From the archive
As armies march
Jun 10th 1989
From The Economist print edition
China at war with itself
FROM OUR CHINA CORRESPONDENT
THE soldiers are divided, the Communist party tortured by its leaders' fratricidal struggle for power, the centre of Beijing scarred with the burn and bullet marks of military repression. This week China looked into the abyss of coup, counter-coup and civil war.
Nobody could tell what it saw there. Beijing was rife with rumours. One said that Mr Deng Xiaoping, the 84-year-old paramount leader, was dying of prostate cancer, or had already died. Another that his conservative acolyte, the prime minister Mr Li Peng, had survived an assassination attempt. A third that rival troops were moving towards the capital for a violent showdown with the bloodstained 27th army. A fourth that President Yang Shangkun, at the age of 81, was making a last bid to succeed the decrepit Mr Deng.
All or none may be true, but all raised tensions in the capital. Even without them, the reality of what happened on the night of June 3rd-4th was a ghastly cause for fear. For the first time in Communist China's 40 years, the People's Liberation Army turned on the people themselves—not with tear-gas and batons, but with tanks, armoured personnel carriers and volley after volley of automatic rifle fire.
The brutality had one obvious aim: to clear Beijing's Tiananmen Square of the dishevelled students who last month occupied it to demand "democracy", however vague their idea of it, from leaders many of whom hated the word whatever it meant. The immediate aim was achieved. The thousands of unarmed civilians who rushed to Changan Avenue and Jianguomenwai Street to block the approaches to the square were no match for heavily armed soldiers willing to abandon their basic humanity. Armoured columns rolled over makeshift barricades and the people who had erected them. Students linked arms and sang the "Internationale", communism's anthem. They were silenced by assault rifles. The plaster and styrofoam statue of the "Goddess of Democracy", provocatively put up opposite the Forbidden City just five days before, was dashed to the ground by the invading soldiers.
But what price "victory"? The idealism of a generation was first scorned, then shattered. The 27th army, loyal to President Yang and commanded, it is said, by his nephew, will never erase the shame of its assault. Television relayed the horror to the outside world; condemnation mounted. President Bush banned American military sales, and on June 7th, to howls of official Chinese outrage, the American embassy in Beijing gave sanctuary to Mr Fang Lizhi, an astrophysicist who is China's best-known dissident. China then cancelled its foreign minister's visit to Washington, which had been due to begin on June 12th.
France, Holland and Sweden "froze" diplomatic relations with China. Britain, which is due to return Hong Kong to China in 1997, cancelled ministerial visits and suspended military contacts. The picture millions of foreigners will always remember of China's despairing bid for freedom was the television footage of a lone student stepping first left, then right, to halt an armoured column of tanks for three minutes before his friends dragged him to safety.
China's own people, however, did not see the young man's reckless bravery. State television has shown only official video tape: of civilians mobbing soldiers and burning vehicles, and of soldiers being interviewed in their hospital beds. The government's spokesman, Mr Yuan Mu, declared that the weekend death toll was 300—of whom 23 were students. This was a sick joke: western intelligence sources estimate that 7,000 died, of whom 6,000 were civilians and 1,000 soldiers (almost all of them killed by other soldiers). What may not have been a joke was Mr Yuan's assertion that the attack on the "counter-revolutionary" element was "an initial" victory.
The implication was clear enough: the military forces in and around Beijing, which by mid-week amounted to perhaps 350,000 men, are meant to intimidate more than just luckless citizens who for seven weeks dreamed they could wrest freedom from a party nurtured on Stalinism. For centuries the size and posturing of Chinese armies—even the noise they made—were weapons to achieve victory in political power struggles. They still are.
The struggle this time is ferocious. The assumption is that one contestant, the party's reform-minded general secretary, Mr Zhao Ziyang, faces certain defeat. He has not been seen since he visited the students in the square on May 19th—the day before Mr Li and President Yang imposed martial law on parts of the capital. But by June 8th Mr Li had been seen only twice since martial law began. Neither President Yang nor Mr Deng has been seen since the all-but-forgotten summit with Mr Gorbachev in mid-May. The one big clue in the political fight came early this week: the Supreme People's Court addressed its praise for the "essential" military action of June 4th to the Standing Committee of the Politburo in general—and to Mr Qiao Shi in particular.
Mr Qiao, 65 this year, is a shadowy figure reminiscent of Yuri Andropov, the ex-KGB chief who briefly ruled Russia earlier this decade. Mr Qiao, too, made his career in his party's security apparatus; his views, too, about policy are unknown. If Mr Zhao is indeed finished, Mr Qiao is a likelier candidate than most to step into his shoes. He would make a comfortable protégé of the hardline President Yang. Yet he does not bear Mr Li's presumably fatal taint of blood and failure. Unlike Mr Li and President Yang, Mr Qiao has not been branded a murderer in the dissidents' wall posters.
But even if Mr Qiao were confirmed by a Central Committee meeting tomorrow, China's convulsions would continue. On June 6th there were brief skirmishes in Beijing between the 27th army and the 38th army—which has a longstanding loyalty to Mr Zhao and which last month refused to support martial law or to fire on civilians. By June 7th those clashes and the prospect of more to come had prompted a string of foreign embassies to arrange emergency evacuation of their citizens from China.
The departures may be timely. On the same day units of the 27th army marched out of Tiananmen Square eastwards along Changan Avenue. They chanted "down with corruption" and "down with chaos" and then fired salvoes of bullets not just at high-rise buildings that house the offices of foreign companies but also at the Jianguomenwai compound where several hundred foreign diplomats and journalists live.
The bullets were probably not intended to draw blood. Perhaps they were to cast foreigners as the scapegoat for China's ills. Those ills are real enough. On the surface they show in the demonstrations that took place in almost all of China's big cities this week, from Shanghai to Wuhan to Chengdu. They will show deeper down for years to come, as China comes to terms with its greatest failure since the cultural revolution.
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