1989 Tiananmen

Much has been said and written about the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre. A refreshing account came from Jan Wong's Red China Blues. Wong was in Beijing at that time and reported on the event as a correspondent for a Canadian newspaper.

Wong described Chai Ling (柴玲), one of the key student activists, as follow:

"The television cameras loved her because her curtain of silky hair was always falling in her eyes, and because she tended to weep at the slightest provocation."

Enthusiastic students at the square reportedly shouted "Xiaoping Wansui" (小平万岁, or "Long Live Xiaoping"). But the slogan was also a pun on Deng's name, and meant "smash little bottle (Xiaoping) into ten thousand pieces."

Watching the event unfolded before her eyes, Wong said she could not decide who was more childish, the students or the "doddering gerontocracy."

Wong wrote: "An experienced mediator could have solved things so easily. But the students were drunk with their new-found celebrity, and communist dictators weren't used to negotiating. The Communist Party also had an internal power struggle to settle."

"Maybe it was sleep deprivation ... but to my jaundiced eye it seemed that the students were merely aping their oppressors. They established a lilliputian kingdom in Tiananmen Square, complete with a mini-bureaucracy with committees for sanitation, finance and propaganda."

"They even adopted grandiose titles. Chai Ling was elected Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Tiananamen Square Unified Action Headquarters. Like the government, the students' broadcast station sometimes deliberately disseminated misinformation, such as the resignation of key government officials, which wasn't true."

"They even, indignity of indignities, issued us press passes. Using transparent fishing line held in place by volunteers ... they carved the huge square into gigantic concentric circles of ascending importance. How our press passes were stamped determined how deeply we could penetrate those silly circles. We reporters had to show our passes to half a dozen officious monitors before we could interview the student leaders, who naturally, hung out at the very center, at the Monument to the People's Heroes."

But when the shooting occurred, Wong noted that like the students, she could hardly believed it. "Perhaps like me, they couldn't believe that the People's Liberation Army was shooting them," Wong noted, "or maybe after stopping an army in its track for days, armed only with moral certitude, they believed they were invincible."

Wong noted that in the aftermath of the shooting, Chinese who were normally afraid to give blood "even when offered large cash incentives", streamed in to donate.

While the students adopted non-violent means, there were instances of violence perpetrated by students after the shootings occurred.

As Wong wrote: "I later learnt that enraged protesters killed a number of soldiers with savage ferocity. After an army officer named Liu Guogeng shot four people, he was pulled from his jeep and beaten to death ... The crowd doused his corpse with gasoline, set it on fire and strung his charred remains, clad only in socks from a bus window ... someone stuck an army cap on his head and, in a chilling attempt at levity, put his glasses back on his nose. The furious mob still wasn't satisfied. Someone yanked him down and disemboweled him."

As Wong observed, in 40 years of communist rule, no one, not even Mao, had ever brought tanks into the capital."

Wong added: "So that there would be no finger-pointing afterward, Deng decided everyone had to have blood on their hands. He ordered every single military region to biao tai (表态), or demonstrate their attitude, with a tangible show of loyalty. Many commanders dragged their feet, but Deng waited, and lobbied."

"Those who didn't go along were arrested and eventually court-martialed. It took 15 tense days, from the declaration of independence of martial law to the start of the massacre, for him to bring every general on his side."