Tiananmen Part 4

Strange fruit

Part 1 of this essay; Part 2; Part 3.

Despite its failure to achieve its strategic objective of overthrowing the Chinese Government, the Tiananmen massacre story was was sufficient excuse to treat China as a human rights pariah for a decade and reimpose savage, Mao-era embargoes. Media professionals, however, had second thoughts.

“I believe we tried to put a ‘made in the USA’ democracy stamp on it,” said Jackie Judd⁠ of ABC. Photographer Jeff Widener⁠ said he took the Tank Man photograph on June 5, more than a day after the students had left the Square. Widener’s photo shows a man stopping four tanks but another photograph, taken by Stuart Franklin a few seconds earlier, shows nineteen tanks behind Widener’s, making it clear that the tanks are leaving the Square, driving east, out of the city.

Slowly, the truth leaked out:

CIA man misread reaction, sources say. Vancouver Sun. WASHINGTON - THE CIA STATION chief in China left the country two days before Chinese troops attacked demonstrators in the capital Beijing in 1989, after predicting the military would not act, U.S. officials said. China's government had declared martial law 12 days earlier and moved tens of thousands of troops to the outskirts of Beijing in preparation for removing the demonstrators from Tiananmen Square.

The Central Intelligence Agency had sources among protesters, as well as within China's intelligence services with which it enjoyed a close relationship since the 1970s, said the officials, who spoke this week on condition of anonymity.

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.In the weeks leading up to the 1989 bloodshed, the CIA monitored the growing tension closely using its case officers, diplomats at the U.S. embassy, and a network of informers among the students who led the protest. But as the protest lost steam, the chief of the CIA station decided the threat of confrontation had been defused, said one official. The CIA declined all comment.

The BBC’s Beijing correspondent, James Miles, confessed to having “Conveyed the wrong impression. There was no massacre in Tiananmen Square. Protesters who were still in the square when the army reached it were allowed to leave after negotiations with martial law troops…There was no Tiananmen Square massacre”.

The venerable Columbia Journalism Review discredited^⁠ the massacre story but few editors were interested–an attitude they maintained after WikiLeaks released Ambassador Lilley’s July 12 cable:

OF JUNE 3-4 EVENTS ON TIANANMEN SQUARE

1. CONFIDENTIAL - ENTIRE TEXT.

2. SUMMARY- DURING A RECENT MEETING, A LATIN AMERICAN DIPLOMAT AND HIS WIFE PROVIDED POLOFF AN ACCOUNT OF THEIR MOVEMENTS ON JUNE 3-4 AND THEIR EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF EVENTS AT TIANANMEN SQUARE. ALTHOUGH THEIR ACCOUNT GENERALLY FOLLOWS THOSE PREVIOUSLY REPORTED, THEIR UNIQUE EXPERIENCES PROVIDE ADDITIONAL INSIGHT AND CORROBORATION OF EVENTS IN THE SQUARE. THEY WERE ABLE TO ENTER AND LEAVE THE SQUARE SEVERAL TIMES AND WERE NOT HARASSED BY TROOPS. REMAINING WITH STUDENTS BY THE MONUMENT TO THE PEOPLE'S HEROES UNTIL THE FINAL WITHDRAWAL, THE DIPLOMAT SAID THERE WERE NO MASS SHOOTINGS OF STUDENTS IN THE SQUARE OR AT THE MONUMENT. END SUMMARY. (Emphasis mine - WE)

8. GALLO [Chilean Second Secretary Carlos Gallo and his wife] EVENTUALLY ENDED UP AT THE RED CROSS STATION, AGAIN HOPING THAT TROOPS WOULD NOT FIRE ON THE MEDICAL PERSONNEL THERE. HE WATCHED THE MILITARY ENTER THE SQUARE AND DID NOT OBSERVE ANY MASS FIRING OF WEAPONS INTO THE CROWDS, ALTHOUGH SPORADIC GUNFIRE WAS HEARD. HE SAID THAT MOST OF THE TROOPS WHICH ENTERED THE SQUARE WERE ACTUALLY ARMED ONLY WITH ANTI-RIOT GEAR--TRUNCHEONS AND WOODEN CLUBS… (Emphasis added - WE)

10. ALTHOUGH GUNFIRE COULD BE HEARD, GALLO SAID THAT APART FROM SOME BEATING OF STUDENTS, THERE WAS NO MASS FIRING INTO THE CROWD OF STUDENTS AT THE MONUMENT. WHEN POLOFF MENTIONED SOME REPORTEDLY EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS OF MASSACRES AT THE MONUMENT WITH AUTOMATIC WEAPONS, GALLO SAID THAT THERE WAS NO SUCH SLAUGHTER. ONCE AGREEMENT WAS REACHED FOR THE STUDENTS TO WITHDRAW, LINKING HANDS TO FORM A COLUMN, THE STUDENTS LEFT THE SQUARE THROUGH THE SOUTHEAST CORNER. ESSENTIALLY EVERYONE, INCLUDING GALLO, LEFT. THE FEW THAT ATTEMPTED TO REMAIN BEHIND WERE BEATEN AND DRIVEN TO JOIN THE END OF THE DEPARTING PROCESSION. ONCE OUTSIDE THE SQUARE, THE STUDENTS HEADED WEST ON QIANMEN DAJIE WHILE GALLO HEADED EAST TO HIS CAR. (Emphasis mine - WE)

The report

Two weeks after the demonstrations, on June 19, Beijing Party Secretary Li Ximing delivered the results of the official enquiry: “During a riot in Chang’An Road, over 7,000 people were wounded or injured and two hundred forty-one were killed, including thirty-six students, ten soldiers and thirteen People's Armed Police”. 

Fugitives

The Public Security Ministry issued arrest warrants for twenty-one demonstrators, including Liu Xiaobo, Wang Dan, Wu’er Kaixi, Liu Gang and Chai Ling but, operating out of Hong Kong, the CIA’s Operation Yellowbird had spirited the four hundred leaders out of China to Western countries. Though it was later proven that the Hong Kong’s notorious Sun Yee On criminal triad was involved, Ambassador Lilley insisted they were ‘almost exclusively legal exfiltrations’.

Students had discovered their leader, Chai Ling, leaving the Square and, accusing her of abandoning them to die, detained her. She escaped, recorded a speech saying that she saw twenty students and workers massacred in the Square, received a scholarship to Princeton and was nominated for the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize. Fellow leader, Wu’er Kaixi, claimed he witnessed tanks killing hundreds of protesters by driving over them as they slept – though he had left the Square hours before the military arrived. Future Nobelist Liu Xiaobo, who was pardoned for helping avoid bloodshed, also insisted that nobody in the Square was harmed.

Reflections

A few months later, Deng discussed the incident with Chinese-American academic Li Zhengdao, “In suppressing the turmoil we were at pains to avoid hurting people, especially the students; that was our guiding principle”. Deng criticized his colleague Zhao Ziyang whom, he said, “was clearly exposed as siding with the agitators and attempting to split the Party” and reportedly told West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, “don’t blame the students too much. The roots of the problem lay within the Party leadership”. James Miles recalls,

A year after Tiananmen, Deng told former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, “If turmoil erupts in China, it wouldn't just be a Cultural Revolution-type problem. At that time (during the Cultural Revolution) you still had the prestige of the elder generation of leaders such as Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Even though it was described as 'all-out civil war,' actually there wasn't any major fighting. It wasn't a proper civil war.

Now it's not at all the same. If turmoil erupts again, to the extent that the Party is no longer effective and state power is no longer effective and one faction grabs one part of the army and another faction grabs another part of the army–that would be civil war.

If some so-called democratic fighters seize power, they'll start fighting among themselves. As soon as civil war breaks out there'll be rivers of blood. What would be the point then of talking about ‘human rights’? As soon as civil war breaks out, local warlords will spring up everywhere, production will plummet, communications will be severed, and it won't be a matter of a few million or even tens of millions of refugees. There'd be well over a hundred million people fleeing the country and the first to be affected would be Asia, now the most promising part of the world. It would be a global disaster’.  The Legacy of Tiananmen.

Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew said he would have shot 200,000 demonstrators to maintain stability. U.S. Ambassador Chas H Freeman opined, “I cannot conceive of any American government behaving with the ill-conceived restraint that the Zhao Ziyang administration did in China, allowing students to occupy zones that are the equivalent of the Washington National Mall and Times Square combined, while shutting down much of the Chinese government's normal operations”. 

CIA analysts attributed the failure to ‘the difficulty of mobilizing young activists in the desired direction due to lack of strong polarizations in Chinese society’. Chinese analysts attributed the lack of polarization to the Cultural Revolution, which taught people how to resolve societal disputes en masse.

Three years later, in response to demonstrations  in Los Angeles, President Bush sent in thousands of troops saying “There can be no excuse for the murder, arson, theft or vandalism that have terrorized the people of Los Angeles... Let me assure you that I will use whatever force is necessary to restore order”.  Troops shot sixty-six people dead and arrested eleven thousand. Media praised the President’s action as ‘decisive’. The following year, President Clinton ordered federal forces to attack a Christian community in Waco and they killed eighty-one men, women and children. No-one was disciplined.

In 1998, President Clinton discussed the incident with President Jiang Zemin,

as NYT’s John Border⁠ reported, “The drama of the meeting came in a remarkable 70-minute news conference, carried live on nationwide Chinese television, in which the two Presidents differed sharply on the nature of personal freedom, the role of the state and the meaning of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations that were violently suppressed by the Chinese Government in June 1989…Mr. Clinton flatly told the Chinese leader that his Government had been ‘wrong’ to use force to end the peaceful demonstrations of the spring of 1989 and that broad personal freedom and political expression were the price of admission to the world community of the 21st century. ‘For all of our agreements, we still disagree about the meaning of what happened then,’ Mr. Clinton said in his opening statement, referring to the violent crackdown on Tiananmen Square the night of June 3-4, 1989, that left hundreds of protesters dead”.  

An Ugly Truth

The Tiananmen student body vice-president and leader of the riot in Chang’An Avenue, Wang Yam, was exfiltrated to the UK and given British citizenship. In 2006 he was tried in camera for bludgeoning, murdering, and robbing an elderly Londoner. For the first time in modern British history, his murder trial was held in secret. The trial judge publicly gagged all media speculation before convicting Wang Yam of first degree murder. MI6, Britain’s intelligence agency, admitted that he was their employee.

Part 1 of this essay. Part 2. Part 3.