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TITLE: The Row That Drove China's Rulers to Crush Dissent in Tiananmen |
AUTHOR: Steven Mufson |
DATE: January 9, 2001 |
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China's leaders, fearing house arrest in a popular uprising, overcame their moderate comrades and ordered troops to crush the student-led protests in Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989. Documents released at the weekend reveal the leaders' secret conversations and give human faces and voices to the most controversial event in China in the past quarter-century. The internal documents, smuggled out of China and now being published in a book and in magazine excerpts, detail how the late leader Deng Xiaoping and eight retired and semi-retired Communist elders overcame opposition from others in the leadership who favoured placating the student demonstrators. "Anarchy gets worse every day. If this continues, we could even end up under house arrest," Deng said during a May 13 meeting at his house inside the Zhongnanhai leadership compound. Wang Zhen, one of the eight senior revolutionaries who then constituted the ultimate authority in China, said three weeks later: "Those goddamn bastards. Who do they think they are, trampling on sacred ground like Tiananmen so long? ... "Anybody who tries to overthrow the Communist Party deserves death and noburial..." The papers also demonstrate how China's current leader, President Jiang Zemin, got his job through irregular processes that violated the party's constitution. In the midst of the Tiananmen crisis Deng and other elders handpicked Mr Jiang to replace the party secretary, Zhao Ziyang, who opposed the imposition of martial law in Beijing. Deng told party leaders at a meeting on June 2, 1989, the day before the army was ordered to march into the city: "The Western world, especially the United States, has thrown its entire propaganda machine into agitation work and has given a lot of encouragement and assistance to the so-called democrats or opposition in China - people who in fact are the scum of the Chinese nation.'' The documents were spirited out of China by a Chinese official who says he wants to promote political reform and remain anonymous. They were translated by two leading United States scholars, Professor Andrew Nathan of Columbia University and Professor Perry Link of Princeton University, who after extensive conversations with the official and independent research are convinced of the documents' authenticity. The documents, which include transcripts and recordings of internal meetings, are being published in a book, The Tiananmen Papers, by PublicAffairs, a non-fiction publishing house in New York. Extensive excerpts from the documents are being published in the next issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. "I believe that the documents are authentic," said Mr James Lilley, the US ambassador during the protests and one of the few China experts besides the volume's editors to have examined the materials. "But I don't rule out the possibility that people might have played with the language to score certain points.'' The documents confirm that the then premier, Li Peng, led the internal campaign to crack down on the students, whose appeals for openness and broader elections he dismissed at one leadership meeting as nonsense. They show the party's standing committee was indeed split over whether to continue dialogue with the students, with only two of the five committee members voting for martial law and one abstaining. They show Deng as having little sympathy for the demonstrators. The number of people killed in Beijing during the 1989 crackdown remains in dispute. Western estimates have put the figure at at least 700, and some calculations have been as high as 2,700. The newly published materials show that the leadership believed, as it has long said publicly, that only about 200 people died during the upheavals. Under Mr Jiang, who continues to hold the top job within the Chinese Communist Party and has been China's most powerful leader since Deng's death in 1997, the Government has continued to repress dissent. The party's formal verdict on the 1989 protests is still that they amounted to a "counter-revolutionary rebellion" aimed at seizing power. Demonstrators said at the time that they were merely trying to persuade the party to adopt reforms. Professor Nathan said he thought the leak of the documents suggested there was renewed skirmishing inside China today over the issue of political reform. The focus of the 1989 power struggle was Zhao, the party chief, who that spring consistently favoured a flexible, conciliatory approach to the students gathering in Beijing and many other Chinese cities. "Martial law could give us total control of the situation, but think of the terror it will strike in the minds of Beijing's citizens and students," he said on May 27, 1989. "Where will that lead?'' Zhao ran afoul of a group of octogenarian party stalwarts who had relinquished formal positions but still held extraordinary influence with Deng and the People's Liberation Army. "Zhao Ziyang's never paid a whit of attention to people like us," Wang Zhen said at a party meeting on May 21, 1989, the documents show. "...What he really wants is to drive us old people from power. We didn't mistreat him - he's the one who picked the fight. When he falls it'll be his own fault." Zhao was purged by Deng. He has been under house arrest for more than a decade and is said to be in poor health. The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times,The New York Times END |