My original impressions of Tiananmen Square remain as vivid now as when I first saw it on a warm May day 10 years ago. The vast, flat arena in the centre of Beijing was filled with huge crowds of young people in white headbands who were debating, arguing, singing, banging drums and chanting slogans. Student leaders like Wang Dan, Wu'er Kaixi and Chai Ling were making endless speeches through megaphones.
Above it all rose the constant wail of ambulance sirens, as Red Cross orderlies rushed fainting students to hospital. With incredible organisational skill, students had taken on the roles of traffic policemen, press officers, printers, treasurers, nurses and kitchen hands. Volunteers with strips of tape cordoned off encampments and formed human alleyways for ambulances, TV crews and lines of disciplined students who snaked their way through ankle-deep rubbish to distant latrines.
I had arrived in Beijing as part of the Moscow press corps accompanying then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on his first visit to China. We found the city in a state of wild excitement. In the lobby of the Jianguo Hotel a chamber orchestra played "It's Now or Never" as outside thousands of cheering, chanting people paraded along the wide avenue to the square facing Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace. Students from the city's universities had been demonstrating in front of the maroon-coloured ramparts with the portrait of Mao Zedong since the death on April 15th of Hu Yaobang, the reform-minded former communist party leader. They mourned Hu as a pretext for demands to reform the Communist Party and end corruption.
In a city seething with discontent over raging inflation, the students attracted initial support from workers and intellectuals alike. They had been angered by an editorial in the People's Daily on April 26th, dictated by 85-year-old supreme leader Deng Xiaoping, accusing them of counter-revolutionary turmoil and now on May 15th, the day Gorbachev's plane touched down, they came in overwhelming numbers to demonstrate in full view of the world's media.
Over the next two days factory workers, artists, journalists, and teachers swelled the multitude to a million people. They chanted slogans about democracy but their basic demands were a repudiation of the April 26th editorial, recognition of their union and negotiations on issues such as a free press and blatant, high-level corruption.
Four days later, when the Soviet leader departed, the atmosphere changed. Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang, who sympathised with their demands, tried unsuccessfully to persuade the students to leave. With tears in his eyes, he told them: "I have come too late, too late."
His failure hardened the belief of Deng and other hard-liners that they had to crack down to avoid chaos. The Premier, Li Peng, declared martial law on May 20th. As the People's Liberation Army approached the square it was blocked by two million outraged citizens who poured on to the streets to defend the students.
But the die had been cast. The now terrified students planned a final rally on May 30th and erected a 37-foot foam and plaster Goddess of Liberty, facing Mao on the Gate of Heavenly Peace. Militants, among them Chai Ling, voted against leaving the square afterwards.
On the evening of June 3rd infantry and armoured divisions shot their way through street barricades, leaving crushed bodies and mangled bicycles in their wake. Before dawn they had surrounded the square and ordered out the exhausted, weeping students. On June 5th came the moment which provided one of the most enduring images of righteous defiance in this century. A man holding a satchel stepped out and halted an armoured column. When the first tank moved to the right to avoid him, he moved too and it stopped. He climbed on to the tracked vehicle to berate the startled driver. His friends eventually pulled him away and he was never identified. Hundreds of Beijing citizens died that night and during the next few days in the streets around Tiananmen Square. Amnesty International estimated the death toll at between 700 (the US government figure) and 3,000. As the army imposed order on the city, the reckoning began. Hundreds of people were arrested and paraded with bruises and shaved heads on television. Within three weeks 37 were executed for rioting. Almost all the editorial staff of the People's Daily were sacked for student sympathies.
Student leaders fled to the United States where they were treated as celebrities, including Wu'er Kaixi and Chai Ling - who was paraded at a Democratic Party convention. Wang Dan was imprisoned and then exiled. The physicist Fang Lizhi sought refuge in the American embassy and eventually in the US. To this day hundreds of protesters remain in prison. The case of Sun Xiongying (33) of Fujian province is typical. He threw paint at a statue of Mao Zedong and got 18 years for counter-revolutionary sabotage, which since 1997 is no longer a crime. While the student movement was shattered, the party leadership was also shaken up. Shanghai mayor Jiang Zemin took over as party secretary from Zhao Ziyang, who was put under house arrest and today at 79 is still under surveillance. While economic reform and opening up continued, no public debate on the action of the party leadership has ever been allowed. Low-level local demonstrations about social grievances have become part of the Chinese political culture, but Tiananmen-linked protests are strictly banned. Hundreds of camera-toting security officials have made their careers posing as tourists on Tiananmen Square, waiting to pounce.
The legacy of June 4th 1989 today is an apathetic student body convinced that public dissent is futile and dangerous and dedicated to academic excellence and jobs in China's growing economy. And since the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, it has become unpatriotic to identify with a pro-democracy, i.e. pro-western, movement. It is not the students who pose a threat to the party leaders in 1999, but laid-off workers and dissatisfied peasants.
The bloody crackdown poisoned Western views of communist China and especially damaged Sino-US relations. After 1989 Senate majority leader George Mitchell, outraged by what he saw on television, led a partisan assault on the "soft" White House policy. Human rights issues came to dominate US Congress views on China. Some economic grievances have been redressed, but the relatives of those who died have had no redress. Those who, like Mrs Ding Zilin, a retired professor at Peking University whose 17-year-old son Jiang Jielian was shot dead, try to keep the memory alive are put under close surveillance as every June 4th comes around. Li Peng remains at the top in the party hierarchy, and the PLA has been rehabilitated through "heroic" services in flood relief. Maj-Gen Wang Yufa, who led martial law troops in Beijing, now commands the PLA in Hong Kong.
Any prospects that this year the Communist party might soften its verdict of "counter-revolutionary turmoil" were dashed at a meeting of top party officials in April, when members of official "opposition" parties in the National People's Congress demanded the end of criminal sanctions against protesters and permission for exiled students to return. Lu Jiaxa, chairman of the Peasants' and Workers' Democratic party, reportedly expressed concerns about public resentment over layoffs and corruption among cadres, and suggested that reassessing Tiananmen could create a more harmonious atmosphere. Li Ruihuan, number four in party ranking, acknowledged that some "patriotic" scholars abroad had argued that students living in exile in the US, Canada, and Europe would prove "a priceless treasure" to modern China, but said the party judgment on the nature and handling of events in 1989 would never soften.
As for the square itself, it is being renovated for the ceremonies marking the 50th anniversary of the People's Republic of China on October 1st. It is out of bounds during this sensitive period, surrounded by metal hoarding. But in the present overheated nationalistic climate, there is little danger of any turbulence in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, unless this time it is anti-American.
