Now at least we know why China's old men slaughtered their grandchildren at Tiananmen Square. Or do we?
Last week's documents out of China draw a picture of Li Peng and Deng Xiaoping driven to drastic measures through fears of house arrest and imminent collapse of government control. I believe, however, based on my experience of Beijing at the time, that that is not the case.
A few hours after the massacre ended, I was sitting with students in a Beijing college dormitory, as the names of the dead came in. The young people sat stone-faced on the edge of bunks, staring into nothing. I would hold an occasional hand or put an arm around a shoulder and feel the waves of shuddering. It was all I could think to do. As each name came in, someone taped a photo of the dead student on the wall. The pictures came from student lockers or from boyfriends or girl friends. Soon there was a line of pictures, then another line below that. Then another.
At some point a young woman half-whispered something, and a friend translated for me. "They didn't have to do that," she said. It was all over, any- way?" What did she mean?
Some days earlier I had watched thousands striding down Chang'an Boulevard, chanting, "Li Peng, xia tai! Li Peng, xia tai!" (Peng, resign!) Suddenly the sky turned black and a fierce wind and rain roared down the boulevard.
"Li Peng has lost the mandate of heaven," one of my companions said. "No," said another. "It's ourselves who have lost it."
She could have been right, for from that moment the protests began to decline. From a high point where one million had demonstrated at Tiananmen Square, the numbers dwindled inexorably. In the days that followed, with troops watching and waiting in the streets, the exodus from Tiananmen Square became a flood, and the central railway station was clogged with young people returning to the provinces. Finally there were only 5,000 left in the square. By then it was a pathetic sight, stinking of latrines, with leaflets and plastic bags blowing everywhere. Students with drooping shoulders and filthy wrinkled jeans huddled in tents and parked buses, squabbling about how they could withdraw from Tiananmen Square without losing face.
They were finished and they knew it. Everyone knew it. We knew it at Xin Hua, the Chinese government news agency where I worked, and we were the eyes and ears of the government. So the leaders knew it too.
Li Peng and Deng Xiaoping had stayed their hand, whether through oriental patience, or because they were so preoccupied with the internal power struggle against Zhao Ziyang and his liberal faction. But anyway, it had paid off in the end: they had won without bloodshed.
So why, only then, did they send the soldiers in to kill? There can be only one reason. Some days earlier, Deng had been reported as saying: "It would be worth getting rid of 20,000 people to ensure 20 years of stability."
This was widely quoted in the corridors of Xin Hua. They would have considered that stability could be best guaranteed through terror, and terror is most efficaciously achieved through deaths. So they had to have deaths.
And those deaths would have the added value of locking down the victory just barely won over the Zhao faction. That, surely, is why, with the crisis over, they nevertheless started the killings. This would have been perfectly normal behaviour for Chinese emperors (which they practically were), and would have been simply acting out their ancient proverb: Kill a chicken to frighten the monkeys.
And indeed they got their stability, purchased by those deaths. They would have seen it as a fair enough bargain.
Does this mean that those documents smuggled out of China are not to be credited? By no means. It is certainly credible that, at the height of the protests, Deng and Li were indeed in danger of house arrest and of losing their power, more likely from rival Zhao Ziyang than from the students. However, that danger had passed by the time of the massacre. And the internal struggles were ending once rival Zhao Ziyang went under house arrest.
In fact it was clear two weeks before the massacre that Zhao was losing out, after he offered his resignation to the Politburo's Standing Committee (May 18th) and then made his last public appearance, visiting hunger strikers at the square and bursting into tears. The next day he took "sick leave" and disappeared.
So what reason was left for massacring, except to create such terror as would ensure that the Tiananmen Square "turmoil" would never happen again? However, human motives are rarely entirely pure, and I hazard there was one other motive for the massacre. Revenge.
Deng Xiaoping was a tiny man, and his nickname was Little Bottle (which his name sounded like). He had been shamed before Gorbachev and the world by the placards, the chants, and the wholesale smashing of bottles.
Premier Li Peng had been mocked and lampooned until his name became a joke and a byword, and had been publicly humiliated by Wuerkaixi on national television.
Now, lese majeste, or insulting the emperor, would have been a crime worthy of death in the eyes of the imperial geriatrics who ruled China. So that would have been another reason to kill their grandchildren.
David Rice directs the Killaloe Hedge-School of Writing. His latest novel, Song of Tiananmen Square, is published by Brandon