“The People’s Army doesn’t shoot the People”

Lesen Sie die deutsche Version hier.

I came to Beijing in a hurry. I was hired as a postdoc at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the Academia Sinica, in the team of Nobel Prize winner T.D. Lee. I had planned to write my PhD thesis during the summer of 1989, but in February, the Institute sent me the offer to start on May 1^st. As a result, in a rush, I compiled the research I had performed over the past three years into my thesis and defended it just before the end of April.

A week or so later, my girlfriend at the time (now my wife) and I flew from Amsterdam to Karachi and from there to Beijing. We were picked up from the airport with an old Soviet limousine – this was the last time we used a car for several weeks: after that, almost everything was on bicycle, cars being still a rarity in China at the time. We were, by the way, also a rarity: as Westerners, we stuck out from everybody else, and often people in the streets would turn around to look at us in bewilderment.

The Institute had arranged a wonderful little 3-room furnished apartment (quite a luxury in China at that time!) for us, very close to the Institute. It was located in the northwestern outskirts of the city, in the middle of the triangle formed by the three main universities: Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Renmin University. The Institute and a colleague also provided us with two “Flying Pigeons”, those ubiquitous heavy but indestructible Chinese bicycles, which enabled us to explore at least some parts of this huge city.

It felt like a fun adventure

The protests and demonstrations had already started in April, and we were aware before our arrival that the situation was exceptional. Shortly after we arrived, some of my older colleagues informed me that the government had imposed a curfew and that we were expected to stay at home all day: of course, we didn’t comply, and we happily went with people of our generation to the Tian An Men Square to observe and mingle with the crowd. Some colleagues suggested we should visit the Forbidden City and other cultural highlights of and around Beijing, but we preferred experiencing the demonstrations as long as they lasted, postponing the touristic activities for later. We had no idea that our plans would soon be scrapped.

We went to Tian An Men several times, first in the company of Chinese acquaintances, and later on our own. Each time, it felt like a fun adventure, and we never felt threatened.

A huge square filled with people

The long trip from the northwestern outskirts to the center of Beijing was, in itself, an impressive experience: there was an incredibly dense but laminar flow of bicycles to and from the center, with also vans and trucks overfilled with demonstrators. It was easy to recognize that almost everybody went there to demonstrate, because they carried all sorts of banners and other paraphernalia with slogans. There were numerous groups of students from different faculties, as well as workers from various factories and administrations (who often came on the back of company trucks), including uniformed policemen or military personnel (I couldn’t fathom the difference). Basically, although the students appeared to have the lead, all trades and ages seemed to be represented.

Tian An Men, though, topped everything: this is a huge square, one of the largest in the world, and it was almost entirely filled with people of all ages, genders, occupations, and backgrounds. Some were there on their own, but many had come in groups. Although most demonstrators came from the greater Beijing area, our Chinese companions from time to time pointed out to us some individuals or groups that had come from further away, including the countryside.

The crowd on the way to the square had already been quite dense, but on the square itself, it became extremely jammed. With a very crude extrapolation, I estimated there could well have been one million people crowding the square. Nevertheless, the atmosphere was totally relaxed, somewhat reminiscent of a kermess, and many demonstrators radiated an almost jovial mood.

There was one exception, though: the carefully cordoned area around the buses where students took care of their classmates in hunger (and thirst!) strike. There, the atmosphere was far quieter and more serious, almost solemn. The students took great care that nobody would approach these buses too closely and that there were at all times free lanes to channel ambulances in and out. Every 5 to 10 minutes, there was an ambulance bringing one of the striking students to a hospital to get a transfusion, as we were told.

Diverging expectations

Although Tian An Men was the center and focus of the movement, demonstrations also took place at other locations, notably on the university campuses, of course, but also at other crowded places such as markets. The students, some of whom were quite vocal and sometimes attracted crowds of listeners around them, were very excited and longed for a fundamental change in Chinese society: over the last decade at least, the urbanites had gradually become more aware of the Western way of life and had started being increasingly exposed to Western ideas and goods. However, more and more of them resented the unequal distribution of the new prosperity and begrudged the party leaders and their families, who, in their opinion, accumulated a disproportionate part of this new wealth.

They also demanded more democracy. However, their understandings of what this concept meant and entailed could differ quite widely, and it didn’t necessarily coincide with what I understood by democracy. For instance, a student told me bluntly that peasants and other “uneducated” citizens should not have the right to vote.

Of these lesser-educated people in the street, though less vocal, some seemed equally excited, but for obvious language reasons, I found it more difficult to understand why. One of them, however, managed to convey to me that this all reminded him of the start of the Cultural Revolution, and he looked forward to a repeat of this time of societal upheaval, onto which he fondly looked back!

On the other hand, the slightly older scholars from the Institute were terrified: it also reminded them of the start of the Cultural Revolution, but to them and their families, this had been an abominable period of immense suffering. The mere thought of that dark period repeating itself was unbearable to them. I suspect that the current party leaders (who had also struggled under the Cultural Revolution) very much shared the same view, which may explain (without justifying in any way!) why they eventually overreacted to this perceived threat and ended up ordering the violent massacre that was to follow. They probably couldn’t conceive of a spontaneous popular movement, which would rise and thrive without some centralized brain directing the masses.

One night at the end of May, we were awakened during the night by girls shouting in the street, “jūn duì lái le!” (“the army has arrived!”). Out of our window, I called one of them and asked her what exactly happened. She told me people had stopped troops in trucks at the outskirts of the city and that students were arguing with them not to disrupt the demonstrations. The next morning, we indeed saw several crossroads being blocked by young people with (in hindsight, futile, flimsy) barricades, but no military personnel: we were told that they had been sent unprepared and without clear orders, and that it had been easy to convince the officers to return to their barracks. The atmosphere felt a bit tenser for a couple of days, but almost everybody we talked with claimed a great victory of the People. From this moment on until the fateful night, we were repeatedly told the slogan, “The People’s Army doesn’t shoot the People.” Was it wishful thinking or dark premonition?

A terrible realization

On 3 June, my girlfriend had left Beijing for a few days to visit another city, so on the morning of 4 June, I decided to go alone in the direction of the city center in order to return to the so-called fish and bird market, which we had visited a week earlier. As always in those days, I carried my camera with me.

Very soon on my way, it became clear that something had changed: the streets were as full as before, but this morning, there was a much stronger stream of people coming from the center. Moreover, whereas before people were quite cheerful, this time they looked deeply depressed. Some of them even cried, which is a very rare display of emotions in Chinese culture.

On my way, some people stopped me and tried to depict their horrific experiences to me in broken English or in Chinese, which I barely understood. I realized that there had been a crackdown on the demonstrators during the night, but I was unprepared for what I was about to see when I arrived at Chang An Avenue, which, after a few kilometers, leads to the Tian An Men square. First, I saw a long column of abandoned military personnel carriers, either already burned-out or still burning. Regularly, some gun shells exploded under the extreme heat. Still, some passersby, armed with long bamboo sticks, tried to collect from under them intact shells as souvenirs.

The avenue was busy with people observing the destruction, many of them in total disbelief, while some strolled relaxed as though they were visiting a tourist attraction. For instance, I remember this little grassy area with puddles of blood and some people just sitting next to them observing the crowd. Overall, though, when I talked to people (either in my broken Chinese or their broken English), I sensed a complete bewilderment at the fact that the People’s Army had really opened fire on the people.

Strangely enough, however, their anger often seemed to be directed more towards the government than at the military. I vividly remember a lady walking quickly towards me with her pointed finger and yelling in English at me: “Li Peng must die!” (Li Peng was the Prime Minister at that time, and he had also been the prime target of the demonstrators’ discontent.) That day and later on, people tried to explain the unexplainable behavior of the People’s Army by telling me that the soldiers had been drugged and didn’t know what they were doing, or that they had actually been brought in from the southern border to Vietnam and didn’t understand the Beijing dialect, or that they came from the countryside and had been indoctrinated against city dwellers. Whatever the truth may be, the party and government officials had definitely learned their lesson from the night a couple of weeks earlier, when the demonstrators managed to convince the military convoys to turn around at the outskirts of Beijing.

I walked along the Chang An Avenue in the direction of Tian An Men shooting pictures with my camera. On the walls of the buildings, you could observe many bullet impacts, some of them as big as an outstretched hand. Some who had witnessed the military progressing through the avenue on their way to Tien An Men stopped me to relate the scenes they had witnessed during the night. One of them told me how he saw a military personnel pointing his gun upwards and shooting an elderly lady who was looking down at the devastation from her window. At some point, people conducted me into a hospital: just behind the entrance, dead bodies littered the floor in their blood. While helpers lifted them one by one onto a wheeled stretcher, a doctor came and kindly asked me to leave. I briefly considered refusing and exploring further into the hospital, but I had the impression that he was about to start crying, and I left.

Eventually, as I got closer to Tian An Men, the behavior of the people on the street somehow changed. In the distance, I could see the guns of a row of tanks pointing in our direction. That’s when several passersby took me by the arm and told me not to go any further: even at a distance, with my fair hair, my beard, and my funny dress, I was clearly identifiable as a foreigner, and they feared that snipers would target me preferentially; to the bystanders, I was too precious a witness! Indeed, many anticipated that the government would deny any wrongdoing, and they invited me, the independent foreigner, to photograph the evidence and make it public as soon as I got back home.

At some point, a person addressed me in excellent English. He was a journalist from the “People’s Daily”, a newspaper written in English. He told me that throughout the month of May, the whole governmental censorship had vanished, and he and his colleagues in all media had been free to publish whatever they wished. That’s when I remembered having read a week earlier in this Chinese newspaper (the only one I could read) an extremely interesting article about the alarmingly high rate of girl abortions in Chinese rural areas, as a consequence of applying a one-child policy in a patriarchal society. Having always lived in democratic societies, where the freedom of the press is obvious, I hadn’t realized how unique and revolutionary these articles were.

After having explored the Chang An Avenue back and forth for a few hours, taking pictures and talking with witnesses, at some point around noon, the sound of a machine gun echoed very close by. Immediately, the crowd scattered in all directions. I ran in the direction of where I had left my bicycle, with a single bizarre thought: “It is strange that I don’t feel any fear whatsoever; however, I run for my life. Actually, I just don’t want to die in such a stupid way!”

Rejected at the embassy

Immediately after the massacre, everybody expected the army to storm the universities, but it took the government several days to take control over the city. Nevertheless, the streets remained almost abandoned, and except for a few crossroads where you could see some buses decorated with white flowers (the Chinese color of mourning), all protest activities had vanished. I was told, however, that soldiers had entered city hospitals and arrested all the wounded. Although I saw very few soldiers patrolling the streets, from time to time, one could hear rifle salvos, but no more machine guns.

As I was a Belgian national, two days after the event, I managed to call the Belgian embassy to ask for advice. The person on the line was appalled that we were still in the city, and he told me that they would send a car immediately to pick us up and evacuate us onto the safe grounds of the embassy. I told him that my girlfriend was German, and he answered that at that stage, the important thing was to save lives; difficult to make it sound more dramatic… However, upon our arrival at the embassy, she was no longer welcome. There was no arguing with the Belgian diplomats: I could stay, but she had to leave the compound immediately.

I asked them to bring us back to our flat, but in the meantime, they had run out of fuel: apparently, most embassies had not anticipated the possibility of any kind of event that would disrupt the supply of gasoline. So, we decided to try out the German Embassy, which was located around the corner. This time, though, we didn’t tell them that I was not a German national. They took very good care of us, and with a few other stranded Germans, we spent the night in the apartment of an embassy employee who shared his dinner with us. The next day, we managed to find a taxi driver who drove us back to our flat. In contrast to the foreign embassies, he was perfectly prepared and told us that over the past few weeks, he had stored numerous canisters with fuel at his place, just in case.

Over the past few weeks, we had made a few acquaintances, and when we met them again after the massacre, the situation became almost tragicomic. Indeed, we had suspected that some of them were spying on us. (Indeed, quite an unlikely coincidence when you meet one of them again “just by coincidence” in the midst of the million people demonstrating on Tian An Men square…)

Shortly after the massacre, as we watched news on TV in the tiny room on campus, which one of our acquaintances shared with five other students, we were struck by the vivid testimonial of a witness to the massacre, who emotionally and gesturally described how the military shot at fellows around him, while at the same time, a scrolling text at the bottom of the screen invited the viewers who recognized him to report him to the authorities. Censorship regained control of the press.

Before the crackdown, my girlfriend and I had considered several scenarios, which would dictate our behavior in case the government violently curbed the demonstrations. We had come to the conclusion that if the toll exceeded 20 deaths, I would quit my job at the Institute, and we would leave the country. The extent of the massacre – some witnesses of the night’s events told me they estimated more than 1000 death – exceeded by far anything we had conceived in our wildest dreams.

The malaise remains

I always wanted to write down in some form my experience in China, but strangely enough, while I have no problems relating it orally, something deep in me has prevented me so far from putting it in writing – there has always been some kind of psychological barrier, and it’s only because I committed to do it that I finally wrote up this account.

I can’t help wondering what would’ve happened if the Chinese leadership at that time had not panicked. (I’m convinced this can be the only reason for ordering such a horrifying slaughter on unarmed peaceful demonstrators.) Where would China and the world stand now? I’m not sure it would be a more democratic place, because democracy does not necessarily resolve inequalities in the distribution of riches and privileges, which seemed to be the most important and recurrent demand of the demonstrators. Moreover, the understanding of democracy I gathered from some of my interlocutors was, in my eyes, at best crude and partial.

In any case, the experience of such a monstrous massacre has reinforced in me the firm opinion that, whatever difficulties we encounter in our democracies, in other parts of the world, it can be worse, much worse. To whine about the defects of our Western democracies while ignoring what is happening under autocratic regimes is petty and disgraceful, and I pledge my solidarity with all those who try to escape a brutal and arbitrary rule in the hope of also enjoying those fundamental freedoms and rights, which we too often fail to be aware of.

I never returned to China, but from what I regularly gathered over the media, the country has advanced in wealth and technology at an incredible pace. Nevertheless, I have the feeling that the fundamental malaise of the demonstrators in 1989 about a corrupt elite remains. Only today, the call for democracy no longer seems to be the consensual answer.