THE TIANANMEN SQUARE MASS
MURDER
Mass killings occurred under some
Communist regimes during the twentieth century. Estimates of the death toll
vary widely, depending on the methodology used.
Some estimates of mass killings include not only mass murders or
executions that took place during the elimination of political opponents, civil wars, terror campaigns, land reform but also under the auspices of
law and order.
On the evening of
June 3rd , state-run television in Beijing, China warned residents
to stay indoors but crowds of people took to the streets, as they had two weeks
before, to block the incoming army. PLA
units advanced on Beijing from every direction— the 38th, 63rd and 28th
Armies from the west, the 15th Airborne Corps, 20th, 26th and 54th Armies from
the south, the 39th
Army and the 1st Armored Division from the east
and the 40th and 64th
Armies from the north.
At about 10 pm, on June 3rd , the 38th Army opened fired on protesters at the Wukesong intersection
on Chang'an Avenue, about 10 kilometres
west of Square. The crowds were stunned that the army was using live ammunition
and reacted by hurling insults and projectiles. Song Xiaoming, a 32-year-old
aerospace technician, who was killed at Wukesong, was the first confirmed
fatality of the night. The troops used expanding bullets, (dum dum bullets) prohibited
by international law for use in warfare, which expand upon entering the body
and created larger wounds.
But
was the June 4, 1989 massacre in the Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China
prompted by the Chinese government for political reasons? The government
claimed that the people in the Square were rioters who were attempting to
overthrow the government of China.
At about 10:30 pm, the advance of the army was briefly halted
at Muxidi, about 5 km
west of the Square where trolleybuses were placed
across a bridge and set on fire. Crowds of residents from
nearby apartment blocks tried to surround the military convoy and halt its
advance. The 38th Army again opened fire, inflicting heavy
casualties. According to the tabulation of victims by Tiananmen Mothers, 36 people died at
Muxidi, including Wang Weiping, a doctor tending to the wounded. Several were
killed in the apartments of high-ranking party officials overlooking the
boulevard. Soldiers raked the apartment buildings with gunfire, and some people
inside or on their balconies were shot. The 38th Army also used armored
personnel carriers (APCs) to ram through the buses. They
continued to fight off demonstrators, who hastily erected barricades and tried
to form human chains. As the army advanced, fatalities were
recorded all along Chang'an Avenue, at Nanlishhilu, Fuxingmen, Xidan, Liubukou and Tiananmen. Among those killed
was Duan Changlong, a Tsinghua University graduate student, who was shot in the
chest as he tried to negotiate with soldiers at Xidan. To the south,
paratroopers of the 15th Airborne Corps also used live ammunition, and
civilians deaths were recorded at Hufangqiao, Zhushikou, Tianqiao, and Qianmen.
The killings
infuriated city residents, some of whom attacked soldiers with sticks, rocks
and molotov cocktails, (bottles of
gasoline with cloth fuses attached) setting fire to military vehicles.
The
Chinese government and its supporters had tried to argue that the troops acted
in self-defense and seized upon troop casualties to justify the use of force.
Lethal attacks on troops occurred after the military had opened fire at 10 pm on June 3rd and the number of military fatalities caused by protesters is relatively
few compared o as to how many were killed later in the Tiananmen Square.
Thousands of Student pro-democracy
demonstrators had previously spent months camped out in the Square, calling for
political reform. The government was caught off-guard and were troubled as
to how to handle so many protesters in one particular area such as the Tiananmen Square.
At 8:30 pm, June 4th, army helicopters appeared
above the Square and students called for campuses to send reinforcements. At 10 pm, the founding ceremony of the Tiananmen Democracy
University was held as scheduled at the base of the Goddess
of Democracy. At 10:16 pm,
the loudspeakers controlled by the government warned the protesters that troops
may take "any measures" to enforce martial law. By 10:30 pm, news of bloodshed to the west and south of the
city began trickling into the Square that was told by witnesses drenched in
blood. At midnight, the students' loudspeaker announced news that a student had
been killed on West Chang'an Avenue, near the Military Museum and a somber mood
settled on the Square. Li Lu, the deputy commander of the student headquarters,
urged students to remain united in defending the Square through non-violent
means. At 12:30 am, Wu'erkaixi fainted after
learning that a female student at Beijing Normal University, who had left
campus with him earlier in the evening, had just been killed. Wuerkaixi was
taken away by ambulance. By then, there were still 70,000–80,000 people in the
Square
At about 12:15 am, a flare lit up the sky
and the first armored personnel (APC) vehicle appeared on the Square from the
west. At 12:30 am, two more APCs arrived from
the South. The students threw chunks of cement at the vehicles. One APC
stalled, perhaps by metal poles jammed into its wheels, and the demonstrators
covered it with gasoline-doused blankets and set it on fire. The intense heat
forced out the three occupants, who were swarmed by demonstrators. The APCs had
reportedly run over tents and many in the crowd wanted to beat the soldiers.
But students formed a protective cordon and escorted the three men to the medic
station by the History Museum on the east side of the Square.
Pressure mounted on
the student leadership to abandon non-violence and retaliate against the
killings. At one point, Chai Ling picked up the megaphone and called on fellow
students to prepare to "defend themselves" against the
"shameless government." But she and Li Lu agreed to adhere to
peaceful means and had the students' sticks, rocks and glass bottles
confiscated.
At about 1:30 am, the vanguard of the 38th Army and paratroopers
from the 15th Airborne Corps arrived at the north and south ends of the Square,
respectively. They began to seal off the Square from reinforcements of students
and residents, killing more demonstrators who were trying to enter the Square.
Meanwhile, the 27th and 65th
Armies poured out of the Great Hall of the People to the west and the
24th Army emerged from behind
the History Museum to the east. The
remaining students, numbering several thousand, were completely surrounded at
the Monument of the People's Heroes in the center of the Square. At 2 am, the troops fired shots over the heads of the
students at the Monument. The students broadcast pleadings back toward the
troops: "We entreat you in peace, for democracy and freedom of the
motherland, for strength and prosperity of the Chinese nation, please comply
with the will of the people and refrain from using force against peaceful
student demonstrators. “ unquote
At about 2:30 am, several workers near the Monument emerged with a
machine gun they had captured from the troops and vowed to take revenge. They
were persuaded to give up the weapon by Hou Dejian. The workers also handed
over an assault rifle without ammunition, which Liu Xiaobo smashed against the
marble railings of the Monument. Shao Jiang, a student who had witnessed
the killings at Muxidi, pleaded with the older intellectuals to retreat, saying
too many lives had already been lost. Initially, Liu Xiaobo was reluctant, but
eventually joined Zhou Tuo, Gao Xin and Hou Dejian in making the
case to the student leaders for a withdrawal. Chai Ling, Li Lu and Feng Congde
initially rejected the idea of withdrawal.[115] At 3:30 am,
at the suggestion of two doctors in the Red Cross camp, Hou Dejian and Zhuo Tuo
agreed to try to negotiate with the soldiers. They rode in an ambulance to the
northeast corner of the Square and spoke with Ji Xinguo, the political
commissar of the 38th Army's 336th Regiment, who relayed the request to command
headquarters, which agreed to grant safe passage for the students to the
southeast. The commissar told Hou, "It would be a tremendous
accomplishment, if you can persuade the students to leave the Square.” unquote
At 4 am,
the lights on the Square suddenly turned off, and the government's loudspeaker
announced: "Clearance of the Square begins now. We agree with the
students' request to clear the Square.” unquote
The students sang The Internationale and braced for a
last stand.[ Hou returned and informed
student leaders of his agreement with the troops. At 4:30 am,
the lights relit and the troops began to advance on the Monument from all
sides. At about 4:32 am, Hou Dejian took the
student's loudspeaker and recounted his meeting with the military. Many
students, who learned of the talks for the first time, reacted angrily and
accused him of cowardice. In my respectful opinion, that was a very bad
decision. By then had already made their point. To remain in the Square was
akin to walking into a gun fight with pencils in hand.
The soldiers initially stopped
about 10 meters from the students. The first row of troops took aim with
machine guns in the prone position. Behind them soldiers squatted and stood with assault rifles.
Mixed among them were anti-riot police with clubs. Further back were tanks and
APCs. Feng Congde took to the loudspeaker and explained that there was no time
left to hold a meeting. Instead, a voice vote would decide the collective
action of the group. Although the "stays" were louder than
"gos", Feng said the "gos" had prevailed. Just at that
time, at about 4:40 am, a squad of soldiers in
camouflaged uniform charged up the Monument and shot out the students'
loudspeaker. Other troops beat and kicked dozens of students at the Monument,
seizing and smashing their cameras and recording equipment. An officer with a
loudspeaker called out "you better leave or this won't end well.”
Some
of the students and professors persuaded others still sitting on the lower
tiers of the Monument to get up and leave, while soldiers beat them with clubs
and gun butts and prodded them with bayonets. Witnesses heard bursts of
gunfire. At about 5:10 am, the students
began to leave the Monument. They linked hands and marched through a corridor
to the southeast, though some departed through the north. Those
who refused to leave were beaten by soldiers and ordered to join the departing
procession. Having removed the students from the square, soldiers were ordered
to relinquish their ammunition, after which they were allowed a short reprieve
from 7 am to 9 am.
The
soldiers were then ordered to clear the square of all debris left over from the
student occupation. The debris was either piled and burnt on the square, or
placed in large plastic bags that were airlifted away by military
helicopters. After the cleanup, the troops stationed at The Great Hall of the People remained
confined within for the next nine days. During this time, the soldiers were
left to sleep on the floors and fed a single packet of instant noodles split
between three men daily. Officers apparently suffered no such deprivation, and
were served regular meals apart from their troops.
Just past 6 am on June 4th, as a convoy of students
who had vacated the Square were walking westward in the bicycle lane along
Chang'an Avenue back to their campus, three tanks pursued them from the Square,
firing tear gas and one drove through the crowd, killing 11 students, injuring
scores of others.
Early in the Tiananmen Square Protests, it
looked as though the student protestors had the upper hand over the People's Liberation Army (PLA). The
protestors captured tanks and weapons from the young PLA soldiers, who were
deployed without any ammunition. This toothless attempt by the Chinese
Communist Party government to intimidate the protestors was completely
ineffectual, The students chose to remain in the Square, so on June 4th,
1989, the government panicked so it sent the PLA into the square with loaded
weapons and tanks.
Most of the student activists in Tiananmen
Square were from relatively well-to-do families in Beijing or other major
cities. The PLA troops, often the same age as the students, tended to come from
rural farm families. Initially, the two sides were relatively evenly
matched until the central government ordered the PLA to use all necessary
force to put down the protests. At that point, the Tiananmen Square Protests became
internationally known as the Tiananmen
Square Massacre
Later in the
morning, thousands of civilians tried to re-enter the Square from the northeast
on East Chang'an Avenue, which was blocked by rows of infantry. Many in the
crowd were parents of the demonstrators who had been in the Square. As the
crowd approached the troops, an officer sounded a warning, and then the troops opened fire. The crowd scurried back
down the avenue in view of journalists in the Beijing Hotel. Dozens of
civilians were shot in the back as they fled. Later, the crowds surged
back toward the troops, who opened fire again. The people fled in panic. An
ambulance that was arriving was also caught in the gunfire. The crowd tried
several more times but could not enter the Square, which remained closed to the
public for two weeks.
On June 5th, the
suppression of the protest was immortalized in Western media by the famous
video footage and photographs of a lone man standing in front of a column of tanks driving out of Tiananmen
Square. The iconic photo that would eventually make its way around the world
was taken on June 5th on Chang'an Avenue. As the tank driver tried to go
around him, the "Tank Man" moved into the tank's path. He continued
to stand defiantly in front of the tanks for some time, then he climbed up onto
the turret of the lead tank to speak to the soldiers inside. After returning to
his position in front of the tanks, the man was pulled aside by a group of
people.
A stopped convoy of 37 APCs on
Changan Boulevard at Muxidi was forced to abandon their vehicles after becoming
stuck among an assortment of burned out buses and military vehicles.[131] In addition to occasional
incidents of soldiers opening fire on civilians in Beijing, Western news
outlets reported clashes between Units of the PLA.[132] Late in the afternoon 26
tanks, three armored personnel carriers and supporting infantry took up
defensive positions facing East at Jiaanguomen
and a Fuxingmen overpasses.
Shellfire was heard throughout
the night and the next morning a U.S. Marine in the Eastern part of the city
reported spotting a damaged armored vehicle that had been disabled by an
armor-piercing shell. The ongoing turmoil in the capital disrupted the flow of
everyday life. No editions of the People's Daily were
available in Beijing on June 5th despite assurances that they had been printed.
Many shops, offices, and factories were not able to open as workers remained in
their homes, and public transit services were limited to Subway and suburban
bus routes.
Evetually the government regained
control in the week following the military's seizure of the Square. A political
purge followed in which officials responsible for organizing or condoning the
protests were removed, and protest leaders jailed.
After order was restored in
Beijing on June 4th, protests of varying scales continued in some 80
other Chinese cities, outside of the spotlight the international press. In the then-British colony of Hong Kong,
people again took to wearing black in solidarity with the demonstrators in
Beijing. There were also protests in other countries, many adopting the use of
black armbands as well
In Shanghai, students marched on
the streets on June 5th, and erected roadblocks on major
thoroughfares. Factory workers went on a general strike and took to the streets
as well; railway traffic was also blocked. Public transport was also suspended
and prevented people from getting to work. On June 6th, the
municipal government tried to clear the rail blockade, but was met with fierce
resistance from the crowds. Several people were killed by being run over by the
train. On June 7th, students from major Shanghai universities
stormed various campus facilities to erect biers in
commemoration of the dead in Beijing. The situation gradually came under
control without use of deadly force. The municipal government gained
recognition from the top leadership in Beijing for averting a major upheaval.
At first, the government sent in the People's Liberation Army (PLA) without weapons to try to basically
muscle the students off of the Square. At this point in the Tiananmen Square Protests, the soldiers were
unarmed and were trying to use their sheer numbers to clear the square of protestors. The
Chinese government hoped that this show of potential force would suffice to
drive the students from the square and end the demonstrations.
Then the armed soldiers entered th square. They were
uneducated backwoods men who had no concept as to what was right or wrong. They
slaughtered the men, women and children as they moved into the depths of the square.
The tanks ran over the students and crushed them to death.
Nobody knows exactly how many protestors (or soldiers, or
passersby) were injured or killed in the melee. The Chinese government claims
that 200 people were killed; independent estimates put the number at as many as
3,000 They were all wrong in their estimates.
In
2014, the Next Magazine reported on
White House declassified files, which estimated that 10,454 were killed and
40,000 were injured. The documents cited internal files from the Chinese
government headquarters in Zhongnanhai, which were passed to the Americans via
sources in the martial law troops. According to a source, the army
that committed the “atrocities” was the 27th Army of Shanxi Province, which was “60 percent
illiterate and are called primitives.” and the army that committed the
“atrocities” was the 27th Army of Shanxi Province, which was “60 percent
illiterate and were called primitives. The source said the commander was Yang
Zhenhua, who was the nephew of Yang Shangkun, China’s president at the time. The 27th Army APCs (armoured personnel carriers) opened fire
on the crowd (both civilians and soldiers) before running over them in their
APCs.”
A
document said that before the slaughter began, the SMR troops separated
the students from local residents upon arrival at Tiananmen Square.
The
students were led to understand that they were given one hour to leave the square
but after five minutes, the APCs
attacked. Students linked arms but were mown down including soldiers. The 27th
Army was ordered to spare no-one, They even shot wounded SMR soldiers. When
four wounded girl students begged for their lives, they were bayoneted. A three
year old girl was injured but her mother was shot dead as she went to her aid. Six other tried to rescue the girl and they
too were shot dead. As many as 1000
survivors were told they could escape via Zhengyi Lu but were then mown down by
specially prepared M/G positions who were waiting for them. A student holding a small pair of blood-stained glasses
with a bullet hole in them later said that he saw troops shooting at two little
girls to the south of the Monument to
People’s Heroes in the middle of the square. One of the girls who was aged
around 12 was shot in the face as she shielded her 6-year-old sister with her
little body. They had come out for a walk the night before and were stuck in
the square.
Army
ambulances who attempted to give aid were shot up as was a Sino-Japanese
Hospital ambulance. With medical crew dead, the wounded driver attempted to ram attackers
but was blown to pieces with anti-tank weapon. In a further attack, APCs caught
up with SMR straggler trucks, rammed and overturned them and ran over the troops
who were previously in the trucks. During attack, a 27th Army
officer was shot dead by his own troops apparently because he faltered. Troops later
explained they would be shot if they hadn’t shot officer.
Then
the APCs then ran over bodies time and time again to make sure that they were
turned into mush and then the remains were collected by bulldozer. The remains were
incinerated and then hosed down the drains.
Li Zhiyun, the political chief of the 38th
Army, said later that the army did not
shoot anyone, and 200 deaths were caused by stray bullets. He was quoted as saying, “If more than 200 can
be killed in a single aircraft crash, how anybody can claim that the PLA
massacred the people. In any case, most of the dead were rioters trying to
overthrow the government.” unquote
He also claimed that fires in the square before
the clearance began, were caused by illegal unions burning documents, and that
young soldiers were only burning rubbish on the square afterward “Nobody was killed or wounded on Tiananmen.
Nobody in China can come out and testify that people were killed on Tiananmen.”
That creep was such a liar that his nose grew so long unlike
that of the fabled Pinocchio, it would make Pinocchio’s nose look like a small
pimple on the surface of his face.
After order was restored in
Beijing on June 4th, protests of varying scales continued in some 80
other Chinese cities, outside of the spotlight the international press. In
the then-British colony of Hong Kong, people again took to wearing black in
solidarity with the demonstrators in Beijing. There were also protests in other
countries, many adopting the use of black armbands as well.
In Shanghai, students marched on
the streets on June 5th , and erected roadblocks on major
thoroughfares. Factory workers went on a general strike and took to the streets
as well; railway traffic was also blocked. Public transport was also
suspended and prevented people from getting to work.[139] On June 6th,
the municipal government tried to clear the rail blockade, but was met with
fierce resistance from the crowds. Several people were killed by being run over
by the train. On June 7th , students from major Shanghai
universities stormed various campus facilities to erect biers in
commemoration of the dead in Beijing.
The situation gradually came under control without use of deadly
force. The municipal government gained recognition from the top leadership in
Beijing for averting a major upheaval.
I have only one word to say about the Chinese army and civil
authorities who had a part in the slaughter of their victims and their attempt
at covering up the slaughter and it is—SHAMELESS.
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