 5 June, an unidentified young man stood in front of a tank convoy leaving Tiananmen Square, in a final act of defiance. The actual number of deaths from the crackdown remains unknown, but it is believed the Chinese army killed at least 10,000 people, according to a secret diplomatic cable from the British ambassador to Beijing.
Thirty years on, the Chinese authorities continue to view the Tiananmen protests as one of the most sensitive and taboo subjects. ‘June 4’, as the movement is commonly known as in China, remains largely scrubbed from official history and is censored from school text books and online. The authorities punish those who try to commemorate the event, and relatives of the victims who died during the massacre are barred from openly mourning their loved ones.
Verna Yu in Hong Kong
As they began beating me with their rubber truncheons, the officer shot fallen demonstrators. My left arm was fractured, half a dozen teeth were knocked out and I thought I was finished. But a British journalist running out of the square swerved, took my arm, and led me away. I managed to dictate my story by phone to an Observer copytaker who asked me: “Hey mate, is everything OK?”
What no one knew was that Deng Xiaoping and other “elders” had selected PLA units they knew would kill students.
Nowadays the horror of 3 and 4 June 1989 can barely be mentioned in China. People know, but speak only in whispers. Such is the country today.
