Tiananmen, Part 3
The situation was volatile, but violence would require a catalyst, and the CIA was ready and eager to provide it. Having overthrown Iran’s government in 1953, South Vietnam’s in 1963 and Chile’s in 1973, the Agency moved its team of coupsters to Beijing. As The Vancouver Sun reported, “For months before the June 3 attack on the demonstrators, the CIA had been helping student activists form the anti-government movement, providing typewriters, facsimile machines and other equipment to help them spread their message, said one official”. The CIA moved Gene Sharp, author of the Color Revolution manual, to Beijing where financier George Soros had incorporated the Soros Fund for the Reform and Opening of China.
CIA Director George H.W. Bush withdrew Ambassador Winston Lord from Beijing and replaced him with regime change specialist James Lilley. They had been close friend since the ‘70s, when Lilley was CIA head of station in Beijing and Bush was Chef de Mission and de facto Ambassador. In 1975, as Bush was returning to Washington from Beijing to head the CIA, he appointed Lilley National Intelligence Officer for China, the highest-ranked expert on China in the American intelligence community.
Ripe for destabilization
Lilley had made contact with Premier Zhao Ziyang, knowing that he wanted China to privatize the media, an independent judiciary, a multiparty parliamentary democracy, privatization of state-owned assets, the separation of Party and State and market-oriented economic reforms. Thus it came to pass that, in
1986, Zhao blessed George Soros’ establishing an NGO, The Fund for the Reform and Opening of China with one million dollars—a huge sum for China those days—to promote cultural and intellectual exchanges with Zhao’s Institute for Economic Structural Reform.
1988 the National Endowment for Democracy, NED, opened two Chinese offices, gave seminars on democracy, sponsored select Chinese writers and publications and recruited Chinese students studying in US.
1989, two months before the CIA launched the Tiananmen campaign, President Bush paid his first and only visit to China.
Cards and letters
Two months later, the student protests erupted and the NED mailed thousands of inflammatory letters from Washington to recipients in China. Voice of America VOA (broadcasting in Mandarin under the direction of Tucker Carlson’s father, Dick, aroused public opinion across China on the days of the protests. Nanjing university students had boom-boxes turned up as the VOA described events in China.
At this point Deng Xiaoping, Chairman of the Military Commission, intervened, expelling the campaign’s architect and CIA strategist Gene Sharp. Sharp moved to Hong Kong, whence he directed the insurrection, as he recounts in Non-Violent Struggle in China.
Another CIA operative, VOA’s Beijing chief, Alan Pessin, in round-the-clock broadcasts, provided encouragement, provocation, strategic guidance and tactical advice. Students who were there during those heady days still talk of the VOA’s promised land of ‘freedom and democracy’. Intelligence photo of Alan, looking conspiratorial, in 1989 Beijing:
The Taiwan-funded Chinese Alliance for Democracy issued an Open Letter from New York which, posted in Beijing University’s Triangle on April 26, called for ‘consolidating the organizational links established during the movement, strengthening the contacts with the critics and strengthening support for the movement within all sectors of society’. Taiwan provided $100 million for equipment. Washington flew its most prominent dissident (and future Nobelist) Liu Xiaobo, to Beijing to lead the protests but the students’ elected leader, Chai Ling (secretly holding a US visa and a Yale scholarship), angrily accused Liu of exploiting the student movement to ‘rebuild his own image’.
The stage was set for violence in the Square and moderate student leaders argued that, having made their point and gained concessions, they should withdraw and fight another day but Chai Ling begged them to stay because, she explained, “This made me feel sick at heart; I started to tell them that what we were waiting for was actually the spilling of blood, for only when the government descends to the depths of depravity and decides to deal with us by slaughtering us, only when rivers of blood flow in the Square, will the eyes of our country's people truly be opened…But how could I tell them this? How could I tell them that their lives would have to be sacrificed in order to win?”
By publicly supporting Chai Ling’s call for violence her fellow organizer, Wang Yam, gave government conservatives the excuse they needed, said One Long March veteran, “Those goddamn bastards! Who do they think they are, trampling on sacred ground like Tiananmen? They’re really asking for it! We should send the troops right now to grab those counter-revolutionaries! What’s the People’s Liberation Army for, anyway? What are the martial law troops for? They’re not supposed to just sit around and eat!”
At midnight on June 3, six weeks after the protests began, troops began moving from the railway station into the city, under orders not to fire unless fired upon.
The troops move in
On the way in, one soldier was seized, thrown from an overpass and killed, another doused with gasoline and set alight, one was clubbed to death and disemboweled and three major-generals were attacked and hospitalized. Rioters looted weapons and ammunition from captured trucks and attacked government buildings. Leaders distributed knives, iron bars, bricks and chains, urging people to ‘take up arms and overthrow the government’.
An officer later testified at the official enquiry, “If we had been allowed to let ourselves go, one battalion would have been quite sufficient to quell the riot but, with rioters hiding behind onlookers, we had to stay our hand”.
At six pm the following day loudspeakers told Beijingers to remain indoors as troops had been ordered to suppress the uprising by force. When the soldiers moved in, rioters burned hundreds of vehicles, including sixty armored cars and thirty police cars. NYU Professor James C. Hsiung watched the action from his perch in the Beijing Hotel:
After midnight, I saw troops trotting on foot from the East towards Tiananmen Square, without helmets or weapons. As they were approaching the square, they were blocked by huge crowds and were forced to retreat, trotting back in the direction (east) they had come from. On their retreat route, the troops were chased by the crowds, many throwing rocks and bricks. Not long after, troops returned by truck, this time with helmets on and weapons in hand. By then, the crowds had set up more roadblocks. As the trucks were negotiating their way through, the crowds stopped them with a barrage of rocks. This free-for-all went on for some time, during which many soldiers were either killed or wounded; and some lost their weapons to the ruffians. Then came the armored reinforcements spitting sporadic fire, apparently in revenge, into the crowds along both sides of the road. Besides the ruffians and students, many were merely onlookers.
The crowds, however, fought back hard. They climbed atop the on-coming tanks. Some even used Molotov cocktails or the equivalents of a flame-thrower against the tanks. One tank went ablaze. As the three soldiers inside opened the latch to run away from the heat, some hooligans shouted: "Kill them, kill them!" A BCC (Taiwan) radio reporter on the scene recorded the shouting. He later told me that he saw the three soldiers killed by their maulers. A Chinese-American friend, in whose house I had been a dinner guest only two nights before, later called and told me that a similar attack took place in front of their apartment building. One soldier's corpse, lying by an incinerated troop-carrier truck, I was told, was set on fire by his killers, who had poured gasoline on the body. In all the cases we knew, the ruffians were much older than most college students and did not appear to be students at all.
Informed that troops were approaching Tiananmen Square and shooting had started, the students began withdrawing at 5 am and were gone by 6:30. Journalist Che Muqi recounts his conversation with Kong Xiangzhi, a professor at Chinese People's University:
At about 12:10 a.m., the troops marched in from West Chang'an Avenue. I was sitting on the steps outside the West entrance of the Great Hall of the People. When the troops marched towards the square, I saw a group of people throwing rocks at them. When a few soldiers went up to them, they ran southwards. These soldiers fired into the air. Then some other soldiers came up but they didn't shoot at the crowds, otherwise I would have been shot, since I was now on the sidewalk.
I walked to the East entrance of the Great Hall where several hundred soldiers were sitting and some people were talking with them. The atmosphere seemed friendly. When I saw someone binding up a wound for a young soldier, I went up to help and asked him how he had been wounded. He told me he had been hit by rocks. He also told me that many of his comrades had also been wounded. I saw many whose heads, arms or hands were bound with gauze. I told him that I believed that the majority of the students and residents would not do this. He agreed with me. Then, an officer came to talk with us. He said that the troops would never open fire on the masses or the students. At about 3:30 a.m., the troops began to fall in. The officer then said to his men: “We’re going in to clear out the square. Now I want to make clear that no-one is permitted to shoot at the students or people; right now, this is the highest form of discipline”.
About 4:10 a.m. all the lights at the square went out. A lot of soldiers came out from the East entrance of the Great Hall. I sat down to watch under the pine trees, feeling excited and nervous. I was nervous because this was the first time I had seen so many soldiers carrying guns and I didn't know how they were going to clear up the square. ..At about 4:30, the martial law troops announced over the loudspeaker, “Attention, students. We have agreed to your appeal. We will allow you to leave peacefully”. The announcement was broadcast over and over again. At about 4:50, the students around the monument began to leave. I looked around and saw that there was almost no one in sight. So I came back with the students. That was at 5:05 a.m. This was what I saw at the time. No one was killed throughout the whole process. Some people with ulterior motives who had fled abroad spread rumors that Tiananmen Square had been a blood-bath and that they had had to crawl out from underneath the corpses, which was sheer nonsense.
Prominent Taiwanese entertainer Hou Dejian summarized his experience of the finale, “Some people said that two hundred died in the Square and others claimed that two thousand died. There were also stories of tanks running over students who were trying to leave. I have to say that I did not see any of that. I don’t know where those people died. I myself was in the Square until six-thirty in the morning”. Future Nobelist Liu Xiaobo remained to the end and said he saw nobody harmed.